Raising Elijah

THE EARLY YEARS after Elijah’s birth were lean ones. Jeff was making a transition from studio-based artist to state-certified art teacher, which necessitated night classes and tuition payments and child-care costs. At the same time, both of us, as secondtime parents, were acutely aware of the brevity of infancy and childhood. We didn’t want to miss anything. Money was a means to buy time with Faith and Elijah. We competed to be the primary parent, and the farther we could stretch a dollar, the more time we had with our kids.

To that end, Jeff and I sought out the advice of a financial counselor. We thought a third pair of eyes looking over our household budget might identify places where we could take up even more slack. And Becky Bilderbeck—who ran a bed and breakfast and sewed her own curtains—seemed to possess the ideal eyes for the job. Becky wasted no time scanning down the list of our monthly expenses. But, to both our relief and disappointment, she couldn’t find much room for improvement. We owned one car, bought clothes at consignment shops, paid off our credit card in full each month. And there wasn’t much that could be done about the health insurance premiums and all my various medical co-pays. Finally, she tapped her finger on one of our line items.

Resisting the urge to issue an organic proclamation, I responded only with a polite, nodding smile. But the rest of the conversation continued without my full attention. I felt defensive and somehow ashamed. I had avoided supermarkets for so long that I had no idea what the prices of conventionally produced foods were like. I knew that organic food carried premium prices, but was it possible that even with Jeff’s co-op discount and our CSA farm, we were paying significantly more for food? I cooked beans in the Crock-Pot while sleeping. Jeff cooked oatmeal on the stove while awake. Dried beans and bulk oatmeal—even organic dried beans and organic bulk oatmeal—were surely cheaper than, I don’t know, Hamburger Helper and a pound of ground chuck. Right? I ran through a mental grocery list. Maybe it was the fair-trade coffee. Maybe the once-a-week organic chicken.

Back at home, I checked the Official USDA Food Plan, which consists of four different budgets—complete with grocery lists—all of which can meet minimal daily nutritional requirements. Developed during the Great Depression with an eye toward preventing low-income families from spiraling into malnutrition, the Food Plan is divided into quartiles of food spending—liberal, moderate-cost, low-cost, and thrifty—each corresponding to quartiles of household income. (These standards are now used for the basis of food stamp allotments as well as in setting alimony payments in divorce courts.) In 2003, for a family of four with young children, the average weekly food outlay was $145 for those who followed the moderate-cost plan.

So, we were essentially eating at the low end of the third quartile, although our income did not really qualify us to do so. We were clearly not as thrifty as those prudent souls following the thrifty plan, who were, in fact, able to limit their grocery budgets to about $100/week. Nor did we come in under $120/week, as those following the low-cost plan were managing to do. Still, we certainly looked like the paragons of parsimony compared to families following the USDA’s liberal plan. Those eaters spent, on average, nearly $180 every week for their groceries.

Why does organic food cost more than conventionally grown food? I spent some days in the basement of the agriculture library at Cornell University trying to figure this out. There seemed to be three basic reasons. First, organic prices are higher because of retail mark-ups. Organic farms are often small, local, and seasonal. Retailers have to source with more suppliers who provide less predictable quantities. This takes more work. By contrast, conventional growers can keep prices down by sheer volume. Second, organic food provides higher profit margins for those who produce it. Increased farm income, of course, is not a bad thing. It provides jobs, prevents bankruptcies and foreclosures, and strengthens the fabric of rural communities.

But the principal reason that organic food costs more than conventional food is that organic food costs more to produce. It is more tightly regulated, and it requires more labor. And, in the United States, labor is more expensive than chemicals.

Encouraging job creation while decreasing the demand for toxic chemicals seemed like worthy use of my food dollars. In a sense, my generous food budget was subsidized by my lack of charitable giving—the financial counselor had noticed the absence of a line item for this expense category—because I had long ago decided that I was more interested in preventing social problems than trying to cure them. By directing my food dollars toward organic farmers, I felt that I was helping to prevent cancer, preterm birth, and rural unemployment, for example, while also investing in a healthy environment for my own children.

