| ORGANIC INC: THE BOOK PROJECT Sliding through the glass doors and into the 37,000 square foot Whole Foods Market in Washington, D.C, you are greeted by overflowing fresh produce, glistening under the well-designed lights. Organic strawberries fan out on a table next to a wall of organic lettuce (with not a head of iceberg in sight). Nestled amid other exotica are sorrel, Swiss chard, and Italian kale. And beyond that is the fresh fish section, with varieties like skate and monk fish and wild Copper River salmon laid out on a bed of ice. Nearby, an eager-to-please butcher offers unpackaged cuts of Argentine beef, Icelandic lamb, "natural" pork, and thick Osso Buco. The aisles in the store mirror the layout of conventional markets, but Kraft and Nabisco are nowhere in sight. Instead, there's Kamut breakfast cereal, hand-dipped ricotta cheese, flown in from Italy, brown eggs from free range hens, several varieties of soy milk, meditation videos, natural skin creams, all of it, along with thousands of other organic and natural products, beaming a message of health, well-being, and environmentally friendly consumption. I first discovered this alternative consumer Mecca in the mid-1990s, after leaving behind the familiar New York City bachelor's life of trendy restaurants and take-out food. Determined to cook for my wife-to-be, I became a regular at Whole Foods and actually looked forward to shopping there, at times twice a week. My food tastes evolved. I began to buy more organic products. I sharpened my cooking skills, even began baking bread. But the business reporter within got curious. What was behind this store, this trend, this lifestyle and why was I finding it so easy to spend so much money there? By the end of the dot-com boom (which in a small part had supported my habit of freelance journalism), the question grew more pertinent. With Whole Food's stock price moving up steadily, the health-food market became a financial refuge from the sinking Ciscos of the world. Was the era of greed and fraud and speculation of the 1990s being replaced by something more wholesome, ethically conscious, environmentally attuned, intuitively healthy, organic? Sales pointed the way ahead, since the organic food industry has grown about 25 percent a year since 1990. It was now nearing $10 billion. It wasn't too long before my penchant for fresh food took me to local farmers markets, with their bountiful, in-season produce, chatty farmers and crowded stalls. Now I understood why chefs were so enthusiastic. I would shop at the farm market on Sunday, then drive over to Whole Foods to round out my week's needs. Clearly, the farmers were as much a part of the trend as me. But who were they? Family farmers? Back-to-the-land hippies? Weekend gardeners? And how did they fit into the universe occupied by Whole Foods, and even more recently, the Costcos and Safeways, which were also selling organic food? Were these the dying farms we always read about come back to life or were they exception to the rule? By buying organic, I was implicitly helping farmers and the planet, improving my diet and supporting a socially conscious company recognized as exceptional by such publications as Business Ethics. But was this win win situation all it promised to be? Opponents deride organic food as elitest, the farming methods incapable of feeding the world. But were they simply shills for conventional agricultural interests? What did the research say? I decided I would need to dig deeper to find out. I started this project because I wanted to know where my food came from, who made it, and how it was sold. But more than that, I wanted to know whether an industry – a group of fast-growing businesses – could have a positive social and environmental impact. I realized it would take a book to answer these questions. With the aid of my agent, I secured a book contract from Harcourt. I too had hitched onto this trend, beginning a book that will keep me busy through 2004. Samuel Fromartz |