An Urban's Rural View

If you weren't alive in the 1950s, you may not be familiar with the Davy Crockett coonskin hat, a $100 million fad touched off by a Walt Disney television series. Like millions of other eight-year-old wanna-be frontiersmen, I wore one—for a while. A short while. This fad flamed out quickly.

Soon we had all moved on to other things, like hula hoops. They were a fad of a different sort, a fad that became something more than a fad.

Fads are short-lived; hula hoops remained popular for decades. Even if you weren't alive in 1958, when hula hoops were first twirled, you probably know about them. They almost disappeared but were reborn. Although not exactly the rage today, they're still around.

And then there's another fad of the '50s, rock music. Rock and roll, as it was originally called, didn't flame or fade, like piano wrecking or panty raids, and it didn't merely hang on, like hula hoops. It evolved and changed and grew. It made the leap from passing fad to something big and broad and permanent. Rock in all its many forms, from rockabilly to rap metal, from proto-punk to post-Britpop, keeps rocking along.

Having examined a variety of fad types, you might wonder about organic food, food produced without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. Where in this taxonomy of fads does it fit?

In the 1960s and 1970s organic food had the makings of a fad that would flame out, never to be heard from again. Many saw it as a hippie affectation that would go away when the hippies grew up and got jobs.

Time proved that notion wrong; a coonskin cap it was not. Nor was it a hula hoop exactly; it never enjoyed a spectacular moment in the spotlight, as hula hoops did, when everyone seems to be "doing it."

Instead, organic food may be making the leap rock and roll once made, to something big and long lasting.

Today's organic devotees aren't hippies; they're mainstream Americans. And they no longer have to patronize specialty stories; every supermarket offers organic produce and organic packaged products. There's little chance that future generations will view organic food the way we view, say, goldfish swallowing, as a quaint quirk of a moment in time long past.

In 2012 sales of organic food reached $28.4 billion (http://tiny.cc/…), more than 4% of total food sales, and projected to reach $35 billion last year. By one estimate organic-food sales are growing a heady 14% a year (http://tiny.cc/…).

Conventional farmers watch this development with interest, seeing in it both threats and opportunities. So do food companies. Sensing a swing in consumers' tastes, some are hedging their bets. Campbell Soup Co., the Wall Street Journal reports, has acquired a company that makes organic baby food and announced a new line of organic soups (http://tiny.cc/…).

Despite the advances it's made, organic food doesn't threaten to dominate the food scene the way rock dominates popular-music radio. It's big, but it's a long way from even 10% of the total food market. At this point, at least, it doesn't seem likely to supplant conventional food.

What could change that likelihood? Two possibilities leap to mind:

Possibility one: Were science to establish that even very low levels of residual pesticide in food is hazardous to health, shoppers would stampede to organics. We're far from that now. Studies do show eating organic food exposes you to fewer pesticides (http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/…). They don't show you're in any danger from the level of pesticides in non-organic food. Eat your fruits and vegetables, however grown, is today's scientific wisdom.

"Pesticide residues in average diets in the industrialized countries are all well below Acceptable Daily Intakes," say Gordon Conway and Jules N. Pretty in their book Unwanted Harvest: Agriculture and Pollution (http://tiny.cc/…).

Possibility two: If shoppers didn't have to pay more, or much more, for organic food, there would be no reason not to buy it. They pay more now because organic methods cost farmers more; if farmers didn't get a premium price for organic food, many wouldn't grow it.

Walmart, as I noted in a previous post, is trying to make organic food more affordable ((http://tiny.cc/…). The question is how. Technology is one way of lowering the cost of producing something, but in organics technology is a dirty word. Scale is another way, but to true organic believers "large-scale organic farm" is an oxymoron.

To outline these limitations is not to deny or denigrate the progress organic food has made. It may never rock as much as rock does, but it no longer bears any resemblance to a fad. It's a fact of life, one that food companies and analysts of consumer taste and farmers will ignore at their peril for years to come.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES)