The Darkside of Organic

"Organic food remained on the fringe until the nineties when the “Alar scare” over a possible carcinogen used on apples led many consumers to seek out organic foods. This represented a much larger market: those more concerned about personal health than planetary health. This inevitably drew in large corporations as they realized the organic market was growing up to 20 percent a year.

Food writer Michael Pollan popularized the term “organic-industrial complex” to describe practices such as packing thousands of cattle into factory farms to produce “organic” milk and growing “organic” lettuce on 1,000-acre farms.

..Increasingly, organic produce is being shipped thousands of miles from Mexico, Central America — and possibly China in the future — as the Wal-Martization of organic food takes hold, pressuring prices and health, safety and labor standards downward. And it means adding to global warming by relying on a petro-economy to grow, process and transport organic food from around the world.

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