Organizing Organic

Conflict and Compromise in an Emerging Market

Michael A. Haedicke

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804798730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Stakeholders in the organic food movement agree that it has the potential to transform our food system, and yet there is little consensus about what this transformation should look like.

Tracing the history of the organic food sector, Michael A. Haedicke charts the development of two narratives that do more than simply polarize the organic debate, they give way to competing institutional logics. On the one hand, social activists contend that organics can break up the concentration of power that rests in the hands of a big, traditional agribusiness. Alternatively, professionals who are steeped in the culture of business emphasize the potential for market growth, for fostering better behemoths. Independent food store owners are then left to reconcile these ideas as they construct their professional identities and hone their business strategies.

Drawing on extensive interviews and unique archival sources, Haedicke looks at how these groups make sense of their everyday work. He pays particular attention to instances in which individuals overcome the conflicting narratives of industry transformation and market expansion by creating new cultural concepts and organizational forms. At once an account of the sector's development and an analysis of individual choices within it, Organizing Organic provides a nuanced account of the way the organic movement continues to negotiate ethical values and economic productivity.

CHAPTER 1

Breaking Ground for a New Agriculture

Transformation and Expansion during the Organic Sector’s Early Years

MANY PEOPLE ASSUME that the organic sector’s origins lie in the efforts of idealistic farmers to transform agricultural systems, but ideas and practices that centered on business activities and market growth also have a long history in the organic sector. During the sector’s early years, expansionary ideas appeared in the pages of organic farming periodicals, and farmers’ groups and organic retail stores embraced practices that aimed to grow markets for organic foods, as well as ones that aimed to change relationships among farmers, consumers, and the land. One of the more striking features of the sector’s early years was the relatively peaceful coexistence of these two ways of thinking and organizing. In the young, small, and decentralized organic sector, the contradictions between the two visions did not spark the widespread conflicts that emerged in the sector’s later years.

The relative calm of the early organic sector, despite the presence of contradictory cultural understandings, differs from the contention that characterizes many emerging markets. Early markets and other sorts of organizational fields are usually “unsettled” in the sense that dominant understandings and modes of acting have not yet come into being, and they are often marked by struggles between participants who espouse different understandings and approaches (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Two factors were particularly important in limiting conflicts during the organic sector’s early years. The first had to do with the decentralized organization of the sector as a whole. In the absence of overarching rules and regulations, members of the sector were able to practice organic farming in different ways. Markets were limited in size, and farmers typically sold to geographically proximate consumers, which enabled different regional styles of organic farming to emerge. The sector’s fragmented character and the lack of a sizable national market for organic foods reduced the chances that different regional understandings would produce widespread conflicts.

Second, leading members of the sector downplayed tensions that existed between different understandings of organic farming. They did so by articulating visions of the organic sector that included both transformative and expansionary principles, as well as by ignoring ways in which organizing the sector for the purpose of market growth might be incompatible with the objective of systemic change. They told stories that implied that organic agriculture could be a lucrative business opportunity as well as an activity that produced social and cultural changes (Lounsbury and Glynn 2001). The statements of organic advocates during this period offer an early example of how people may frame organic farming in ways that seek compromise between different cultural logics. To illustrate this compromise-oriented framing, I discuss the work of J. I. Rodale and other writers for the magazine Organic Gardening and Farming (OGF), which Rodale created. Rodale was not the only mid-twentieth-century advocate of organic farming in the United States, but his prolific writings on the topic made him a central figure in the emerging organic field.¹ For its part, OGF helped to synthesize transformative ideas from the alternative agriculture and countercultural movements with a vision of the organic sector’s market growth. It also created some of the first institutions that were intended to support the national organic trade.

I begin by placing organic farming advocacy in the context of the development of modern agriculture and food production systems during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. I then examine Rodale’s writing, as well as that of other advocates whose work appeared in OGF. I show how Rodale and his followers blended expansionary and transformative ideas as they engaged with an audience shaped first by post–World War II concerns about chemically intensive farming and industrial food processing and later by an influx of radical activists from the 1960s New Left and counterculture. I also discuss initiatives that the magazine launched during the late 1960s that aimed to grow the organic market. Finally, I examine the decentralized and regionally oriented character of the sector during the 1970s, which facilitated the existence of diverse understandings of organic production. Here, I focus on organic farmers’ groups and on small-scale retailers that specialized in organic foods.

Industrialization and Resistance in the Food System

As the historian Philip Conford puts it, “Organic methods have existed for centuries, [but] the organic movement could begin only once an alternative to them existed” (Conford 2001, 17). Advocacy for organic farming emerged in the context of industrialized agriculture and mass-market food processing and built on the work of critics who called for a food system organized according to the principles of decentralized and locally oriented farms and markets. In the United States, the rise to dominance of modern (or, as it is usually referred to in organic farming circles, “conventional”) agriculture was closely associated with the development of an industrial economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large enterprises and mass production enabled the widespread use of labor-saving agricultural implements and machinery. These technologies allowed farmers to bring new areas of the country into cultivation and to increase the size of the acreages that they worked. The extension of railways also lowered transportation costs and encouraged the formation of national markets for agricultural commodities, which contributed to increases in the size of farms and to geographical specialization in agricultural production (Cronon 1992). Finally, the movement of people from rural areas to cities created new centers of demand for farm commodities and contributed to the growing emphasis on efficiency and productivity in agriculture.

