Organic, Inc.

by Fromartz, Samuel

• ISBN13: 9780156032421
• ISBN10: 0156032422
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-05
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Who would have thought that a natural food supermarket could have been a financial refuge from the dot-com bust? But it had. Sales of organic food had shot up about 20 percent per year since 1990, reaching $11 billion by 2003 . . . Whole Foods managed to sidestep that fray by focusing on, well, people like me.Organic food has become a juggernaut in an otherwise sluggish food industry, growing at 20 percent a year as products like organic ketchup and corn chips vie for shelf space with conventional comestibles. But what is organic food? Is it really better for you? Where did it come from, and why are so many of us buying it? Business writer Samuel Fromartz set out to get the story behind this surprising success after he noticed that his own food choices were changing with the times. InOrganic, Inc.,Fromartz traces organic food back to its anti-industrial origins more than a century ago. Then he follows it forward again, casting a spotlight on the innovators who created an alternative way of producing food that took root and grew beyond their wildest expectations. In the process he captures how the industry came to risk betraying the very ideals that drove its success in a classically complex case of free-market triumph.

Author Biography

SAMUEL FROMARTZ is a business journalist whose work has appeared in Inc., Fortune Small Business, Business Week, the New York Times, and other publications. A recreational cook, he lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
Humus Worshippers The Origins of Organic shy;Food	p. 1
The Organic Method Strawberries in Two shy;Versions	p. 32
A Local Initiative From Farm to shy;Market	p. 69
A Spring Mix Growing Organic shy;Salad	p. 108
Mythic Manufacturing Health, Spirituality, and shy;Breakfast	p. 145
Backlash The Meaning of Organic
Consuming Organic Why We shy;Buyp237
Acknowledgments	p. 257
Notes	p. 261
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1. Humus WorshippersThe Origins of Organic FoodThe birthright of all living things is health. This law is true for soil, plant, animal and man: the health of these four is one connected chain. Any weakness or defect in the health of any earlier link in the chain is carried on to the next and succeeding links, until it reaches the last, namely, man.Sir Albert Howard, 1945In 1998, Chensheng Lu, a researcher at the Department of Health at the University of Washington, began testing children in the Seattle area to see whether he could detect pesticide residues in their urine. He was looking for signs of organophosphates, a class of chemicals closely related to nerve agents developed during World War II, which subsequently came into widespread use as pesticides in a far less potent form, eventually accounting for half of all insecticide use in the United States. The chemicals inactivate enzymes crucial to the nervous and hormonal system, which, at high enough levels of exposure, can lead to symptoms as various as mild anxiety or respiratory paralysis. Long-term exposure increases the risk of neurobehavioral damage, cancer, and reproductive disorders. Lu and his colleagues thought that children living near farms would have the highest levels of pesticide residues, since they were subject to drift from nearby fields. But the 110 two- to five-year-olds he studied in the Seattle metropolitan area turned out to have higher levels of pesticide metabolites (the markers produced when the body metabolizes the chemicals). This suggested that food residues or home pesticide use, not drift, were the primary path for exposure. The study also had a curious anomaly: One child out of the hundreds they had studied had no signs of any pesticide metabolites. It was kind of surprising, said Lu, who now directs the Pesticide Exposure and Risk Laboratory at Emory Universitys Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. When the researchers interviewed the parents, they learned the family ate organic food almost exclusively. This provided the first hint of scientific evidence that an organic food diet reduced pesticide exposure in children. Another study looked at pesticide residue data from 94,000 food samples from 19941999 and found organic food had about two-thirds less residues than conventional food. This showed that organic consumers were getting what they paid forlower pesticides in foodbut the study looked only at what was in the overall food supply, not what people ate. By identifying metabolites in the urinethrough a technique known as biomonitoringthe researchers had evidence of pesticides children had actually consumed. Cynthia Curl, another scientist then at the University of Washington, followed up on Lus finding and published the results in March 2003. She showed that a group of children who ate mostly organic food had one-sixth the pesticide metabolites of those who ate nonorganic food, but the study could not identify the pesticides, or

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Excerpted from Organic, Inc: Natural Foods and How They Grew by Samuel Fromartz
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.