Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, American writer, author from the just published The Botany of Desire, wrote an article at The New York Times Magazine, in May 13, 2001: “THE ORGANIC – INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. All about the folks who brought you the organic TV dinner”.

Planeta Organico interviewed him in New York, and brings you the points of vue of this organic consumer that believes that ” farms produce more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape “.

PO – You start your article mentioning the “Pastoral scene”  that is on consumer’s mind when he buys an organic product.  What pushed  you into a closer look at organic product, especially in supermarket?

MP – The expression “organic TV dinner” seemed to me not to fit the organic concept, and looking closely at the organic industry, the pastoral scene begins to get more and more out of focus. The fact is that the big companies have already realized that an organic fruit or vegetable isn’t part of a cultural revolution, but a marketing niche with a turnover of over 7 billion dollars in the USA alone. The big companies also know that health is a matter of the consumer’s perception.

PO – During the interview we’ll talk abour the issues raised in your article, but first , please, tell us when and how did you have your first contact with Organic?

MP – It was in seventies, I think. Organic food was something you got in Health Food Stores, and always looked awful. It was not something I was overly concerned with. We used to live in Manhattan and in 1983, we bought a house in the country, when I started gardening. When we bought this house, I started to read organic magazines, I didn’t want to use pesticides, so I got into organic more on the gardening side, more than the consumer side.

My next sort of serious encounter with organics was when I was writing an article on genetic engineering, GMO food, for The New York Magazine, in 1998 – in fact the last chapter of the book “The Botany of Desire”, the one about potatoes, is based on that article: “Playing God in the Garden”.

PO – What chocked most  you during the process of writing the article “Playing God in the Garden”?

MP – In the process of writing that, I was learning a lot about conventional agriculture. I interviewed Idaho potato farmers and learned how potatoes are grown conventionally, which is truly terrifying: 14 applications of pesticide!!  Pesticides so toxic that the farmers will not go in their fields for five days after they spray, no matter what. Even if their irrigation is broken down. They know that it is so dangerous that they’d rather lose the whole field than the employees. I’ve met farmers who can’t eat the potatoes which they’re growing because of the systemic pesticides.

PO – It’s really terrifying….14 applications of pesticide !!

MP – So it was a real lesson to me because I didn’t really know how American industrial farming was conducted till I took this trip to Idaho. And there were vast farmers, computer control, very high capital, etc.These are what they call “Clean Fields”. Everything is dead except for the one plant you want to grow. The soil is dead. You don’t see one insect. You feel the soil like a powder. It’s not a living thing.

“His soil was completely different.
It smelt like life.”

PO – And then you decided to check an organic farm.

MP – The organic people I know were very upset about GMOs. So I went to visit an organic potato farmer and this farm was a completely different place. His soil was completely different. It smelt like life. There was something going on there. And I talked to him about how he controlled disease, his whole philosophy and that was my first extensive encounter with an organic farmer, and learning how they did it. The fact is that he was managing to get excellent harvests, comparable to the conventional farmers, although not as often.

PO – It was a completely different way of culture.

MP – No pesticides. Relying on crop rotation, planting a great variety of potatoes and other crops. Basically what you learn when you’re studying industrial agriculture and GMOs is that monoculture is the problem. It’s growing one thing, in vast amounts.The ideal is polyculture, to group different cultures. So while I was writing this article I thought of writing a whole article about organic. At the same time, the organic market was growing. GMOs were the best thing that could have happened to organics from the business point of view. It created a demand in this country for organic.Organic was the only way you could be sure that your food did not have genetically modified ingredients. The market started growing dramatically. So it was a business story too.

PO – Monsanto replied  your article saying the GMO doesn’t spoil the soil.

MP – Well, compared to the toxic industrial agriculture I was seeing, I can see that they can make that argument. I am not sure that it’s true. But if they really have developed a GMO potato that did not need to be sprayed 14 times, yes, they could make the case that it’s sustainable.In fact, those farmers were being able to skip one or two sprayings. Even if it’s more sustainable, we don’t really know the environmental effects GMOs have. That’s not saying a lot. But what is curious is that the people of Monsanto genuinely believe that their product is organic, because they were using an organic pesticide: BT. And they were hurt when they were rejected by organics.