The federal government, in an effort to ensure the food security of an increasingly urban population, subsidized the expansion of the railroad infrastructure and helped to provide access to land and credit (necessary for investments in new technologies) to farmers (Conkin 2008). Agricultural policymakers also explicitly sought to foster technical innovations through the creation of land-grant agricultural colleges and through systems of agricultural extension agents, who had a mandate to disseminate new technologies from the laboratory to farmers in the field (Henke 2008). The colleges and extension services employed agricultural economists who advocated for models of farm management that copied those in the manufacturing sector and that focused in particular on the use of standardized techniques and capital investment to increase crop yields (Lyson 2004). Later, federal research funding contributed to the widespread availability of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which appeared on the market in unprecedented quantities after World War II. Synthetic inputs enabled farms to increase crop yields per acre of cultivated land and reduced the pest and disease risks faced by operations that cultivated only one or two major crops (Stoll 1998). These new tools allowed a relatively small number of farmers to feed an expanding population, although the costs associated with modern farming also contributed to the consolidation of farms into larger units of production and resulted in the bankruptcy of mid-sized farms, particularly during periods in which the production of agricultural commodities exceeded demand (Kirschenmann et al. 2008).

Alongside these on-farm developments, the industrial processing and mass-market distribution of food products increased during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Giant food processing companies, such as Armour and Swift in the beef industry and Nabisco and Heinz in the packaged foods sector, were well established by the turn of the century. These companies took advantage of new transportation technologies to sell products in distant markets. Swift, for example, pioneered the use of telegraphic ordering and refrigerated railway cars to build an interregional distribution system centered on Chicago (Fields 2003). These national food corporations also helped to spur the creation of modern grocery stores through advancements in food processing and preservation. The new retailers brought lower prices to consumers by stockpiling massive quantities of dry and canned goods, as well as by introducing self-service shopping (Mayo 1993). Food companies also launched lavish advertising strategies to build customer loyalty and increase demand for their branded goods. The Heinz company (now known for its ketchup) erected a six-story illuminated sign shaped like a pickle (then the company’s flagship product) at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street in New York City and built the Heinz Pier in Atlantic City, where vacationers could munch on free samples while taking in views of the ocean and of artworks on display (Levenstein 2003b).

By the beginning of the 1950s, the United States had entered what food historian Harvey Levenstein labels “the golden age of food processing” (Levenstein 2003a, 101). Economic growth after World War II increased the household income of many American families, who purchased brand-name convenience foods and the appliances with which to store and prepare them. Large food corporations invested heavily in these value-added products, hiring food chemists, who set to work creating additives to improve the flavor, appearance, nutrition, and shelf life of processed foods, and advertisers, who developed eye-catching packages and brand identities for the new products. Marketed in particular to women in terms evocative of the postwar cult of domesticity, advertisements for frozen, canned, dehydrated, and other convenience foods promised that they would satisfy demanding husbands and children while freeing time for “bridge, canasta, garden club, and other perhaps more soul-satisfying pursuits” (Levenstein 2003a, 106).² The explosion of the food processing industry even shaped decision making on the farm, as fruit and vegetable growers shifted to varieties that were more able to withstand the rigors of processing, although the gains in hardiness were often offset by the loss of flavor (Goodman and Redclift 1991).

This modern American food system did not escape criticism. Throughout the twentieth century, dissident farmers, consumers, and agricultural thinkers found reasons for skepticism about the changes in farming and food processing (Beeman and Pritchard 2001; Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2011). Critics drew attention to the environmental consequences of modern farming, arguing that intensive cultivation contributed to the erosion of topsoil and the depletion of soil-based nutrients. Early in the twentieth century, for example, the American soil scientist Franklin H. King completed a study of Asian peasant agriculture titled Farmers of Forty Centuries. The book contrasted the use of machinery and manufactured inputs in Western agriculture with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean practices of composting biological wastes and planting cover crops to reduce soil erosion. King argued that the latter techniques were more efficient and, as the title of his book implied, more sustainable over the long term. In the wake of the Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s, other agricultural reformers such as Hugh Bennett, Paul Sears, and Henry Wallace produced lengthy analyses that linked soil erosion to the possibility of famines and social and economic crises. As Bennett noted in 1935, “History has shown time and again that no large nation can long endure the continuous mismanagement of its soil resources. The world is strewn with the ruins of once-flourishing civilizations, destroyed by erosion” (quoted in Beeman and Pritchard 2001, 14).

New critical voices began to emerge as American agriculture leaned more heavily on synthetic herbicides and pesticides in the years that followed World War II. In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring exposed the hazardous nature of these widely used chemicals. Carson took particular aim at chlorinated hydrocarbons and organophosphates, two common families of synthetic pesticides, arguing that these substances and their by-products had permeated the soil on farms, leached into groundwater supplies, and created dangers for humans and animals alike. She documented cases of acute pesticide poisoning and examined connections between chronic, low-level exposure to pesticides and the development of cancer and other degenerative illnesses. Like earlier environmental critics, Carson also raised the specter of ecological collapse, although her work focused on the loss of beneficial organisms and the development of chemical resistance among pests rather than on soil erosion (Carson [1962] 2002).