As a mother of modest means who cleaves to an organic diet, I’m hardly alone. Consumer demand for organic food has risen swiftly over the past two decades, at some points racing past domestic supply to the point where shortages constrained further growth. U.S. sales of organic food hit $24.8 billion in 2009—up from a mere $1 billion in 1990. Even during the economic downturn, the growth of organic sales—up 15.8 percent in 2008 and another 5.1 percent in 2009—outpaced total sales of conventional food. (Organic dairy was an exception. More on this momentarily.)

Nevertheless, even with retail growth figures like these—which Food Business Week called “whopping”—the amount of organic food in the U.S. marketplace is paltry. To quantify paltry: In 2009, the most recent year for which there is data, organic food sales reached—drumroll, please—3.5 percent of all food product sales in the United States.

Measured by the number of acres in production, the statistics on organic food production are even more unimpressive. Yes, certified organic cropland increased 41 percent between 2001 and 2005 and another 51 percent between 2005 and 2008. But even with the collective enthusiasm for chemical-free farming, these organic acres still only account for 0.7 percent of total U.S. crop acreage. Of U.S. cows, 2.7 percent are raised organically. Of U.S. egg-laying hens, 1.5 percent are raised organically. These numbers are dramatically lower than those in many other nations. (Carrots are a bright spot, though: the organic kind now takes up 25 percent of total U.S. carrot acreage.)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides some clues about the tempest-in-a-teapot progress of organic agriculture in its reports. In spite of high consumer demand, obstacles still stand in the way of farmers who are considering making the move from conventional to organic. Organic farmers need to know they have access to credit, markets, trade assistance, and crop insurance. They need infrastructure: meat lockers, processing facilities, warehouses, and mills. They need university research dollars directed down lines of inquiry relevant to them. They need knowledgeable assistance from cooperative extension services. Without this support, farmers are on their own when problems arise, and, no matter how enthusiastic consumer demand, the decision to embrace organic represents a perilous and possibly foolish career move.

Institutional neglect of organic farming should make parents of young children sit up and take notice. It means that the kind of agriculture that does not rely on hormones, antibiotics, and neurological poisons receives less public investment than the kind that does. It means that even when we grocery shoppers create such demand for pesticide-free food that we blow past supply, systematic bottlenecks prevent supply from catching up. It means that organic farming will remain a niche market rather than a transformational force in the lives of families everywhere. It means that retail prices will remain high. It’s what prevents organic agriculture from becoming . . . well, agriculture.

To quantify the depth of my financial commitment to organic food, I decided to conduct an experiment. I would make two pizzas using the same recipe. The first would be assembled from conventionally grown ingredients purchased at the supermarket near Faith’s nursery school and the second from organically grown ones purchased at our food co-op. I would find out what I could about the agricultural origins of the ingredients. I would conduct a taste test. And I would compare the costs of the individual ingredients, based on the price I paid per unit amount.

Pizza seemed like a happy metric. It was the food that had fueled all my childhood birthday parties. It was notably present the first time a boy put his arm around me. In college, pizza was a recurring motif in my first serious love affair. Brian—linebacker, poet, and eldest of four brothers—had taught me the fine art of rolling up a pizza slice and eating it like sushi. The night he left his fraternity and moved in with me—setting in motion a small scandal that I had fully intended to enjoy—we had ordered pizza. Now I was married to a man who gladly made pizza because the dough reminded him of plaster, and I had wolfishly consumed the results throughout both my pregnancies. Both of our children, the then almost five-year-old as well as the almosttwo-year-old, identified pizza as their favorite entrée. In this, they were hardly exceptional. Fully 70 percent of U.S. schoolchildren make the same claim.

In the fall of 2003, I published the results of my pizza study. Essentially, they were these: With one-to-one substitutes of organic ingredients for conventional ones, an organic pizza cost over 40 percent more than one assembled with conventional ingredients purchased at a supermarket. However, thanks to Jeff’s discount at the co-op, the real additional cost to us was closer to 25 percent (conventional pizza: $4.50; organic pizza: $5.65). That 25 percent premium was roughly the difference between the Moderate-Cost Plan and the Low-Cost Plan on the USDA’s chart of official food plans. The pizza experiment seemed to illustrate that my organic stubbornness was indeed the explanation for why we were eating with the modest but well-heeled third-quartile families rather than with the costcutting second-quartile tribe.

