The question is a momentous one: How did a ragged bunch of organic farms run by aging hippies selling their wares in farmers' markets grow, in just two decades, into an $11 billion business dominated by companies like Dole, Dean Foods and Whole Foods Market, which, by itself, is grossing more than $5 billion annually?
In "Organic, Inc.," Samuel Fromartz attempts to chronicle this rapid metamorphosis and account for its amazing success. Unfortunately, this is an author who forces you to eat your spinach--and eat it and eat it--before you get to the meat of the matter, much less the dessert. Instead of spinach, read baby lettuce leaves. Instead of meat, read organically raised free-range chickens.
The eating revolution has moved from green markets to Whole Foods to Wal-Mart.
To me, Whole Foods is the dessert, but Mr. Fromartz doesn't get around to it until page 237 of his 259 pages of text. In between, he presents what has to be the most thorough history of the packaged organic salad market ever put to paper. Ditto, soy milk. The tale of this distributor buying out that farmer is told in excruciating detail, to little effect.
Whole Foods, though, he gets exactly right: "Health food historically meant bug-eaten organic produce, hardy beans and grains, and badly prepared tofu--their health quotient rising as palatability declined. On the other extreme, gourmands consumed, say, a milk-braised pork loin, butter-whipped potatoes, and yet another plate of chocolate truffles--delicious, but full of cardio-challenging saturated fat and calories." Whole Foods saw these two camps, Mr. Fromartz notes, and decided that it didn't have to choose between them. Instead, it "saw a dialectic and came up with the synthesis; it made healthy food delicious and marketed the perfect meal."
The logic was impeccable. After all, it was Alice Waters, the chef-owner of the Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., who triggered the organic explosion by discovering baby lettuce--and she hated the terms "organic" and "health food." Ms. Waters, writes Mr. Fromartz, "was interested in taste, size and the way the salad looked." Looks matter to Whole Foods, too. Its shoppers enter the store through a long, pampered section of voluptuous produce, and they have trusted the grocery to do the selecting--"the editing," as Mr. Fromartz calls it--among unfamiliar brands like Eden Foods, Hain and Cascadian Farms.
But if Whole Foods is the dessert of "Organic, Inc.," where's the main course? Mr. Fromartz is so distracted by his story of whole-wheat cereals that he forgets to serve it. So let me try. "Organic, Inc." is about how market forces transform the most obscure and far-flung products into objects of desire. Organic farming has gone from an ideology to an industry, mainly because along the supply chain people have learned, through competition, how to grow, distribute and market more efficiently.
Also, alas, they learned to become rent seekers. In his next-to-last chapter, Mr. Fromartz relates the battle over what foods would be allowed to stamp their packages "organic"--a purely political decision, made by Congress, the regulators and the courts. "Regulations," Mr. Fromartz writes, have become "the battleground for the future control of organic food."
And it is a battle. There has never been a single definition of organic, though it's generally held that such foods must be grown, raised and processed without pesticides, hormones, antibiotics or synthetic colorings and additives. Mr. Fromartz makes a good case that organic foods are healthier than conventional foods, though probably not by much.
The final federal document defining "organic" in the mid-1990s ran to 554 pages, but several fights developed after it was published, the biggest involving whether organic processors could use "synthetics"--natural agricultural ingredients that are chemically processed. Among the 38 synthetics at issue were ammonium carbonate (baking powder), a type of pectin for making jam, and xanthum gum for thickening. "It wasn't just Campbell's Soup or General Mills that relied on these substances," writes Mr. Fromartz, "but Newman's Own Organics, the philanthropic venture; Amy's Kitchen, the fifth-largest organic brand...; and small organic farmers making homemade jam."
In 1999, the board set up by federal law to decide such things voted to allow synthetics, but a successful lawsuit by a Maine blueberry farmer ensued. The latest news is that synthetics have been reinstated after lobbying by a trade association whose members include Dean (maker of Silk, the most popular soy milk) and Kraft (which owns Boca Burgers).
Mr. Fromartz sees the synthetics fight as a proxy for a more important conflict: "whether organic food should become a kind of agrarian niche in the food system, with natural, whole food, or whether it should expand to include the industrial food complex that it was created to replace."
The evidence from Whole Foods Market and makers of those bags of packaged spring mix lettuce leaves is that organic (plus partly organic and "natural") foods are swiftly entering the mainstream. The cost differential between organic and other foods is coming down, and Mr. Fromartz quotes a researcher saying: "We've definitely found, within those categories that consumers ascribe a high organic value to, such as organic milk for their children, it doesn't matter what your income level is. If you think that's an important value, you're willing to pay more for it."
Thus organic foods, like the varieties of coffee at Starbucks, are not for elite consumers only. The median income of organic shoppers is "usually within $2,000 of the national median," Mr. Fromartz tells us. It's no surprise that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has announced that it will double its organic offerings. The free market turns out to be a green one as well.
James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI.