PO – And what is your opinion about it?

MP – The fallacy of that thinking is they are going to ruin BT.; they are putting so much BT into the environment in such high doses, that it created resistance in Colorado potato fields. That’s why organic people are so mad. That they have been using BT safely and responsibly for so many years, and Monsanto is ruining that.

PO – Do you think organic and GMOs are incompatible?

MP – One of the questions I ask organic farmers is; “Could you imagine a genetic modification that could be organic?”  Some of them could. Some say no. Some of them said: “No, in principle, it’s too synthetic”. Others would give interesting answers like: “Well, if you are using genetic modification to advance corn breeding, for instance, and you weren’t taking genes from other species, if you were not crossing the species barriers, but you were just using it to speed up the process within the corn, we could consider supporting that, if all the research was done”. I personally don’t think any technology is inherently good or evil, So, there may be a day, some time in the future, when these two things will be not quite so far apart. But, in general, what I learned, is we don’t need this technology…

PO – But what about their argument that we need this technology to solve the world hunger problem?

MP – This is a very complicated subject. I do not think they are entirely sincere in making this argument. Because they are not working on world hunger. They are working on herbicide resistance for commodity producers in industrialized countries. I think their argument is rhetorical, and I think they are appealing to our sense of liberal guilt and concern, and compassion, and I really resent the argument that we, in the first world, have to eat our spinach, so people don’t starve in the third world. In another words, they are saying we should put aside our self-interest, and act for “altruistic reasons”, and accept this technology so people in Africa can eat. I just don’t believe their argument.

The other set of arguments goes back to the green revolution, which enormously increased the productivity of crops, but obviously did not do that much for world hunger. The countries with highest rates of hunger are food exporters… So it’s not a question of how much food you produce, it’s a question of who commands the money to buy the food, the distribution. So it may not be a technological issue…

“So it’s not a question of how much food you produce, it’s a question of who commands the money to buy the food, the distribution.
So it may not be a technological issue…”

PO – Some people consider being against GMO’s is the same as being against progress.

MP – I’m not against research. Science must be done; but my argument is that these products should be labeled, so people know if they are eating GMOs or not, and it should be very well regulated. And it is neither labeled nor regulated. But the growth of organics is very much related to GMOs. People got scared and started looking more and more for healthy food. It makes me a little nervous on an industry that is too dependent on food scares for its growth. I think people need more positive reasons.

PO – How do you see the growth of processed organic?

MP – I think there’s a fundamental tension between the logical of industrialism and organic as I define. The concern with the lowest possible price and efficiency, can lead people to simplify or streamlining the idea of what organic really is. Local is very part of it and that is getting lost. Big organic American industries are buying their berries in Chile. I’m not against buying industrial organic products. I think they are necessary and we need more of them.

PO – As you wrote in your article, people use to imagine a family farm, a pastoral scene when they look at organic labels.

MP – Exactly, and that’s not true. That’s what opening my eyes when looked at a product upclose , when I was writing my article. And in some cases, as in the case of the milk that I talk about in the article, it is a more processed product and that’s another apart of the organic ideal.

PO – Don’t you think that organic had another meaning in the 70’s?

MP – The word Organic in the 70’s meant a lot more – I just think that now the definition of organic has shrunk quite a few.  Any dream gets compromised as it enters the mainstream. If you insist that organic will be unprocessed and local it will be very small. If your concern is environmental in the sense of what is happening on the farm, on the soil, and that’s all you care about,  just get as many acres as you can under organic production, that’s what Cascadian Farm is doing. So what I’m saying is that people shouldn’t forget what has been left by the way side. All the social revolutions of the sixties, many of witch found their way in the mainstream, they compromised along the way – one of the great things of organic, from my point of view, it’s a way for small farmers to survive, in a moment when agribusiness is taking over everything.

“Any dream gets compromised as it enters the mainstream.”

PO – Do you think the organic market will keep growing?

MP – Yes I think it’s gonna get a lot bigger. Still very small, there’s a lot potential for growth. So we come back to the idea of the good with the bad. What is going to happen is that you’ll have very large retailers like Walmart getting into organic.

PO – You say that  is growing the number of organic farmers in USA. Why do you think is that happening? New potential market?

