The retail market needed a standard organic definition. The very fact that the
Federal government stepped in to supply one shows that organic has gone
mainstream.
On October 21, 2002 everyone in the United States will know that
”organic” means food produced without hormones, antibiotics, herbicides,
insecticides, chemical fertilizers, genetic modification or bacteria-killing
radiation. The US Department of Agriculture, after a torturous twelve-year
process during which every big agriculture, food industry and bio-tech
interest group lobbied for its own definition, finally set down an organic
standard that raises a meaningful bar. The National Organic Rule represents
a long awaited victory for health and environment conscious consumers who
want assurance that organically labeled food is actually organic. Now when a
consumer buys an organic apple grown in Washington it meets the same farming
standards as an organic apple raised in Michigan. And growers outside the
United States--Mexico, Chile, Australia-- who want to market organic produce
here, must meet those same certified standards.
No longer a niche market, organic food is the fastest growing segment of
the retail food industry. Each year for the past decade, sales of organic
food have increased by 20 percent. Though organics represent less than 2
percent of the overall food supply, farmers’ markets with organic vendors
proliferate. The neighborhood health food store has paved the way for giant
whole foods chains. Safeway now has organic produce sections and the corner
grocery stocks packaged organic salad greens. Even Pacific Bell Park sells
organic fruit from a farmer’s market food stall behind home plate. The
retail market needed a standard organic definition. The very fact that the
Federal government stepped in to supply one shows that organic has gone
mainstream.
But not everyone in the organic sector is popping the champagne cork.
Many of the very farmers who started the organic movement in California
thirty years ago say that the national organic standard falls short by not
addressing some of the most important principles of sustainable agriculture,
like size of the farm, distance to market, water usage and fair labor
practices. Industrial scale farms can substitute organic inputs (compost
instead of nitrogen fertilizers; organically derived sprays instead of
chemical ones) while still maintaining a monoculture (acres and acres of a
single crop farmed mechanically) that ignores these human and environmental
costs.
Small organic farmers are afraid that the government has opened the
door for big agriculture to take over what has been the domain of the family
farm. In protest, some organic farmers have chosen to de-certify by creating
their own labels based on more far reaching criteria. The cutting edge of
northern California agriculture considers itself beyond organic.
Organic chemistry PhD. Rick Knoll who started Knoll Farm twenty three
years ago, is one farmer who currently rejects the organic label, though he
has been a California certified organic farmer since 1983. He regards his
ten acres in Brentwood as a living eco-system, which he created with a
technique of microbial composting called bio-dynamics. This system makes
soil so rich that plants absorb maximum nutrients and resist disease. Each
of his acres earns a whopping $40,000, twenty to thirty times more than an
industrial acre. “If the Los Angeles basin were returned to agriculture and
farmed bio-dynamically, it could supply the whole United States with food,”
he claims.
He believes that the Federal organic standard degrades the
philosophical principles of sustainable farming that he practices. So he has
come up with his own label called Táirwa, a
transliteration of the French word terroir, which refers to flavors in
food and wine that come directly from the earth. This distinctive taste
of the land is the highest expression of “locality,” a characteristic
prized in a world where industrial agriculture produces food that tastes the
same no matter where it’s grown.
When he gave up the organic label Knoll says that several big organic
wholesalers dropped him but that he has gained many direct restaurant
accounts, farmers' market customers and the full attention of Greenleaf
Produce, a San Francisco wholesaler that markets small artisan producers.
He’s never been busier.
Other farmers are banding together to create a label that emphasizes
locality. A group of Central Coast growers launched a Buy Fresh, Buy Local
campaign last weekend with their own logo. Produce in America travels an
average of 1500 miles from farm to table.
Considering the added cost of transportation and warehousing, local farmers
are being squeezed. They earn more by distributing and selling locally. Two
partners of Santa Cruz's Route One Farms, who cultivate a 112 acres of
certified organic land in the Central Coast, say that they have actually
lost money growing for the national market. Their only profits come from
produce they sell locally.
Jared Lawson, spokesman for the Community Alliance of Family Farmers, the
organization that launched the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign, feels that buying locally is
more important than buying organically. Though most of the farms in the
Central Coast initiative happen to be organic, they don't have to be
certified to carry “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” label. Lawson hopes that their
campaign will raise consumer awareness about the provenance of food since
locally grown food is usually fresher, picked ripe, and tastes better. They
are looking to distribute to school lunch programs and restaurants.
A group of farmers and food producers in Marin county, including
Warren Weber of Star Route Farm, Sue Connoly and Peggy Smith of Tomales Bay
Foods and the Straus Family Creamery are also working on their own local
label to offer consumers the choice between buying fresh from their own
backyard or shipped in from thousands of miles away. The Marin Organic label
currently covers eighteen county ag commission-certified growers, but Weber
wants the make the whole county organic. Though he strongly believes that
only organic agriculture is environmentally healthy, he's motivated by the
importance of creating a niche for small local farmers. With the big boys
moving into the organic marketplace, Weber knows that small sustainable
farms must position themselves beyond organic.
Though I celebrate the new organic standard, I learned first hand that organic protocols are not lightly adapted. As a board member of the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, an organization that supports sustainable agriculture, I voted with the majority over a year ago to move toward an exclusively organic market. I discussed this goal with one of my favorite farmers, who grows fruit in the foothills of the Sierra. He’s
a proud second generation small family farmer who produces some of the most
luscious peaches, apples, pears and cherries I have ever tasted. He sells
to a small, local supermarket chain and drives three hours to the Ferry Plaza
Farmers Market when he has fruit.
About a year ago I got an anguished call from him. “I want you to drive
up here and see what happened to my cherry trees,” he said. “Twenty years
of production gone.” He had used a “soft program” of insecticide augmented
with insects that eat leafhoppers, the pest that spreads a cherry tree
disease called buckskin. His trees became so severely infested under the
new regime that they had to be destroyed. We were both devastated. How could I
have stuck my nose into something I knew absolutely nothing about,
especially in the cause of a doctrinaire position on organics that I myself
don't always follow. The cherry tree disaster made me rethink my own values, just
as the new federal organic standard has made farmers, large and small,
decide what side of the line they want to be on.
It’s absurd to think that the new organic standard has pushed a ten acre
bio-dynamic farmer like Rick Knoll and big agri-business to the same side.
But an organic label doesn’t mean that food has been produced with the
highest principles of sustainability.
Frankly, flavor guides my buying, trumping considerations of cost,
health, the environment and fair labor practices. If it doesn’t taste good I
won’t buy it. However, most of the time the freshest and tastiest produce
happens to be grown locally on small family farms that most likely follow
organic practices--whether the farm seeks organic certification or not.
But maybe, because of attention focused on the new organic label,
people who thought tomatoes grow in cellophane packages will become
conscious for the first time of the sources of their food supply. Maybe
grassroots campaigns to identify locally grown fruit and vegetables will
make consumers aware that they live near farmland, and that these farms
supply them with tasty food. Only then will city dwellers come to realize
that what they choose to buy makes a difference and that they can influence
the food chain. Ultimately it was the consumer who caused the new organic
standard and it will be the consumer who takes agriculture beyond organic to
an even healthier sustainable realm.
This article originally appeared in the October 16, 2002 issue of the San Francisco Examiner.
For the last twenty-five years Patricia Unterman has been writing restaurant criticism and food essays for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. She has also written for Gourmet, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit and Taste magazines. She also publishes a bi-monthly newsletter.
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