At the risk of sounding more equivocal than any self-respecting blogger is expected to sound, I’m going to turn my attention from the benefits of Wal-Mart’s decision to enter the organic food market to its costs. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether the advantage of making organic food accessible to more Americans is outweighed by the damage Wal-Mart may do to the practice and meaning of organic food production. The trade-offs are considerable.

When Wal-Mart announced its plan to offer consumers a wide selection of organic foods, the company claimed it would keep the price premium for organic to no more than 10 percent. This in itself is grounds for concern — in my view, it virtually guarantees that Wal-Mart’s version of cheap, industrialized organic food will not be sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word (see my earlier column, “Voting With Your Fork,” for a discussion of that word). Why? Because to index the price of organic to the price of conventional food is to give up, right from the start, on the idea — once enshrined in the organic movement — that food should be priced responsibly. Cheap industrial food, the organic movement has argued, only seems cheap, because the real costs are charged to the environment (in the form of water and air pollution and depletion of the soil); to the public purse (in the form of subsidies to conventional commodity producers); and to the public health (in the cost of diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease), not to mention to the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers and the well-being of the animals. As Wendell Berry once wrote, the motto of our conventional food system — at the center of which stands Wal-Mart, the biggest grocer in America — should be: Cheap at Any Price!

To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent above the price at which you sell irresponsibly priced food suggests you don’t really get it — that you plan to bring the same principles of industrial “efficiency” and “economies of scale” to a system of food production that was supposed to mimic the logic of nature rather than that of the factory.

We have already seen what happens when the logic of industry is applied to organic food production. Synthetic pesticides are simply replaced by approved organic pesticides; synthetic fertilizer is simply replaced by compost and manures and mined forms of nitrogen imported from South America. The result is a greener factory farm, to be sure, but a factory nevertheless.

The industrialization of organic agriculture, which Wal-Mart’s entry will hasten, has given us “organic feedlots” — two words that I never thought would find their way into the same clause. To supply the burgeoning demand for cheap organic milk, agribusiness companies are setting up 5000-head dairies, often in the desert. The milking cows never touch a blade of grass, but instead spend their lives standing around a dry lot “loafing area” munching organic grain — grain that takes a toll on both the animals’ health (these ruminants evolved to eat grass after all) and the nutritional value of their milk. Frequently the milk is then ultra-pasteurized (a high heat process that further diminishes its nutritional value) before being shipped across the country. This is the sort of milk we’re going to see a lot more of in our supermarkets, as long as Wal-Mart honors its commitment to keep organic milk cheap.

We’re also going to see more organic milk coming from places like New Zealand, a trend driven by soaring demand — and also by what seems to me, in an era of energy scarcity, a rather forgiving construction of the idea of sustainability. Making organic food inexpensive means buying it from anywhere it can be produced most cheaply — lengthening rather than shortening the food chain, and deepening its dependence on fossil fuels.

Similarly, organic meat is increasingly coming not from polycultures growing a variety of species (which are able to recycle nutrients between plants and animals) but from ever-bigger organic confined animal feeding operations, or CAFO’s, that, apart from not using antibiotics and feeding organic grain, are little different from their conventional counterparts. Yes, the organic rules say the animals should have “access to the outdoors,” but in practice this means providing them with a tiny exercise yard or, in the case of one egg producer in New England, a screened-in concrete “porch.” This is one of the ironies of practicing organic agriculture on an industrial scale: big, single-species organic CAFO’s are even more precarious than their industrial cousins, since they can’t rely on antibiotics to keep thousands of animals living in close confinement from getting sick. So organic CAFO-hands (to call them farm-hands just doesn’t seem right) keep the free-ranging to a minimum, and then keep their fingers crossed.

The industrial food chain, whether organic or conventional, inevitably links giant supermarkets to giant farms. But this is not because big farms are any more efficient or productive than small farms — to the contrary. Studies have found that small farms produce more food per unit of land than big farms do). And polycultures are more productive than monocultures. So why don’t such farms predominate? Because big supermarkets prefer to do business with big farms growing lots of the same thing. It is more efficient for Wal-Mart — in the economic, not the biological, sense — to contract with a single huge carrot or chicken grower than with 10 small ones: the “transaction costs” are lower, even if the price and the quality is no different. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short term, the logic of business usually prevails.