In fall 2010, I repeated the study but tweaked the methodology a bit. In the seven years between the first pizza experiment and the second, my organic ingredient options had expanded considerably. For example, thanks to a local grain collaborative, I now had available to me a source of organic flour produced from heritage wheat varieties and milled in my own county. (By contrast, the organic dough of 2003 was kneaded with flour that had originated in the wheat fields of Montana.) In addition to possessing a CSA membership, I was now within walking distance of a weekly farmers’ market whose vendors included at least one artisanal cheese maker. Alternatively, an Amish grocery a few miles up the road had expanded operations to include locally made cheese. I could compare prices.

Along with my shopping options, my culinary skills had also improved. Over the years, I had become, for example, an experienced home-canner of tomatoes. Along the way, I discovered that I could forego the addition of a can of tomato paste to my pizza sauce, as the recipe called for, because a quart jar of my own tomatoes—when crushed and drained—was zippy enough in flavor and substantial enough in texture to stand in for a can of paste and two watery, chopped tomatoes.

In fact, between 2003 and 2010, so many more organic ingredients and methods had become available to me that I felt confused. What was the purpose of my experiment now? Was I trying to prove that I could make an all-organic pizza for the same price as a one assembled from conventional supermarket ingredients? If so, yes, I could do that. Although the locally milled, stone-ground, organic flour cost twice as much as its conventional supermarket counterpart, I could more than compensate for that expense with my home-canned tomatoes. Two tomatoes and a can of tomato paste at the supermarket cost $3.70, whereas a jar of my own tomatoes priced out at $2.14.

Or was the point of my new experiment to assemble an entirely local pizza out of the most delicious ingredients I could find, while still remaining within the 25 percent organic price differential? If so, I could do that, too (not withstanding the essential but decidedly unlocal quarter-cup of olive oil). Since it seemed somehow unfair to use tomatoes and garlic from my CSA farm—the overall cost of my weekly share of produce from the farm came in at only a dollar a pound, as near as I could figure—I decided to buy everything. The choices were still tantalizing. Not only did I have sources for locally produced artisanal organic flour and cheese, my new BFF was a farmer named Margaret whose stall at the weekly market looked like the Museum of Garlic. She had rare varieties of every sort—some hot, some sweet, some with indescribably complicated flavors. At one point, thanks to Margaret, I had thirteen different kinds of garlic bulbs piled in a big wooden bowl on my kitchen counter. They had names like Music, Lukak, German Red, and Shang Tung Purple. They made me feel rich. And they stored better than conventional bulbs.

Driven by concerns about childhood obesity, the high price of cheap food is currently receiving well-deserved attention. And therein lies growing public acknowledgement that the money we hand to supermarket cashiers is only part of the price we pay for a form of agriculture that makes a twelve-pack of Ding Dongs cheaper than a bag of apples. Not appearing on the cash register receipt that flutters from a bag of groceries are the costs of treating obesity-related cancers, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

Right behind this critique lies another one: This same system of agriculture that fills store shelves with Ding Dongs requires pesticides and synthetic fertilizers to function, and this dependency, too, carries hidden economic price tags. These include higher utility bills triggered by the need to filter farm chemicals out of tap water; lost productivity caused by the pesticide poisonings of farm workers; higher taxes to pay for elaborate systems to monitor pesticides; loss of revenues prompted by poisoned honeybees, contaminated sport fish, and closed swimming beaches; and higher insurance premiums stoked by antibioticresistant infections and increased cancers caused by a thinning ozone layer. (See Chapter 3, strawberries and tomatoes.)

These factors are known as economic externalities—the costs of a privately profitable activity that are passed on to others. And, in many cases, those receiving the bill for the passed-along costs are children and members of future generations. Yes, as I discovered in the library basement, someone with a Ph.D. has attempted to quantify the externalized costs of pesticide use. His estimation is that, in the United States, only about half of the total cost of using pesticides to grow conventional food is included in the price of the food itself. By that logic, buying organic food is a good deal.

