Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex

Michael Pollan's work, Behind the Organic Industrial Complex, is an exploration of the logistics behind producing the organic foods we see in the supermarket. He discusses how he questioned what "organic" really meant to large food corporations and decided to investigate the process first hand. What he found was that the USDA certified label that suggests foods are organic means something very specific and not necessarily what consumers assume. Organic crops are grown without pesticides and organic meat comes from animals that are fed with organic produce. However, he found that organic farming on an industrial level is certainly not sustainable by any means due to the amount of fuel it takes to either transport produce and meat from different places in the country and abroad and the machinery used to cultivate the crops on these massive farms. Ultimately, Pollan decides that while organic products are better for you in many ways, they are not really sustainable or better for the environment.

Throughout this piece, I went back and forth when it came to agreeing with Pollan but by the end I was on his side. I thought that it was interesting that Pollan describes his main informant, Gene Kahn, as a "hippie farmer" which has a more positive connotation than corporate executive, but then admits he is a vice president of General Mills, ultimately making the reader question Kahn's motives even if he was once a small-scale organic farmer. Ultimately I think that description set the stage for the way the reader was supposed to react to the information presented by Kahn and, for me, it worked.

Ironically, Kahn says his critics are idealistic in the way they believe organic farming should work but I would argue that he is the true idealist. Throughout the reading, Pollan and Kahn discuss the processes behind the production of organic food with Kahn singing the praises of General Mills and the resources available to organic farming now but also admits that everything in one of his frozen dinners has to be trucked somewhere new several times over before it ever makes it to the frozen food section. For someone who began organic farming as a way to combat how unsustainable conventional forms of farming are, he seems to be contradicting his own supposed way of life. It would be wonderful if truly healthy organic food could be produced at a scale that was both industrial enough to provide sustenance to more people than just the affluent and health conscious but at this point in time it does not seem possible which makes using things like pesticides and GMO's a dilemma for the cheap production of food and conventional farming.