XPost: pgh.food, ne.food, co.food 
 XPost: ba.food 
 From: rlener@verizon.net 
  
 hate really to say this (maybe i should not) butg when you psychoanalyse 
 people 
  
 i suspect they ahve coprophagic desires that have been suppressed 
  
 probablt similar to vegetarians---spressed reaction formations etc to 
 wanting to be a canable--ever watch them eat? 
  
 for what it is worth 
 news:1149447275.742670.283130@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com... 
  
 THE WAY WE LIVE NOW 
 Mass Natural 
  
 By MICHAEL POLLAN 
 Published: June 4, 2006 
 "Elitist" is just about the nastiest name you can call someone, or 
 something, in America these days, a finely-honed term of derision in 
 the culture wars, and "elitist" has stuck to organic food in this 
 country like balsamic vinegar to m€che. Thirty years ago the rap on 
 organic was a little different: back then the stuff was derided as 
 hippie food, crunchy granola and bricklike brown bread for the unshaved 
  
 set (male and female division). So for organic to be tagged as elitist 
 may count as progress. But you knew it was over for John Kerry in the 
 farm belt when his wife, Teresa, helpfully suggested to Missouri 
 farmers that they go organic. Eating organic has been fixed in the 
 collective imagination as an upper-middle-class luxury, a blue-state 
 affectation as easy to mock as Volvos or lattes. On the cultural 
 spectrum, organic stands at the far opposite extreme from Nascar or 
 Wal-Mart. 
  
  
 But all this is about to change, now that Wal-Mart itself, the nation's 
  
 largest grocer, has decided to take organic food seriously. (Nascar is 
 not quite there yet.) Beginning later this year, Wal-Mart plans to roll 
  
 out a complete selection of organic foods - food certified by the 
 U.S.D.A. to have been grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers 
  
 - in its nearly 4,000 stores. Just as significant, the company says 
 it will price all this organic food at an eye-poppingly tiny premium 
 over its already-cheap conventional food: the organic Cocoa Puffs and 
 Oreos will cost only 10 percent more than the conventional kind. 
 Organic food will soon be available to the tens of millions of 
 Americans who now cannot afford it - indeed, who have little or no 
 idea what the term even means. Organic food, which represents merely 
 2.5 percent of America's half-trillion-dollar food economy, is about to 
  
 go mainstream. At a stroke, the argument that it is elitist will 
 crumble. 
 This is good news indeed, for the American consumer and the American 
 land. Or perhaps I should say for some of the American land and a great 
  
 deal more of the land in places like Mexico and China, for Wal-Mart is 
 bound to hasten the globalization of organic food. (Ten percent of 
 organic food is imported today.) Like every other commodity that global 
  
 corporations lay their hands on, organic food will henceforth come from 
  
 wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. It is about to 
 go the way of sneakers and MP3 players, becoming yet another rootless 
 commodity circulating in the global economy. 
 Oh, but wait. . .I meant to talk about all the good that will come of 
 Wal-Mart's commitment to organic. Sorry about that. When you're talking 
  
 about global capitalism, it can be hard to separate the good news from 
 the bad. Because of its scale and efficiency and notorious 
 ruthlessness, Wal-Mart will force down the price of organics, and that 
 is a good thing for all the consumers who can't afford to spend more 
 for food than they already do. Wal-Mart will also educate the millions 
 of Americans who don't yet know exactly what organic food is or 
 precisely how it differs from conventionally grown food. 
 The vast expansion of organic farmland it will take to feed Wal-Mart's 
 new appetite is also an unambiguous good for the world's environment, 
 since it will result in substantially less pesticide and chemical 
 fertilizer being applied to the land - somewhere. Whatever you think 
 about the prospect of organic Coca-Cola, when it comes, and come it 
 surely will, tens of thousands of acres of the world's cornfields - 
 enough to make all that organic high-fructose corn syrup - will no 
 longer receive an annual shower of pesticides like Atrazine. O.K., 
 you're probably registering a flicker of cognitive dissonance at the 
 conjunction of the words "organic" and "high-fructose corn syrup," but 
 keep your eye for a moment on that Atrazine. 
 Atrazine is a powerful herbicide applied to 70 percent of America's 
 cornfields. Traces of the chemical routinely turn up in American 
 streams and wells and even in the rain; the F.D.A. also finds residues 
 of Atrazine in our food. 
 So what? Well, the chemical, which was recently banned by the European 
 Union, is a suspected carcinogen and endocrine disruptor that has been 
 linked to low sperm counts among farmers. A couple of years ago, a U.C. 
  
 Berkeley herpetologist named Tyrone Hayes, while doing research on 
 behalf of Syngenta, Atrazine's manufacturer, found that even at 
 concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion, the herbicide will 
 chemically emasculate a male frog, causing its gonads to produce eggs 
 - in effect, turning males into hermaphrodites. Atrazine is often 
 present in American waterways at much higher concentrations than 0.1 
 part per billion. But American regulators generally won't ban a 
 pesticide until the bodies, or cancer cases, begin to pile up - 
 until, that is, scientists can prove the link between the suspect 
 molecule and illness in humans or ecological catastrophe. So Atrazine 
 is, at least in the American food system, deemed innocent until proved 
 guilty - a standard of proof extremely difficult to achieve, since it 
 awaits the results of chemical testing on humans that we, rightly, 
 don't perform. 
  
  
 I don't know about you, but as the father of an adolescent boy, I sort 
 of like the idea of keeping such a molecule out of my son's diet, even 
 if the scientists and nutritionists say they still don't have proof 
 that organic food is any safer or healthier. I also like that growing 
 food organically doesn't pollute the rivers and water table with 
 nitrates from synthetic fertilizer or expose farm workers to toxic 
 pesticides. And the fact that animals raised organically don't receive 
 antibiotics or synthetic growth hormones. Sounds like a better 
 agriculture to me - and Wal-Mart has just put the force of its great 
 many supermarkets behind it. 
  
  
 But before you pour yourself a celebratory glass of Wal-Mart organic 
 milk, you might want to ask a few questions about how the company plans 
  
 to achieve its laudable goals. Assuming that it's possible at all, how 
 exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level 
 just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would 
 virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is 
 not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word. To 
 index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, 
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)