- I was a little unprepared. The commercial came on and
I heard the familiar ukulele strums of the late Hawaiian singer Israel
Kamakawiwo'ole's famous and famously beautiful version of "Over the
Rainbow" (I know, but it really is quite lovely) and my first reaction
was merely to cringe and wince as yet another exquisite and plaintive song
was whored out to the advertising demons, just one of thousands.
-
- But then came the barrage of images: the requisite shot
of the Perfect Mom feeding her Perfect Child some sort of Perfect Food,
all bathed in soft morning breakfasty light with happy trees peeking through
the windows of the Perfect Kitchen in some utopian hunk of Perfect America,
a bizarre scene that of course does not exist anywhere on this planet given
how there weren't three empty wine bottles and some used underwear and
a stack of dirty dishes and a fresh bottle of Xanax and an open newspaper
offering up giant headlines about murders and nuclear warheads and Korean
sex slaves anywhere in sight.
-
- And then it happened. The logo. The product shot. The
soothing voice-over. It was a commercial for a brand-new product: Kellogg's
Organic Rice Krispies. And your heart goes, Ugh.
-
- You say it aloud and the words tend to catch in your
throat and make you sort of gag. Kellogg's Organic Rice Krispies, with
"organic" in big scripted flowing font across the top of the
box, all steeped in bogus warmth and happiness and false notions of health
and nature and protecting your Perfect Child from the millions of icky
poisons and unhealthy crap churned out by giant megacorps exactly like,
well, exactly like Kellogg's.
-
- Kellogg's Organic Rice Krispies. It's sort of like saying
"Lockheed Martin Granola Bars" or "Exxon Bottled Spring
Water." Self-immolating, and not in a good way.
-
- That's when I heard it. The plaintive wail, the sigh,
the crack and the moan and the whimper, like a tree shooting itself in
the head. It was the final death knell of the "true" organic
movement, breathing its last.
-
- Because yes indeed, it's over. Organic is dead. Corporations
have officially bought it out, the USDA has weakened its definition to
near death, Whole Foods has made it chic and popular and profitable and
yet has compromised its integrity like no other by being forced to pretty
much ignore small, local farms and ideas of sustainability in favor of
staggering commercial growth. And now this.
-
- Did you know? Did you already understand the real definition?
Because that's what "organic" was really supposed to mean, way
back when: local, sustainable, ethical, connected to source, pesticide-
and hormone-free. But the vast majority of organic product now flooding
the market only gloms on to that last aspect (and sometimes, barely even
that), to meet the USDA's impotent organic guidelines. Ah, government.
There's just nothing like it to make you want to smack yourself in the
skull with a brick.
-
- One example: Stonyfield Farm's organic yogurt. As BusinessWeek
points out, the stuff is made not on an idyllic working farm like the one
on the label but rather in a giant industrial factory. They get their milk
trucked in from a whole range of suppliers and it's possible they will
soon begin to import some of their organic ingredients -- in dried, powdered
form -- from New Zealand, so as to meet national demand, delivering it
all over the country via pollutive trucking companies.
-
- This is the harsh reality, the real cost of mainstream
organic. There apparently aren't enough happy small, Earth-conscious local
farms around to produce this stuff in sufficient quantities to feed the
entire Wal-Mart nation. Massive compromises have been made. And those compromises
mean "organic" is a shell of its former self.
-
- "Organic," according to the lobbyist-friendly
USDA, does not have to mean the food is grown using sustainable (read:
nondestructive) farming practices. It does not mean locally produced. It
does not mean the ethical treatment of animals. Nor does it mean the companies
that produce it need be the slightest bit fair or trustworthy or socially
responsible. All it means now: no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers,
no bioengineering.
-
- So is that enough? After all, the fact that megaproducers
like Kellogg's and General Mills and frightening discount megaretailers
like Wal-Mart are going big into organic certainly will translate into
an enormous reduction in chemicals in the American diet, thousands if not
(eventually) millions of pounds of pesticides and hormones and fertilizer
removed from the food chain as a whole. The benefits of this cannot be
understated: It's a great thing indeed.
-
- But there's a massive snag: Thousands of products now
claim to be organic, but many merely replace the chemicals and pesticides
with a slew of other industrial, pollutive, destructive processes that
easily offset any health benefits -- most notably the extra shipping and
global delivery these "industrial organic" producers employ to
obtain and deliver organic ingredients, which pumps so many chemicals back
into the environment it probably counteracts all those saved in growing
the stuff in the first place.
-
- (On that note, if you're going to read one astounding
book on the subject of farming, organics, fast food, and the American diet
overall, let it be Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
He maps it all out far better than I ever could. It's your must-read of
the summer, even though it's now fall.)
-
- Whole Foods? Perhaps the greatest mixed blessing of all,
an amazing company that has single-handedly done more to bring the organic
movement to the mainstream and raise awareness of healthy foods and improve
farming and meat-quality standards across the board, not to mention the
pleasures of food shopping overall. Yet at the same time, merely by its
sheer size and success, they've simultaneously done more to dilute the
real meaning of "organic" than any other company.
-
- Put another way: Unless you shop at farmers' markets
or quasi-hippie co-ops or unless you do your homework and find a true family-run
farm within 100 miles of your home and establish a relationship with them
and really begin to buy local, the odds that the next "organic"
product you buy truly meets the original definition is about as likely
as finding real breasts at the Playboy mansion. And for now, maybe this
is just the way it has to be.
-
- Which brings us back to Kellogg's Organic Rice Krispies.
Industrial to the hilt, not the slightest bit locally grown, not the slightest
bit sustainable, from the same company that poisons your kid with Pop-Tarts
and Froot Loops and Scooby-Doo Berry Bones and cares about as much for
the health of the planet as Dick Cheney cares about pheasants. And of course,
they ship the crap all over the country in planes and trucks that burn
enough oil to make Bush leer and the oil CEOs grin and it's all just one
big happy joke. On you.
-
- But hey, at least they're helping remove millions of
pounds of chemical crap from the food chain, right? At least they pretend
to care. Problem is, they've merely replaced those chemicals with an even
more toxic additive: hypocrisy. Now, can you swallow it?
-
- http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
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