The Color Green: Representing Environmentalism or Nausea?

Aine Bina has finally gotten around to reading an article from the June 4, 2006 issue of the New York Times that has been sitting on her night stand. The article, which perhaps should be described as editorial journalism, was featured in the "The Way We Live Now" column of the NY Times' Weekend magazine and is called "Mass Natural; With Wal-Mart going organic, where will organic go?" and was written by Michael Pollan. I am giving you all this info rather than a link to the article because a) I *gasp* have the article in hard copy, so I would have to actually *bigger gasp* work to find such a link and b) NYT is quite stingy about letting just anyone access its articles in full on the web.

The title is a pretty good indicator of what the article is about. On the surface, the news of Wal-Mart, or Evil Incorporated as I affectionatley refer to it, deciding to go organic is a major coup for environmentalism. As The Grist wrote in a recent editorial on green crusaders failing to applaud progressive actions taken by the traditional enemies of the environment: "But that self-same Wal-Mart is embarking on a comprehensive sustainability program that includes emission reductions and organics -- the whole shebang." But as Pollan will reveal to us, dig a little deeper and suddenly Wal-Mart's decision to go organic is deeply troubling. Wal-Mart's decision to go organic should not be interpreted as a company's sudden impulse to be a more caring type of corporation. The fact is that recently green has become cool. Vanity Fair did its green issue this summer, and the Washington Post devoted a Sunday Source to it this past month. I was flipping through a recent issue of "Glamour" and they had some suggestions on small steps to becoming greener. So if Wal-Mart wants to keep up with trends in consumer culture, they have to start satisfying demands for Green veggies.

Wal-Mart still wants to deliver it's products at "great" low prices. So they're promising that organic products will only cost 10% more than their non-organic counterparts. The fact is that the Green movement has never promised you cheap goods, just responsibly priced goods. So if Wal-Mart insists that it can deliver organic products cheaply, then one has to ask what the cash register price fails to reflect. For starters, if Wal-Mart is going to deliver on promises for cheap organics, it is going to have to get the products from where it's cheap to grow them. Check the labels on some items around your house: a tv, a souvenir from your recent trip, the tag in your shirt. Found anything made in Asia yet? (Actually, my shirt was made in the USA. Kudos to Wet Seal) So lets ignore for a moment the worker abuses that may be/probably are going on in the countries where we produce our fabulously cheap goods. If you've looked at any websites like myfootprint.org or climatecrisis.net, you know that transporting goods (or people) over great distances causes a significant amount of environmental damage. Why do we love organic again?

As Pollan says "To [get organic food prices to a level just 10% above non-organics] 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." This isn't just a theorhetical projection; the evidence for non-sustainable, cheap "organics" is already there. Pollan points out the existence of so-called organic feed-lots. To produce cheap organic milk, agribusiness sets up huge factory dairies, often in the desert. Rather than being fed on grass, these organic cows are fed a diet purely of organic grain, which not only negatively affects the cows, but actually affects the nutritional value of the milk that you drink. Organic milk produced by these cows is lacking in beta-carotene and "good" fats. Is that really what we think of when we choose organic? And sure, guidelines for growing organic meat requires that animals have access to the outside, but agribusiness often meets these requirements by cramming animals into too-small, grassless, shadeless feedlots or, in the case of some poultry producers, screened-in porches which really only provide access to a view of the outside.

This is why, to quote Kermit the Frog, it isn't easy being green. The more converts we get, the more big corporations want to cash in by providing goods labeled "organic" and "locally grown" without in any way affecting their bottom line. And if obeying only the letter of the law and ignoring the spirit of the law isn't enough to keep it cheap for companies, they'll lobby to change the letter. In the past year the Organic Trade Association lobbied on behalf of Kraft Foods (a part of Phillip-Morris, which I affectionately refer to as "The Devil's Henchment"), to make it easier to include synthetic ingredients in products labeled organic. Pollan tells the story of a chicken producer, Fieldale Farms, which persuaded their Georgian congressman to add a provision into an appropriations bill which would allow the substitution of conventional chicken feed if the price of organic feed exceeded a certain level. The rule was eventually repealed, thank goodness. Because if so-called organic producers can continue to label their goods "organic" without actually producing them in an organic way, what good does that do any of us?

The Grist has some hope for the future of a better, kinder, greener, Wal-Mart. So the point here isn't really that Wal-Mart is intrinsically evil and will ultimately fail to in any way help the environment, but rather that one can't become complacent, and you should always do your homework.