from delancyplace.com

In today's excerpt--organic, as it is used on
food labels, while it still means
chemical-pesticide-free, doesn't mean quite
what it used to. And then there's the
so-called free range chicken:



"Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary
experience. That's not to take
anything away from the food, which is
generally of high quality, much
of it 'certified organic' or 'humanely
raised' or 'free range.' But right
there, that's the point: It's the evocative
prose as much as anything else
that makes this food really special. ...



"With the growth of organics and mounting
concerns about the
wholesomeness of industrial food, ... it is
Whole Foods that consistently offers the most
cutting-edge grocery 'lit.' On a recent visit
I filled
my shopping cart with eggs 'from cage-free
vegetarian hens,' milk
from cows that live 'free from unnecessary
fear and distress,' wild
salmon caught by Native Americans in Yakutat,
Alaska (population 833),
and heirloom tomatoes from Capay Farm (S4.99
a pound), 'one of the
early pioneers of the organic movement.' The
organic broiler I picked
up even had a name: Rosie, who turned out to
be a 'sustainably farmed'
'free-range chicken' from Petaluma Poultry.
...



"The organic movement, as it was once called,
has come a remarkably long way in the last
thirty years, to the point
where it now looks considerably less like a
movement than a big business. Lining the
walls above the sumptuously stocked produce
section
in my Whole Foods are full-color photographs
of local organic farmers
accompanied by text blocks setting forth
their farming philosophies. A
handful of these farms still sell their produce
to Whole Foods, but most are long gone from
the produce bins, if not
yet the walls. That's because Whole Foods in
recent years has adopted
the grocery industry's standard regional
distribution system, which
makes supporting small farms impractical.
Tremendous warehouses
buy produce for dozens of stores at a time,
which forces them to deal
exclusively with [huge] farms. ...



"The question is, ... just how well does
[today's organic] hold up under close
reading and journalistic scrutiny?
[Not that well]. At least that's what I
discovered when I traced a few of the
items in my Whole Foods cart back to the
farms where they were grown.
I learned, for example, that some (certainly
not all) organic milk comes
from factory farms, where thousands of
Holsteins that never encounter
a blade of grass spend their days confined to
a fenced 'dry lot,' eating
(certified organic) grain and tethered to
milking machines three times
a day. ...



"I also visited Rosie the organic chicken at
her farm in Petaluma,
which turns out to be more animal factory
than farm. She lives in a
shed with twenty thousand other Rosies, who,
aside from their certified organic feed, live
lives little different from that of any other
industrial chicken. Ah, but what about the
'free-range' lifestyle promised on
the label? True, there's a little door in the
shed leading out to a narrow
grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a
bit of a stretch when you
discover that the door remains firmly shut
until the birds are at least five
or six weeks old--for fear they'll catch
something outside--and the
chickens are slaughtered only two weeks
later."




Michael Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma,
Penguin, Copyright 2006 by Michael Pollan,
pp. 134-140.