Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States by Brian K. Obach (review)

In an age when consumers are increasingly conscientious of their food choices, the "organic" label doesn't have a lot of radical cachet. With the rise of "Big Organics" (read: corporate organics), it is now possible to pick up an organic apple at Walmart, or peruse an entire aisle of organic snack foods in a conventional supermarket. Brian Obach's book, Organic Struggle, explains how this situation has come to pass—how organics became popular with consumers and converted millions of acres to more sustainable production practices, but ultimately lost its radical appeal. Writing with a scholarly, measured approach that is still sensitive to organic's transformative ambitions, this book yields new insights on the organic label's lost opportunities, ecological gains, and pragmatic underpinnings.

Obach's book rests on the premise that to truly understand the political significance of "Big Organics," we need to understand precisely how the organic food movement evolved. Accordingly, he spends a considerable proportion of the book's pages documenting organics' emergence from Rodale's Organic Farming and Gardening (first published in 1942), to countercultural farms in the 1960s and 1970s, to a nationally certified labeling schema—the National Organic Program—overseen by the United States Department of Agriculture and the target of Washington lobbyists. Sometimes the level of historical detail is overwhelming, but readers of Organic Struggle will be rewarded with a richer sense of how small organic firms (e.g., Odwalla) came to be owned by large corporations (e.g., Coca-Cola), and will better understand the complex array of actors that mobilized to support, contest, and critique national organic standards. More broadly, readers will gain a clearer sense of how challenging it is to balance market growth with social justice and sustainability. For this reason, the book's appeal extends beyond those with an interest in organic agriculture, as it speaks to a more wide-reaching political tension of how to make eco-social change through market mechanisms—and whether this is even possible.

Obach develops a useful metaphor to describe the "market versus movement" tension: "spreaders" versus "tillers." "Spreaders" want alternative markets to expand in scale, and have no problem with the rise of big corporations in the organic sector, reasoning that bigger actors help convert more acres to sustainable production methods. Spreaders also point out that corporation expansion has made organic products more accessible to the average consumer. Compared to the pragmatic spreaders, "tillers" are idealists. They worry that the transformative potential is lost when cost-cutting corporations take advantage of organics' price premium, while shaving standards down to their bare minimum. Indeed, big corporations do produce monocrops of baby carrots and salad greens that are enriched with trucked-in organic fertilizers; these practices may not run afoul of official organic standards, but they do run contrary to the original organic vision of self-sustaining farmers growing multiple crops and producing fertilizer to enrich the soil. Overall, Obach's spreader versus tiller metaphor is a useful clarifying heuristic that applies to other certification schemas undergoing similar growing pains. For example, Fair Trade USA's growth tactics have offended many tillers in the fair-trade movement who critique the watering down of standards (so that plantation-grown coffee, or chocolate bars with only a small percentage of fair-trade cocoa, can now receive the fair-trade label).

Even though current organic standards have certainly facilitated the large-scale expansion of corporate organics, Obach emphasizes that this is not a simple story of "Evil Food Corporation" versus grassroots farmer. The book's historically detailed narrative showcases the plurality of motivations, actors, and ideological divisions at play. For example, the formation of national organic standards was not simply dictated by corporate agribusiness; these players entered the scene en masse only after the national organic program was officially launched in 2002. It would also be a mistake to assume that organic farmers—the ones actually growing the food—were...