“If the public could only see the real price tag of the food we buy, purchasing decisions would be easy,” writes Andrew Kimbrell, the director of the Center for Food Safety, commenting on these findings. “Compared to industrial food, organic alternatives are the bargains of a lifetime.”

The conundrum for us organic-buying parents on a budget is that we are shouldering both the full costs of the food that we are feeding to our own families—produced on that 0.7 percent of agricultural acreage that is managed organically—as well as the externalized costs cast off by the other 99.3 percent. And all of our children, whether their bodies are constructed out of Ding Dongs or heirloom apples, will eventually be paying for damages not incorporated into the bar codes that beep their way through the convenience store checkout lanes. An agricultural system that is costly to society even though privately profitable is not a problem that can be solved by individual consumer choice or educational campaigns about the glories of farmers’ markets. This is a structural problem that requires a structural—political—solution. Which is why agricultural policy and commodity pricing rules are as much issues of parenting as car seat recalls.

Of all the ingredients in a pizza, the one that has been with us the longest is wheat flour. Bread first appeared in the human diet at about 8,000 BC, which makes wheat about as old as goats. What distinguishes wheat from other domesticated grains is an abundance of gluten. By trapping carbon dioxide bubbles released from live yeast, the protein gluten allows bread dough to double in volume by rising. The milled flour of no other grain can do this.

Gluten provides both farmers and bakers a language to describe the various varieties of wheat, but each profession brings a different vocabulary to the table. Farmers talk about hard wheat, which has high gluten content, and soft wheat, which has less. Kansas became a wheat producer in the mid-nineteenth century when Mennonites brought to its prairie a hard wheat variety from Crimea. In general, hard wheats grow in dry areas, soft wheats where it is humid. Farmers also talk about spring wheat and winter wheat. Planted in the fall, winter wheat overwinters in the field and is harvested the following spring. Spring wheat is sown in the spring and harvested in the fall. Durum is an exceptionally hard spring wheat.

Bakers, on the other hand, refer to bread flours and cake flours. Bread flour is milled from gluten-rich hard wheat. Cake flour is milled from soft wheat, which allows for crumbliness. All-purpose flour is a mixture of the two. Durum wheat is for pasta. (Try making a loaf of bread from durum flour, and you end up with something akin to a paving stone.)

Everything about wheat is big. Wheat flour is the single most consumed food in the United States. On average, it makes up 7 percent of the daily diet—twice that for young children. In 2009, the amber waves of U.S. wheat fields filled 59 million acres—exceeding the combined acreage of all the National Parks. The fields themselves also trend toward the gargantuan, and 20,000 acre farms are not unheard of. (My mother’s father raised six children on 160 acres.) That kind of bigness is made possible by pesticides—and, once achieved, guarantees that pesticides will continue to be used. With the right, very big machine, an acre of wheat can now be harvested and threshed in six minutes flat. Nevertheless, with crops located a hundred miles from the machine shed, moving equipment into far-flung fields costs money and takes time. Therefore, big wheat operations, by necessity, plant only wheat rather than many different crops in rotation. Vast tracts of land growing only one variety of one kind of crop allow pest populations to expand to equally vast proportions—at which point only chemical poisons can keep them in check.

There is no national pesticide registry in the United States. Farmers are not required—as are manufacturers—to report their chemical releases. So we don’t know exactly how many tons of which pesticides are used on these 59 million acres of U.S. wheat. However, the USDA does periodically survey farmers in various wheat-growing regions about their pesticide habits. The compiled results are the closest thing we have to a portrait of chemical usage.

If you are the family breadmaker—or pizza or pasta maker—I invite you to visit the National Agricultural Statistics Service Web site. Take a look at its chemical use spreadsheet for wheat, which runs many, many pages. In 2009, eighty different pesticides were used on winter wheat. On spring wheat, sixty-eight. On durum wheat, forty-seven.

One of the names appearing there is 2,4-D, an herbicide that has been linked with birth defects. In studies conducted in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, children who lived in counties that grew a lot of spring and durum wheat suffered significantly higher rates of birth defects than children who lived in counties where less wheat was grown. And within these wheat-growing counties, children who were conceived in the spring, during the time of planting and herbicide application, showed higher rates of malformation than children whose conceptions fell during other months of the calendar year.

