America’s Growing Food Revolution
An Insider’s Guide by Lisa Marshall to Sustainable Choices
and organic foods are up by double digits. The once-obscure Locavore (eat local) movement has become a national phenomenon. Community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives and farmers’ markets are proliferat- ing. Even the federal government and some of the country’s largest grocery retailers have jumped on board, with First Lady Michelle Obama helping to plant the fi rst garden on White House grounds since World War II, and Wal- mart vowing in January to double the percentage of locally grown produce it sells to 9 percent. The statistics are motivating
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indeed: According to University of Wisconsin researchers, produce travels an average of 1,500 miles from farmland to plate today, up 22 percent from 1981. Half of our land and 80 percent of our water is used for agri- culture, reports The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and pesticide use has increased 33-fold since the 1940s. Meanwhile, health problems associ- ated with agricultural chemicals are on the rise. “We have been through 100
years of industrialization of our food supply, and consumers have begun to wake up and realize they have no idea how their food is made,” says
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e’ve heard the buzz. Ameri- ca is in the midst of a food revolution. Sales of natural
historian and food policy writer James McWilliams, an associate professor at Texas State University. “Historians will look back on this time as momentous.” But with every revolution come tough questions—and fi ery debate— on how best to participate. Is it better to buy “organic,” “natural” or “lo- cal”? Is shopping at a farmers’ market inherently more green? Are there other ways, such as planting a garden or eschewing meat, that can make an even bigger impact? In reality, there are no easy
answers, but, “Consumers need to be prepared to take on a bit more com- plexity in how we think about food, and not fall so easily for simple man- tras (like Eat Local and Buy Organic),” advises McWilliams.
The Case for Organic Ask Rodale Inc. CEO Maria Rodale what consumers can do to improve their health and environment, and her answer is unequivocal. “If you do just one thing—make one conscious choice—that can change the world, go organic,” she writes in her new book, Organic Manifesto: How Or- ganic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe. Rodale’s grandfather founded
Organic Farming and Gardening maga- zine (today’s Organic Gardening) in the 1940s, jump-starting an organic move-
ment that by the 1960s was nearly syn- onymous with environmentalism. But today, Rodale concedes, the organic industry faces a public relations chal- lenge, as consumers trade from USDA Organic-certifi ed foods to “locally grown” or cheaper “natural” options. One 2009 survey by The Shelton Group found that out of 1,000 shop- pers, 31 percent looked for the “natu- ral” label, while 11 percent looked for “organic.” “There is a giant mispercep- tion among consumers that somehow natural is the word that is regulated and organic is not. In fact, it is actu- ally the other way around,” says CEO Suzanne Shelton. Law mandates that U.S. Depart-
ment of Agriculture (USDA) products labeled organic be free of pesticides, hormones and genetically modifi ed organisms (GMOs), and that animals be given access to the outdoors. By contrast, the Food and Drug
Administration vaguely describes natural as, “Nothing artifi cial or synthetic has been included in, or has been added to a food that would not normally be expected to be in the food.” With the exception of meat, it is up to the manufacturer to defi ne what natural means. (In 2009, the USDA defi ned “naturally raised” meat as, “… raised entirely without growth promoters, antibiotics, and never been fed animal byproducts.” It says noth-
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