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It was definitely fitting that he described organic food as being about little stories, because his story about Polyface Farms is my favorite in the book. The story about how “organic” came to be a thing, with the “People’s Gardens,” was a good one, too. I like the idea that organic implies more than just a different way of growing, that it’s also a different mode of distribution (that’s hopefully more local and more just to its workers) and even a different kind of cuisine. On the other hand, his description of organic nowadays certainly doesn’t live up to that at all, even if that’s what it implies: After a semester of reading about how regulations fail to protect food quality, it was annoying to read about regulations for organic labeling that seem to have the right idea but block out farms like Polyface because they’re aimed at big, industrial-type businesses.
Some gender-related notes: I noticed more discussion of women farmers in this chapter, like the woman who helped invent the bagged salad mix, but there weren’t very many of them. However, when he was discussing who the detailed labels at Whole Foods were targeting, he used feminine pronouns: She doesn’t want to feed her kids food with pesticides. Which reminded me of Perfection Salad, where the women were expected to have a home chemistry kit to test the food safety – it’s implied to be part of a mom’s responsibility here less directly, but that’s still what it comes out as. I also thought it was interesting that one farmer said organic isn’t as “macho” as conventional farming.
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