Reading Response, Chapter 9

This chapter from "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (Pollan) is aptly titled "Big Organic", a notably self-contradictory phrase. The bigger the company, and the wider it stretches, the more need it has to mass-produce and cut costs to stay competetive. For example, smaller local dairies produce fresh milk sold directly to local markets; larger ones such as Dairygold must chemically enhance their milk to help preserve it, and ship it hundreds of miles away to more foreign paying customers. However, much of the more modern population in America has become more critical about what they eat/drink, reflecting on the companies that provide sustinence. Since they want to have less chemicals in their ever-fattening bodies, Americans move toward the "organic" trend of foods, which companies who wish to keep large market shares quickly follow. Not suprisingly, what is labeled as "organic" becomes highly diverse, differing substantially throughout company, personal, and sociological views.

Sociologically, organic means "natural", "simple", or "clean/pure" in general. These few words are enough to spark outrageous controversy among people, though. Some say organic means farmed/grown without artificial fertilizers or pesticides, while others view the term to mean production of food with minimal technological impact, picked by Americans, unprocessed, perfect as is. While everyone tries to eat healthy nowadays, the current fat plague across America is pushing people to the most extreme "organic" possibilities. To keep business, companies reorganize to a more "organic" structure, but what this spells in changes differs vastly; some feed organic grain to caged cows, others sell only beef raised in unfenced, grassed prarie fields. Some sell corn washed without the worst of artificial cleaners (thus organic by comparison), while others process corn by hand in a more traditional manner. In any case, "organic" is more an idealism than reality; it only really exists to those who have moved so far from it that they feel things have to be changed by great standard for all (even outside this society) to become the new standard "organic"; its "natural" only because we eat in a greatly unnatural manner now.