Another of the names that appears on the wheat spreadsheet is the organophosphate insecticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked to cognitive deficits in children. Emerging evidence also links it to autism. All children are exposed to these chemicals in the food they eat. Those living in the grain belt face the additional burden of drinking herbicides in their water. And those living in communities where crops are produced also must contend with exposure to pesticide drift in the air, which sometimes dwarfs exposures via the diet and water routes.

Large farms are leaky farms. Like pesticides, synthetic fertilizers also drift away from the fields they are sprayed on, and their nitrogen invariably washes into creeks and streams. It eventually ends up in the ocean where it contributes to algal blooms and dead zones. And this is how our flour-buying choices affect the health of the fish at sea.

In 2009, nitrogen fertilizer was used on nearly all conventionally grown durum wheat, 94 percent of other spring wheat, and 83 percent of winter wheat. Using two different USDA databases, I crunched the numbers . . . total acres planted . . . percent of acres treated . . . average rate of application per acre. . .. And I arrived at the following statistic: 2,968,000,000 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer were used to grow America’s wheat in 2009. That’s about ten pounds for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Almost all of these nearly 3 billion pounds were created from the fossil fuel called natural gas. Which was drilled out of the ground somewhere—often in somebody’s backyard. (Whose backyard is a question we’ll take up in Chapter 10.)

Organic farms that produce wheat, by contrast, tend to be smaller, and they usually grow other crops as well. This simple combination of modest size plus diversity provides the farmer an entire armory of potential tricks with which to outwit pests. By rotating crops, organic wheat farmers create a constantly shifting vegetative landscape that keeps disease and pest populations from exploding out of control. Smaller fields also have shorter distances from perimeter to center. Thus, along the edges of their fields, organic farmers sometimes plant insectories—botanical beds that serve as habitats for predatory insects that are the natural enemies of wheat pests. For fertilizer, organic wheat farmers can use either cow manure or green manure—which is not really manure at all but a plowed-under cover crop like hairy vetch or rye. It tends to stay put.

• Cost of 3 cups conventional flour (1½ cups whole wheat; 1½ cups all-purpose): $0.60

• Cost of 3 cups organic flour from Farmer Ground Flour of Newfield, New York (1½ cups hard red spring wheat; 1½ cups all-purpose): $1.26

Olive oil is about 3,000 years younger than wheat. Most scholars locate the botanical birthplace of the olive tree in what is now the border region of Iraq and Iran, where archeological evidence suggests that olive oil has been manufactured since at least 5,000 BC. References to olives abound in the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And its branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit appear in paintings throughout the ages. It’s easy to see why. Olive trunks writhe from rocky ground and yet offer serene and restful silhouettes. Olive branches grow in full sun and yet their silvery leaves seem eternally bathed in moonlight.

Ripe olives are 15 to 40 percent oil. At least a dozen pounds of them are required to make a quart of virgin oil in a process of simple squeezing that has not really changed much over the years. But more is concentrated than just the juice of the fruit. When organophosphate insecticides are used to control the olive fruit’s nemesis, the olive fly, trace residues can remain on the olives. Because insecticides are fat-soluble, they often find their way into the oil within. When olives are pressed, the concentrations of these residues can increase in the finished product by a factor of three to seven. A 2005 study tested for and found a dozen different pesticide residues at trace levels in olive oil. Washing olives prior to pressing them can sometimes lower residues in the finished oil, but the wastewater from the mill is then contaminated with pesticides and poses an environmental threat.

For my original pizza study, I interviewed Paco Núñez de Prado, the Spanish kingpin of organic olive oil. For an hour, we shouted at each other over a bad phone connection. Olive grower is a profession that men in his family have held, he told me proudly, for seven generations. In 2003, he oversaw 100,000 olive trees on four different farms as well as an olive oil mill and bottling plant. And he did it all organically. To control olive flies, he used bait infused with sexual attractants. With the males trapped, the females, he supposed, died of loneliness. And because they are not contaminated with pesticides, he could mix together the leftover olive residue with pruned leaves and branches to make organic fertilizer that is recycled back into his orchards.

