Big versus Little Organic Flashcards
20th Century Food Revolution
- Major changes in food encounters how food is grown, processed, managed, and distributed
- Land conversion to monocultures, corporate management of farms, technological innovations, and government subsidies
- The standardization of food has cheapened the costs of food production, processing, and distribution
- For many, food is more convenient, accessible, and generally inexpensive.
- Globalizing markets have increased the availability of foods previously considered exotic. They are now part of diets.
- But is it safe? Developing in parallel to the massive changes in food economies are critiques that have given rise to new market spaces
Supermarket Recipe
- Supermarkets have remained the same for the last 50 years using the following recipe.
- Load up the shelves with the same factory food.
- Lure shoppers with cut-price promotions, coupons.
- Rely on suppliers to stoke demand with advertising.
- Gobble up competing chains
Whole Foods Market Model: Socially Conscious Capitalism
- With growth rates flattened and profits shrinking, the US supermarket industry seems to be an unlikely place for a breakthrough business model.
- Whole Foods business model is built around a simple premise: people will pay more for food that is good for them, good-tasting, and good for the environment.
- Whole Foods is US’s most profitable food retailer when measured by profit per square foot and the 8th largest food and drug store in the US
- Socially Conscious Capitalism
- Pollan questions whether the logic of an industrial food chain can be reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic agriculture has tried to model itself.
- Is industrial organic a contradiction in terms?
- Pollan analyzes the scale and volume, high transactional costs as measured by an organic ideals articulated by Sir Albert Howard and others.
- The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization crowd out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis.
Supermarket Pastoral
- Evokes a pastoral past, a pre-industrial Garden of Eden—supermarket pastoral.
- Extolls the virtues and practices of peasant farming (as Sir Albert Howard did with peasant farmers in India).
Is Big Industrial Organic a contradiction? How did organic get big?
- Food scares
- Have adopted agribusiness methods by maximizing monetary yield per acre and expansion.
- Almost overnight, the amount and variety of food labeled “organic” and offered in local supermarkets mushroomed. Fresh produce, milk, eggs, cereal, frozen food, even junk food—all of it now has its own organic.
- Quality Assurance International (QAI) in San Diego. Although implicated in a number of other improper decisions, the accredited certifier has yet to be sanctioned by the USDA. QAI is the largest certifier serving corporate agribusinesses that have invested in organics.
- Many of these foods tell a story that does not live up to image of pastoral farm life. Parallels industrial production and owned by big agribusiness companies.
Comparisons between Big Organic, Little Organic (Local) and Slow Food
• Similarities
o Food is more than a commodity to eat.
o Part of networks that promote consumer energy and enthusiasm. Buy-in—”drink the organic kool-aid with agave”.
o Makes available knowledge of the production of food through intermediaries such as journalists, researchers, blogs, classes, “celeb” spokespeople.
o The dominant food system has taken a wrong turn—organic is setting it right.
o Driven by fear of food.
o **Brings together social values and market to build community. Part of a social and cultural movement based in healthy and safe eating.
o Alternative market and social spaces that bring producers and consumers together to create a redefined, ethical market exchange.
o Seek to preserve “endangered” traditions, artisan, small-scale farming & way of life.
o This alternative market implies higher costs for the consumer, because of higher production expenses, but not always.
o Without any help from government, markets, farmers and consumers working together in this way have built an $11 billion industry that is now the fastest growing sector of the food economy.
o Leadership melds food and philosophy/ethics. Epicurean philosophers.
o Evokes a pastoral past, a pre-industrial Garden of Eden—supermarket pastoral.
o Extolls the virtues and practices of peasant farming (as Sir Albert Howard did with peasant farmers in India).
• Differences:
o Little
Lessened physical distance between producer and consumer
Resists monoculture agriculture and long distribution chains
Champions the small producer
o Big
Provides a range of products outside seasonality and small scale production methods. Incorporates industrial agriculture practices
Owned and produced by regional and giant food corporations. Often trucked long distances.
Epicurean philosopher
• Spokespeople for the modern food movement
Building Community
• Brings together social values and market to build community. Part of a social and cultural movement based in healthy and safe eating.
Case of Earthbound farms
- Earthbound is the largest grower of organic salad greens. Anticipates a 15% growth to $550 million in 2012.
- In their defense, Earthbound argues that its farming techniques annually remove the use of more than a quarter of a million pounds of toxic chemical pesticides and almost 8.5 million pounds of synthetic fertilizers, which saves 1.4 million gallons of the petroleum needed to produce those chemicals. Their tractors even use biodiesel fuel.
- Pollan thinks that we ought to take both a wider and a deeper view of the social, economic, and physical chains that deliver food to fork.
- He cites a Cornell scientist’s estimate that growing, processing, and shipping one calorie’s worth of arugula to the East Coast costs fifty-seven calories of fossil fuel. The growing of the arugula is indeed organic, but almost everything else is industrial business as usual.