Wal-Mart’s big-foot entry into the organic market is bad news for small organic farmers, that seems obvious enough. But it may also spell trouble for the big growers they’ll favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after the suppliers have invested in expanding production to feed the Wal-Mart maw. Once you’ve boosted your production to supply Wal-Mart, you’re at the company’s mercy when it decides it no longer wants to give you a price that will cover the cost of production, let alone enable you to make a profit. When that happens, the notion of responsibly priced food will be sacrificed to the need to survive, and the pressure to cut corners will become irresistible.

Right now, the federal organic standards provide a bulwark against that pressure. But with the industrialization of organic, the rules are coming under increasing pressure, and (forgive my skepticism) it’s hard to believe that the lobbyists from Wal-Mart are going to play a constructive role in defending those standards from efforts to dilute them. Earlier this year, the Organic Trade Association hired lobbyists from Kraft to move a bill through Congress making it easier to include synthetic ingredients in products labeled organic.

(What are any synthetic ingredients doing in products labeled organic, anyway? A good question, and one that was recently posed in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture by a blueberry farmer in Maine, who argued that the 1990 law establishing the federal organic program had specifically prohibited synthetics in organic food. Within weeks after he won his case, the industry went to Congress to preserve its right to put synthetic ingredients like xanthan gum and ascorbic acid into organic processed foods.)

For better or worse, the legal meaning of the word organic is now in the hands of the government, which means it is subject to all the usual political and economic forces at play in Washington. The drive to keep organic food cheap will bring pressure to further weaken the regulations, and some of K Street’s most skillful and influential lobbyists will soon be on the case. A couple of years ago, a chicken producer in Georgia named Fieldale Farms induced its congressman to slip a helpful provision into an Agriculture Department appropriations bill that would allow organic chicken farmers to substitute conventional chicken feed when the price of organic feed exceeded a certain level. Well, that certainly makes life easier for a chicken producer, especially when the price of organic corn is up around $8 a bushel (compared to less than $2 for conventional feed). But in what sense would a chicken fed on conventional feed still be organic? In no sense except the Orwellian one: because the government says it is. An outcry from consumers and wiser organic producers (who saw their precious label losing credibility) put a halt to Fieldale’s plans, and the legislation was quickly repealed.

The moral of the Fieldale story is that unless consumers and well-meaning producers remain vigilant, the drive to make organic foods nearly as cheap as conventional foods threatens to hollow out the word and kill the gold-egg-laying organic goose. Let’s hope Wal-Mart understands that the marketing power of the word organic — a power that flows directly from consumers’ uneasiness about the conventional food chain — is a little like the health of a chicken living in close confinement with 20,000 other chickens in an organic CAFO, munching organic corn: fragile.

Let’s take another look at “the elitism question” – the idea, trumpeted by the industrial food companies and their defenders – that because organic and other alternative foods cost more, they’re an upper middle class luxury or, worse, affectation. It is true that organic food historically has cost significantly more than conventional food, but now that retailers like Wal-Mart have decided to move aggressively into organics, as reported in Friday’s New York Times, that is about to change. For better or worse (and surely it will be both), Wal-Mart will for the first time bring organics into the mainstream, putting food grown without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers in reach of nearly all Americans. (The company aims to keep the price premium over conventional products to 10 percent.) Wal-Mart will single-handedly upend the argument that organic food is elitist.

This is very good news for American consumers and for the American land. Or perhaps I should say, for some of the American land and a great deal of the land in places like China and Mexico, because Wal-Mart will hasten the globalization of organic food. (Today, 10 percent of the organic foods in our markets is imported.) Like any other commodity that multinational companies lay their hands on, organic food will henceforth come from anywhere in the world it can be produced most cheaply, because the land and the labor there is cheaper than it is here. Organic food will go the way of sneakers or consumer electronics — yet another rootless commodity circulating in the global economy.

