Season 2, Bonus Episode: To Organic or Not Organic
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
An excerpt from my interview with Michael Lansing - a look at organics and industrialization.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell Narration:
If you listen to all of season two, you might have noticed that we never really talk about organics or non-organic, it just really wasn't the point of any of the episodes. But I did want to share some clips from my interview with Michael Lansing about the organic movement that you might find interesting.
Liz Russell:
You talk about nutrition, capitalism. We mentioned Michael Pollan. I feel like he’s someone who comes to mind for me as sort of saying that… I don't know if he's saying that capitalism isn't good per se, but that this larger industrialization of food in general isn't good. The local food movement feels modern to me, but I haven't studied it the way you have. So maybe you can talk more about that, but I'm curious if we can talk about the implications of industrialization now and that movement against it.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
One way to get at that question is to talk about the history of organics in the post world war II period. That's one entry point. That might be a useful way for your listeners to think about this. So of course, into the 19th century, all agricultural products at some level were considered organic. You don't see the addition of chemicals to agricultural processes until the late 19th century. Industrial chemicals and petroleum based chemicals, that's the early 20th century. And by the middle of the 20th century in the United States, there's of course this impressive number of petrochemicals being used in agriculture across the country. And it's at that very moment in the late 1940s, that you start to see this critique around the addition of chemicals and agricultural processes emerge in the United States. The rodeo press took off in the late forties, and there's a whole host of backyard gardeners, growing food and gardens sometimes in urban, sometimes in suburban settings.
And they are kind of seeing that when a plane comes over and sprays for mosquitoes, that certain plants in their garden die, it doesn't take a lot to figure out that hm, maybe it's not a good idea. It's people that are kind of growing their own food to supplement whatever they're buying, especially in urban and suburban places that start to really think about like, wow, maybe we should be growing food without the addition of all these chemicals, these chemicals might be harmful. Rachel Carson is actually one of the people who gets swept up in this while she's living on Long Island. In the late 1950s, the municipalities are spraying the island and she actually… there's a question of allergies to some of these chemicals, right? This push for what becomes known as organic food comes out of this moment in the late 1940s and the 1950s, where there are more and more urban and suburban people who are engaged in very small scale food production of their own, who are like, gosh, maybe these chemicals aren't great. And then of course, Rachel Carson herself in the mid 1960s with the articles that get published in the New Yorker and then are collected as the book, Silent Spring, kind of explodes this question of petrochemical use in all these different venues across the United States and food is at the heart of that. Organic food, that is food that is used without chemicals, doesn’t see a lot of really serious U.S. federal government regulation until the 1980s and 1990s around what counts as organic or not. But that becomes a kind of core group of producers and consumers who are looking for alternatives to the industrial food system which they might be critical of because of the use of petrochemicals or because of its scale, or because the big companies are profiting or because of the inequities in our current industrial food system, where there are a lot of hungry people. We’re the richest country in the world and we have hundreds of thousands of hungry people, like, what's up with that.
And then this question of how nutritious the food stuffs are by the 1960s. It's very easy for that alternative culture to emerge as some of the other alternative cultures that are happening in the baby boom generation as they come of age in the 1960s and 1970s and the conflation of those different alternative cultures with this alternative food culture. And then of course, it just takes off. And the focus on local food, this idea that you would go into a restaurant and they would tell you, you know, which farm the chicken came from and how it had lived and how it had been slaughtered was unthinkable in the 1970s in most locations. But of course by the 1990s and early 2000s, it's a thing that consumers are willing to pay more for. And of course you see the emergence of these networks, these local and regional networks of people that we now refer to as the food movement in which consumers and producers are trying to find each other and establish structures that are alternatives to industrial food systems, the way in which organics have been captured.
Once again, it's not conspiratorial. It's more complicated than greenwashing. I would argue just these big companies saying, Hey, here's look at this huge market for organics now. Well, we can make organic food too. And in fact, in some ways they're better at it. Gene Kahn, the founder of Cascadian Farms, 10 years after he sold it to General Mills, he said, they're doing a better job of it than I could. That's not very Michael Pollan, not very Alice Waters of him to say that. And of course he's been critiqued for saying that. And some in some ways rightly, in other ways maybe less rightly, but that kind of most recent involvement of organic food I think has people scrambling in the food movement and frankly, most consumers don't even know it. If I say that Annie's is actually owned by General Mills, most people just look at me blankly like, oh my God, right? So individual consumer information is not gonna be enough to solve this problem, I would say. And so maybe you just feel a little more free by doing that. The world doesn't rest on your shoulders.
Liz Russell Narration:
So, there you have it.
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