Organic Researcher

Okay, I was going to write a commentary but to be fair a review would also be useful. The first thing to say about this book, is that like the proverbial duck, it is paddling hard beneath the surface whilst looking graceful on top, Fromartz has done the work – spoken to most of the key players, read the research – both academic and commercial. The result is that it reads well but has a serious punch.

If you don’t want to wade through my comments jump straight to these pages to read extracts and even order it up.

The axis around which the book is organised is that the organic movement in the US is in a conflict between those who desire a purity that would forbid the huge growth that has characterised organic farming and food in the last few years, and those who like it as it is. Of course this is expressed in litigation, as in the case of Arthur Harvey representing himself in an attack on the right to label many organic goods as organic. Rather than stemming from a pro-pesticide, far-right lobby group this attack came from within the movement – Harvey is a small scale organic blueberry grower. This dispute and the energy it has unleashed about what organic means is the core conflict in the contemporary US organic movement. Fromartz is a reliable guide to this conflict, charting his own journey from Whole Food regular to Farmers’ Markets and growing his own vegetables, whilst having interviewed all of the key actors in this dispute.

He charts this through the strawberry trade in California, local sales , organic salad in the catering trade and how that let to huge organic businesses, the development of breakfast cereals and the inevitable backlash, concluding with a consideration of why people buy organic in the first place. Although there are endnotes, and it does look to quite sophisticated arguments, this book is so skillfully written that you do absorb it easily and move with the discussion. Some sections felt familiar to me, as I have read the source material – say the debate on Strawberries in California but the discussion of Soya production genuinely shocked me as a hardened reader of food industry practices.

The best is however saved to last, the chapter on ‘why we buy’ is outstanding. Fromartz takes the dichtomy between whether you could ever have an organic Twinkie and subjects that discussion to the hard light of what consumers actually do. This for me is one the central observations of the whole book, that the debate in the organic movement is actually intensely ideological to the extent that it often overlooks the evidence. People buy and use organic food in complex ways, the ideas of the ideologically charged do not reach into people’s kitchens and pantrys. Until the organic movement looks at organic consumption as it actually is, rather than what it projects it to be, then the impasse can never be overcome.

Fromartz is more content with the organic movement than I would be, but I’m not concerned with that, it is the journey that I hold to be interesting, well written and important. Unfortunately, for those who are not familiar with US eating and farming, much of this will be hard to digest. So many of the points being made are very specific to the States, they don’t travel well – including the title. In Europe ‘Natural Foods’ are quite different and not related in the same way to organics as they are in the US, making what is a good pun a little confusing.

So if you haven’t opened another browser window to either read the extracts or order it – do so now.