Oh, wait… I was talking about the good that will come of Wal-Mart’s commitment to organic. Sorry about that. But in global capitalism it’s often hard to separate the good news from the bad. I’ll try again. . . .

Because of its scale, efficiency and ruthlessness, Wal-Mart will force down the price of organics, and that is a good thing for consumers who can’t afford to spend any more for food than they already do. Wal-Mart will also educate Americans – many of whom have yet to learn what organic food is and how it differs from conventionally grown food.

This is an unalloyed good for the world’s environment, since it will result in less pesticide and chemical fertilizer being applied to land somewhere. Whatever you think of the prospect of organic Coca Cola, when it comes – and it will come – thousands of acres of the world’s corn fields (needed to make all that organic high fructose corn syrup) will no longer receive a shower of Atrazine. Okay, I know, you’re probably registering some cognitive dissonance at the conjunction of the words “organic” and “high fructose corn syrup” — but keep your eye for a moment on that Atrazine.

Atrazine is an herbicide commonly applied to cornfields in America (it’s been banned in Europe as a suspected carcinogen), and traces of it show up in our water and food. Does that matter? Well, at concentrations as slight as .10 part per billion, Atrazine in the water has been shown to chemically emasculate frogs, turning healthy males into hermaphrodites. I don’t know about you, but I sort of like the idea of keeping such a molecule out of my teenage son’s diet, even if the nutritionists say they don’t have any proof organic food is any healthier. (The Times’ story about Wal-Mart’s organic initiative, which appeared on the newspaper’s front page, cited unnamed nutritionists who claimed the “health benefits of [many organic foods] are negligible.”) Do you really need to wait for scientific proof (which would mean testing these chemicals directly on human subjects) that keeping such chemicals out of your family’s food is a good idea? The fact that low-income Americans will soon be able to make the same choice I have been making strikes me as positive and important.

The Times’ coverage of Wal-Mart’s plans was notable for its values-free attitude toward organics. In this it reflected the corporate relativism fashionable among the big companies now rushing into the organic marketplace. They have little choice but to sit firmly on the fence when it comes to making any objective claims about the superiority of organics. (Said one Wal-Mart executive, “Organic agriculture is just another method of agriculture – not better, not worse.”) How do you introduce organic Coco Puffs without implying that there’s something wrong with, or less-wonderful about, conventional Cocoa-Puffs? You adopt the postmodern perspective of the marketer, for whom consumer choice is a matter of self-expression that has nothing to do with old-fashioned ideas of “better” and “worse.” When I was writing about the industrialization of organics in The New York Times Magazine five years ago, I spent a lot of time with the executives at General Mills, who had just acquired an organic division. From the chairman on down, no one wanted to answer the straightforward question, “Is organic food better than conventional food?” To a man (and they were nearly all men), they said things like, “If you think organic food is better, then it’s better.” Organic was, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, purely subjective. Until, that is, I got to the basement laboratory, where the scientist in quality control whose job it was to make sure the levels of toxic pesticide in the breakfast cereal do not exceed federal tolerances, looked at me as if I were dense. The mass spectrometer offered a decidedly pre-post-modern picture of reality. When I asked whether the machine could discern any difference in organic foods, the scientist said, plainly, “Well, they don’t contain pesticide.”

So don’t believe the marketing talk that organic is just another lifestyle choice: it is, for all its limitations, a better agriculture and, if you care about ingesting neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors and carcinogens, an unambiguously better kind of food to eat. That more Americans will now be able to make that choice is something to cheer. As I suggested, however, there are problems with the Wal-Martization of organic food, and I will address those in a subsequent post.

Thanks for all the great posts from readers — you’ve given me a lot to chew on, and there are many questions and comments I plan to address in future posts. But for today, I want to look briefly at the “elitism” issue raised by several of you. As you will see it also ties into the good question raised by Paul Stamler about whether consumer action — voting with your forks — is adequate to the task of changing the American way of eating.

It is a fact that to eat healthily in this country — by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment — costs more than it does to eat poorly. Indeed, the rules of the game by which we eat create a situation in which it is actually rational to eat poorly.

