Horrors! Organic Has Been Kidnapped by Wal-Mart!

Over the last century many upper-class Americans have agitated for the classification of certain areas of the nation as wilderness, that is, areas that should remain unaffected by humans.

Starting about half a century ago many upper-class Americans have agitated for the replacement of conventional farming techniques by “organic” techniques, that is, as defined by Wikipedia, farming that “excludes the use of synthetic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.”

But now Wal-Mart is going to start selling organic food, at about 10 percent more than conventional food, and you can imagine that the folks at the New York Times Magazine aren’t happy. Writes Michael Pollan, a journalism professor,

Assuming that it's possible at all, how exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word.

Well, that is the environmentalists’ story, and they are sticking to it.

The trouble is that the organic narrative is false, just as the wilderness narrative is false.

Our idea of wilderness is based upon the way we imagine the United States looked when the white man first arrived in the seventeenth century. But the land in those days had been painstakingly modified by native Americans for their own benefit. The inhabitants of what we now call New York State used to burn the underbrush regularly to make the environment more hospitable for the deer that they hunted for food. And the Plains Indians modified the Great Plains to make it more hospitable for buffalo.

So it is with agriculture. Humans have cut down vast forests over the last few thousand years to clear their fields; they have bred—that is to say genetically modified—wild animals into domestic slaves. And they used whatever came to hand when it came to controlling weeds. Was that sustainable?

It is certainly a sad thing that intensive farming techniques confine animals in pens and factories and reduce wild grasses to monoculture wheat fields. But the original sin was committed centuries ago when the first man tamed the first wild beast and the first farmer began to cultivate rather than just harvest the wild grasses in the hills of Mesopotamia.

It is totally phoney-baloney to drive a stake in the ground circa 1850 and define every change in farming practice since then an attack on sustainability.

The truth is that there is no such thing as sustainability. Nature fluctuates in all time scales.

And one result of intensive farming practices is that farmland in the United States is being returned to forest.

Still, when Wal-Mart is selling organic food it is surely time for journalism professors and fashionable New York Times reader to move on to something else.