The growing food processing industry also fell under the scrutiny of critics. Some of the earliest commentary of this sort came from “natural foods” advocates like Sylvester Graham in the 1830s and his successor John Harvey Kellogg at the end of the nineteenth century. Graham and Kellogg advocated diets of limited variety, with special restrictions on red meat and spicy foods, in the interest of physical and mental health, but they also linked the industrial processing of milk and flour to a decline in public health and argued that the consumption of processed foods created an unnatural state of excitement in the body that contributed to physical illness and moral degeneracy (Gusfield 1992). Later in the twentieth century, food purity critics targeted the widespread use of synthetic additives and preservatives in processed foods. In the 1930s, the consumer advocates Arthur Kallett and F. J. Schlink (1932) published the widely read book 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, which argued that the indiscriminate use of these substances exposed the public to unknown but significant health risks. Several decades later, Ralph Nader and his protégés took up the campaign, focusing on the use of monosodium glutamate in baby food and on the potentially carcinogenic sweetener cyclamate (Peters 1979). These critics and others contended (with some justification) that industrial processing robbed food of nutrients that were needed for good health and a long life. The enormously popular nutritionist Adelle Davis, for example, encouraged consumers to turn to natural, minimally processed foods and to use vitamin supplements to make up for the nutritional deficiencies of processed foods (Fromartz 2006).

Skeptics of mainstream agriculture and food processing did not limit their critiques to agricultural technologies and ingredients. Many also challenged what they saw as a distinctively American attention to short-term profits, as well as agricultural policies and scientific institutions that encouraged market-oriented “big farming” at the expense of environmental quality, rural communities, and public health. The problems of modern agriculture, for many of these writers, were symptoms of a more extensive alienation of industrial society from the natural world and from the principles of social and environmental responsibility. Some agricultural critics produced “soil jeremiads” (Beeman and Pritchard 2001) that linked farmland erosion to the vacuous moral character of industrial society. Drawing from agrarian political thought, which had its clearest American expression in the Jeffersonian idea that widely distributed land ownership was necessary for political freedom and social order, they argued that reinvigorating small-scale, family-run farms as the foundation of agricultural production would improve soil management and realign the country’s moral compass (Guthman 2004a). The food processing industry’s challengers made similar arguments. Natural foods advocates from Sylvester Graham to Adelle Davis lamented the fact that industrially manufactured products had displaced home gardening and cooking, which they described as bastions of physical and mental health. Like agrarian writers, they suggested that as people became more distant from stable communities and direct experience with food production, they were more likely to fall prey to superficial temptations and to lose a sense of moral focus (Gusfield 1992).

Agricultural and consumer activists also linked problems of food purity and healthiness to the dominance of large corporations in the food industry and raised concerns about the accountability of these corporations to the interest and welfare of the public. In 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, Kallett and Schlink contended that food corporations’ political connections enabled them to obstruct meaningful product safety legislation.³ Similarly, Nader’s group criticized the ability of lobbyists employed by the food industry to shape public dialogue and policy related to food additives and food quality (Turner and Nader 1970). Their arguments paralleled those of Carson, who attributed the overuse of synthetic pesticides to the influence of the chemical industry and to a political system that privileged economic growth over the public interest. In their focus on agrarianism and in their challenges to concentrated economic power, these critics tied the goal of food system reform to a vision of broader social and cultural change.

The Beginnings of Organic Farming Advocacy

These critiques of mainstream agriculture formed a backdrop for the emergence of organic farming advocacy in the 1940s. One of the earliest and probably the most energetic of these advocates was the magazine publisher Jerome Irving (J.I.) Rodale, who founded the magazine Organic Gardening and Farming (OGF) in 1942.⁴ Organizations researchers and economic sociologists have highlighted the important role that discourse plays in the creation of new sorts of organizations and new fields of activity (Phillips, Lawrence, and Hardy 2004; Rao 1998). Pioneers in new fields win support for innovations by constructing stories and accounts that identify problems with existing arrangements and that justify alternative structures and practices (Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings 2002; Lounsbury and Glynn 2001; McInerney 2014). Rodale occupied a central position in the emerging organic field largely because of his ability to produce and disseminate copious amounts of talk about organic farming, although he acted more as a conduit for the ideas of others than as a cultural innovator in his own right (Peters 1979). He relied heavily on the work of the British soil scientist Albert Howard, who had developed a compost-based approach to farming while studying agricultural practices in colonial India, as well as on German philosophers of biodynamic agriculture and on a variety of critics of the food processing industry (Conford 2001). Rodale’s effectiveness as an advocate for the organic approach had much more to do with his tenacity and his ability to frame the virtues of organic farming in compelling ways to an American audience than with the novelty of his ideas.⁵ His work engaged with the critics of mainstream agriculture, although he asserted that organic foods production represented a healthy business op...