Let’s say you live on fixed income, and struggle to keep your family fed. When you go to the supermarket, you are, in effect, foraging for energy — calories — to keep your family alive. So what are you going to buy with your precious food dollar? Fresh produce? Or junk food?

A 2004 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Adam Drewnowski and S.E. Specter offers some devastating answers. One dollar spent in the processed food section of the supermarket — the aisles in the middle of the store — will buy you 1200 calories of cookies and snacks. That same dollar spent in the produce section on the perimeter will buy you only 250 calories of carrots. Similarly, a dollar spent in the processed food aisles will buy you 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of fruit juice. So if you’re in the desperate position of shopping simply for calories to keep your family going, the rational strategy is to buy the junk.

Mr. Drewnowski explains that we are driven by our evolutionary inheritance to expend as little energy as possible seeking out as much food energy as possible. So we naturally gravitate to “energy-dense foods” — high-calorie sugars and fats, which in nature are rare and hard to find. Sugars in nature come mostly in the form of ripe fruit and, if you’re really lucky, honey; fats come in the form of meat, the getting of which requires a great expense of energy, making them fairly rare in the diet as well. Well, the modern supermarket reverses the whole caloric calculus: the most energy-dense foods are the easiest — that is, cheapest — ones to acquire. If you want a concise explanation of obesity, and in particular why the most reliable predictor of obesity is one’s income level, there it is.

The question is, how did energy-dense foods become so much cheaper in the supermarket than they are in the state of nature? This is not a function of the free market. It is very simply a function of government policy: our farm policies subsidize the most energy-dense and least healthy calories in the supermarket. We write checks to farmers for every bushel of corn and soy they can grow, and partly as a result they grow vast quantities of the stuff, driving down the cost of the processed foods we make from those commodities. In effect, we’re subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup. And we’re not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli. Put another way, our tax dollars are the reason that the cheapest calories in the market are the least healthy ones.

That situation is a public problem and can be addressed only through public action — by rewriting the rules of the game by which we eat. We need farm policies that will somehow right this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones — so that it becomes rational for someone with little to spend on food to buy the carrots instead of the cookies, the orange juice instead of the Sprite. Until that happens, eating well will remain “elitist.”

[Correction appended]

Whenever I’m in the company of other journalists and the conversation turns to our respective beats, mine — food — usually draws a silent snicker. It’s deemed a less-than-serious subject, and I suppose compared to covering war or national security, it can be viewed that way. Even when someone is ostensibly complimenting a food story, as a colleague of mine recently did, it comes out backhanded, like so: “You wouldn’t think a piece about food could be so … interesting.”

No? Excuse me, but are you not dependent on the stuff?

This disdain for food journalism has several springs. One of them surely is sexism: at least in some quarters, food is traditionally women’s work; therefore journalism about it is, too. In general, journalism that deals with everyday life close to home will never enjoy the prestige of the exotic dateline. Another source of this low esteem is the venue in which much food journalism is found: the Wednesday food supplements of daily newspapers, the historical purpose of which has been to keep full-page supermarket advertisements from bumping into one another. Tremendous quantities of fluff journalism have been committed in the name of covering food.

But this is changing: look again at your paper’s Wednesday food section, and you’ll find it brimming with issues of politics, economics and health, not to mention agriculture and cultural politics. Today, instead of “Great Dishes for Which We Have Campbell’s Soup to Thank,” you’re much more likely to find tough pieces on school board battles to drive fast food from the cafeteria, the links between E.P.A. air pollution rules and methyl mercury levels in tuna, backdoor efforts to weaken federal standards for organic agriculture—or as in today’s Times, profiles of muckraking journalists like Eric Schlosser. If you’re interested in reading sharp coverage of political economy, Wednesday newspapers have become one of the best places to find it.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” John Muir once wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Some of these things are better hitched than others, and food is surely one of them. We don’t ordinarily think about it this way, but eating represents our most powerful engagement with the natural world — it transforms the world by remaking the landscape more than any other human activity, and it transforms, and defines, us. Whenever a biologist wants to understand the role of a creature in the ecosystem, the first question he or she asks is, What does that creature eat, and what eats it? What, in other words, is its place in the food chain? Well, Homo sapiens is no exception. As William Ralph Inge, the English essayist, wrote early in the last century, “all of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.” Even the eating of a Twinkie represents transactions between species, though in the case of the Twinkie I’d be hard pressed to name all the species involved. (Have you read a Twinkie ingredient list lately? It’s long and full of surprises, one of which is beef.)