MP – I think farmers do believe in the evidence of their eyes, if something works they will adopt it. They study each other very closely and they are always looking, ‘What has my neighbor planted?”So the more organic you have planting the more you’ll see people experimenting organic.I know organics means more management than conventional. It is definitely more management and more labor. Intellectually is more work too. Instead of buying that pre-packed solution you have to have a system that works in your farm. There is a spiritual value in it.

PO – What is the consumer’s perspective concerning organic?

MP -I gave a speech to the Organic Trade Association and I told them,” you really have to decide what is your message. Are you selling environmental message or are you selling a health message?” And they think that health message is more powerful for the consumer. Every product nowadays have a heath claim “This is good for your heart”, “This is good for cholesterol”, etc. A campaign based in environmental would be a softer one. Did you see Whole Foods? Its a supermarket and they have a beautiful store at Chelsea. They have organic, integrated and conventional.

PO – Some people still don’t do the link between organic and environment.

MP – Exactly. But people who would buy things for environmental reasons are estimated in 7/10%. A small core group that already know that organic is good for environmental. I think there’s a vulnerability for industries that are selling health claim that they can’t back up yet.

PO – How important is the chef’s role to promote organic?

MP – The chefs have a important role in spreading organic. The chefs create a demand for organic and increase prestige of organic.They go to the greenmarket to choose their organic product themselves, like Peter Hoffman. Peter has an excellent restaurant, Savoy,  with an interesting menu. He is also the president of Sustainable Agriculture Group – Chef’s Collaborateur. You can see him on Wednesdays, shopping at Union Square with his bicycle.

PO – Tell us about your book TheBotany of Desire. How came up the idea?

MP – The book started exactly as I say ; I was in the garden, I love plants and gradually I come to this recognition that I was working for them, instead of they mere working for me. I love the idea of long piece about one plant. And look at the whole history, methodology, philosophy, and the deeper I got into it, the more I became to see that is two way stream. Nobody is on top on evolution, everybody is acting on everybody else.

PO – What  other book have you published?

MP -‘Second Nature’ it’s a book of essays. It  came out of my experiences in my garden. I realized, when I was writing that book, that the garden is a really interesting place to study our relationship with nature. And Americans traditionally, I mean American Nature writers, go to wilderness to write about nature; go to woods, the mountains, the ocean, there’s where we have our big thoughts about nature, that’s all right! But I learn what we can from there. But I also think we have to act. In wilderness we are spectators and in the garden we have to act. It’s participant to look at place, where we have to engage, we have to participate. That’s the moment where we are now. We have to figure out how to act responsably in Nature. We have to participate. The garden have a lot of lessons.My second book is about Architecture – A Place of my own.It was published China , England, France, Japan.

PO – After reading your book we start looking for apples differently, you have so many kinds of apples in USA…

MP – There are many varieties of apple here. About 2500. Some years are better than the other. Last year was bad. This year is good. When you go to greenmarket you’ll find wonderful apples.

PO – How about the organic wines? How is their market?

MP – You know that there are a lot more organic wines than you can imagine? And some are not even labeled “organic” and you know why? A lot of growers in California have gone organic, but they discovered that if you put the word “organic” in the wine label you don’t sell as much for the reason people suspect “can this wine be good? ‘Galo’ the big one, has most of his vineyards organics.

PO – And Coppola too. We tasted a delicious organic wine, called Bonterra, recommended by Nell Newman.

PO – The taste is one of the strong points of organics.

MP – You can scientifically prove why organic tastes better. There is that farmer that grows organic and conventional tomatoes. Same farm ,same variety and the organic tomatoes had higher bricks scores, which means, more sugar in them, more solid than the other. And that’s why they taste better. More intense flavor. And of course more nutritious, because have less water. Because the nitrogen fertilizers causes the plants to take more water. So it’s more diluted.

PO -What do you see coming  in the near future?

MP – I see a third way coming. Somthing between organic and conventional. Many farmers are scared to throw away chemicals completely. Not that they want to use chemicals routinely, because they hate the chemicals too. But they really worry about an emergnecy situation. So some of them can develop a hybrid system.

On the other hand, some farmers have the two systems in the same farm (organic and coventional), so, little by little, through experience, they can discover the qualities of  ther organic system.

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