Organic, Inc. by Samuel Fromartz

Author:Samuel Fromartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

In the evolution of breakfast cereal, the marketplace trumped the founding ideals as the product moved into the mainstream. Might organic food, with its resounding success, fall prey to the same fate: losing touch with its roots, becoming nothing more than a profit center for Big Food, and reinventing itself with each market shift? By the late 1990s, as pioneering organic food companies were acquired by larger corporations, this became a prevalent question.

How odd this would have seemed thirty years earlier, when organic food was first gaining traction and the aim was to spread the word, turn people on to the cause, so that farming, human health, and the environment would be set right again. J. I. Rodale was one of the earliest mission-driven entrepreneurs in organic food, promoting the vision in his magazines; the Keene family in central Pennsylvania were among the first in the organic food business, establishing Walnut Acres in the 1940s and selling by mail-order catalog. Business was the vehicle that brought the message—and the food—to the people. By the mid-1970s, organic food entrepreneurs presented the ideal in bulk-grains bins and tofu buckets, with wilting vegetables, and snack foods to sate the munchies. It was an offbeat loose revolution led by artisans and small-scale operatives. Counterculture rags played up the subversive nature of communal gardens and subsistence living, but the juice bars, health-food restaurants, and co-ops made up the Main Street of this alternative world. Yet, what would happen if this vision actually succeeded in any meaningful way? Would the artisans—and their concoctions—survive their own success?

I was staring at one answer in my cereal bowl, for soy milk had run through every phase of the movement, from the artisan to the industrial. The product—specifically the Silk brand, made by White Wave in Boulder, Colorado—had hit the proverbial home run, remarkable not only among organic food products but in the annals of the contemporary food industry. Silk was the number-one organic packaged-goods brand in 2003, reaching $270 million in sales. It was the number-one brand in the dairy case, among all milk and soy milk brands until Horizon Organic milk overtook Silk in 2005. Sales were growing by one-third annually as overall milk consumption steadily declined.

Silk’s makers had achieved this feat by answering a fundamental question: How do you create a health food Americans actually want to eat?

If you wanted to stay in the alternative-food ghetto, serving soy to tofu-loving vegans, that was one thing. But if your aim was to reach the mass market, that was something else again. And getting big was the point, because then you would convince people to eat this superior food, edging humanity up a notch. While not a universal thrust in the organic food movement, it was as powerful a line of thought as the goal of local, alternative-food networks pursued by small-scale organic farmers.

Achieving this with soy, though, was especially difficult due to one big hurdle: Americans hated tofu. For most, the bold frontier of soy ended with soy sauce.

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