The Omnivore's Dilemma: Part II

The word organic has become a kind of shorthand for food that is healthier or more natural or chemical-free.

But the idea of organic food did not really catch on until 1969. That year marked the height of the counterculture of the 1960s. Civil rights and anti-war protests rocked the country. Young people were rebelling against a society they thought was violent, corrupt, and immoral.

Some “dropped out” to join communes, groups of people living and working on farms.

The demand for organic food really jumped in the year 1990, after the Alar food scare. Alar was a chemical conventional growers sprayed on apples to help them ripen. In 1990 the Environmental Protection Agency found that Alar could cause cancer.

On one side of the fight were the agribusiness corporations, which had just jumped onto the organic food bandwagon.

They also wanted to be able to fertilize their “organic” fields with sewage sludge.

They also wanted to be able to fertilize their “organic” fields with sewage sludge.

He argued that the rules for organics had to allow synthetic additives and preservatives.

Many people from the old organic movement argued that to put synthetics in a processed food and then call it organic was a fraud.

In place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways’s organic acres are fed with compost from a nearby horse farm and by poultry manure.

Before the Goodmans, salad for most Americans meant iceberg lettuce. They introduced dozens of different salad mixes to mainstream America.

That comes to $34 to feed a family of three at home. (Though we did make a second meal from the leftovers.) That’s a hefty price compared to the same meal from the industrial food chain.

Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields.

A normal patch of dirt will be teeming with life, from earthworms to bacteria to the microscopic threads of fungi.

The original organic food movement thought organic farming should be sustainable. That means it should be, as much as possible, a closed loop, recycling fertility and using renewable energy.