I teach a course at Berkeley’s graduate journalism school called “Following the Food Chain,” and what my students quickly discover as they go down that trail is that it takes them to a great many unexpected places. Food connects us to nature, first and foremost, but it also attaches us to all the other large systems that organize our lives — from energy and economics to politics, public health and cultural identity.
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To someone who’s spent the last few years thinking about the American food chain, a visit to Manhattan’s Union Square in the spring of 2006 feels a little like a visit to Paris in the spring of 1968 must have felt, or perhaps closer to the mark, Peoples Park in Berkeley in the summer of 1969. Not that I was in either of those places at the appointed historical hour, or that the stakes are quite as high. (Isn’t hyperbole an earmark of Internet literary style? O.K. then.) But today in these few square blocks of lower Manhattan, change is in the air, and the future — at least the future of food — is up for grabs.

When Whole Foods planted its flag on 14th Street last year, setting up shop an heirloom tomato’s throw from one of the nation’s liveliest farmer’s markets, two crucial visions of an alternative American food chain — what I call, somewhat oxymoronically, Industrial Organic and Local — faced off. And then this spring Trader Joe’s opened in Union Square, further complicating the picture (for both the farmer’s market and Whole Foods) with its discount take on both organic and artisanal food.

The shopping choices laid out so succinctly for New Yorkers in Union Square today neatly encapsulate the kinds of question we will all be grappling with over the next few years as we navigate an increasingly complex, politicized and ethically challenging food landscape. The organic strawberry or the conventional? The grass-fed or the organic beef? And, if the grass-fed, the Whole Foods steak from New Zealand or the Hudson Valley steak across the street? The organic tomato or the New Jersey beefsteak? The omega-3 fortified eggs or the cage-free eggs? (That last phrase is one of my favorite snatches of recent supermarket prose: I mean, does an egg really care whether it’s caged or not?) The ultra-pasteurized milk or the raw? The farmed fish or the wild? In January, the jet-setting winter asparagus from Argentina or the rutabaga from Upstate? And how do you cook a rutabaga, anyway?

I’ve been doing a lot of food reporting over the past couple years and have discovered there are no simple, one-size-fits-all answers to these questions (several of which I hope to take up in future columns). But it seems to me the crucial thing is that such questions about how we should eat, and how what we eat affects both our health and the health of the world, confront us today in a way they never before have. My explorations of the American food chain — or now, food chains — have convinced me that these questions (except perhaps the one about rutabaga) are actually political questions, and much depends on how we choose to answer them. The market for alternative foods of all kinds — organic, local, pasture-based, humanely raised — represents the stirrings of a movement, or rather a novel hybrid: a market-as-movement. Over the next month I plan to use this column as a place to conduct a conversation with readers (or “r-eaters,” as someone at a lecture proposed the other night) about the politics of food.

Union Square, which 75 years ago served as the red-hot center of the labor movement, is now, at least symbolically, ground zero of the food movement. And while much separates the various choices and philosophies on offer here, it’s important to recognize what unifies the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and the farmer’s market, and what has brought so many of us 21st century food foragers to Union Square and all places like it: the gathering sense that there is something very wrong with our conventional food system — what I call the industrial food chain, by which I mean typical supermarket and fast food.

It has become a commonplace to say that the industrial food system is not “sustainable” — indeed, even Monsanto now acknowledges that American agriculture is not sustainable. (Which is why it supposedly needs the company’s genetically modified organisms in place of pesticides.) But it’s worth taking a moment to think through exactly what it means to say that a system is unsustainable, lest the word lose its force. What it means, very simply, is that a practice or activity cannot go on as it has much longer — that, because of various internal contradictions, it will sooner or later break down.
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