NY Times: You Are What You Eat: 2006 and the Politics of Food

image: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

A succinct and interesting story reviewing this year in food that included this excerpt:

But there were signs that organics may have become too successful for their own good. Once welcomed as the savior of the small farmer and the conscientious eater, organic farming has lost some of its luster, dulled by large operators who follow the letter of the law but ignore the larger principles that once characterized the organic movement.

Today the word no longer stands for small-scale farming and animals raised in a traditional pastoral setting. As Mr. Pollan wrote in The New York Times in 2001, about the dairy farms operated by the organic milk producer Horizon, “thousands of cows 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.”

The Department of Agriculture is now considering allowing salmon farmers to call their fish organic even if the fish are fed nonorganic fishmeal. The increasingly loose meaning of the word has led some consumers, who once bought anything labeled organic, to rely on new signifiers, like grass-fed, sustainable or local.