A few years later, a Spanish study found that this type of olive production is significantly more energy efficient than conventional production. That is to say, organic olive oil has both demonstrably lower pesticide residues as well as a smaller carbon footprint. Given that double benefit, you might imagine a pricing structure that rewards consumers for choosing the organic alternative. That is not the case.

• Cost of ¼ cup of conventional olive oil: $.52

• Cost of ¼ cup of bottled organic olive oil: $1.26 ($1.05 with Jeff’s discount)

• Cost of ¼ cup of organic olive oil purchased in bulk: $.98 ($.83 with Jeff’s discount)

The tomato is the only ingredient of pizza native to the Americas. When Cortez conquered Mexico City in 1519, he sent its seeds to Europe where it was initially grown for the beauty of its fruit but not widely eaten except by a few bold Spaniards and Italians. In contrast to the reverence bestowed upon the olive, tomato fruits were viewed with suspicion. The tomato was reintroduced to America in the 18th century.

Vulnerable to fourteen different fungal diseases, the tomato plant is the delicate Victorian heroine of the horticultural world. Blight, rot, wilt, and canker are all words that appear in guides for the commercial tomato grower. Tomatoes are vulnerable to an equally impressive array of insect pests, some of which inject disease-causing viruses or deposit secretions that attract mold.

The tomato also requires the assistance of insect pollinators for its creation, and that fact, too, makes it vulnerable. Bringing pollen to the tomato’s starry flowers is a task happily performed by bumblebees. A darkened tip around the flower’s stigma indicates fertilization. Commercial varieties can self-pollinate but will not do so if the air is too cool or too still. Thus, one can find in any good agricultural library, step-by-step, full-color manuals on the art of performing tomato sex. This involves handheld vibrators, which are applied to open flowers. As too much mechanical stimulation is counterproductive, a light touch is recommended.

Commercial field tomatoes come in two basic types, neither of which has much in common with the backyard garden tomato. The first kind are fresh-market tomatoes, which we closely examined in Chapter 3. Fresh-market tomatoes are mostly grown in Florida. They are picked green, harvested by hand, and sold on the open market. The second kind are processed tomatoes, which are those destined for sauce and paste. Those who produce them are usually under contract to a processor. In contrast to garden tomatoes that putter along all summer, processed tomatoes all set fruit and ripen at the same time. They are thus harvested by machine and picked ripe. Most come from California. And, because California is the sole state in the union with a comprehensive pesticide registry, it’s possible to investigate pesticide use in tomatoes for processing and find out quite a lot. In 2008, for example, 11,585,200 pounds of pesticides were used on field tomatoes in California, at an average application rate of 2.96 pounds per acre. More than half these 11.5 million pounds were sprayed on tomato vines in just one county—Fresno.

Now that I’ve become my own tomato cannery, I’ve become skilled at negotiating with farmers for bushels of organic field tomatoes. My technique is to walk up and down the stalls at the farmers’ market and let it be known, in a voice slightly louder than normal volume, that I’m thinking about canning. Suddenly, I have men interested in engaging me in conversation about the virtues of certain varieties, offering free samples, slipping me phone numbers, promising discounts.

For me, haggling about price is not the point. I try to strike deals over timing. Can you get me a bushel by Friday? No? How about a week from Friday? With kids too young to help with a project that involves lots of boiling water, I put up tomatoes at night when everyone is asleep. It’s a joyful task, but, unlike other after-hours activities—like, say, answering email or separating crayons from jigsaw puzzle pieces—it’s not one to take on when exhausted, so I always quit after processing a single bushel. Converting fifty-three pounds of muddy field tomatoes into eighteen sealed and sterilized glass jars full of red, tomato-y hearts—all cheerfully cooling on my kitchen table—takes four hours. Then, a week or so later, I’ll put another bushel behind glass. And so on. But baskets of tomatoes won’t inertly wait in the hall closet until I am ready to tackle them, and they can’t be safely canned once soft or bruised. The annual trick is to find farmers with tomatoes when I have time to can them . . . and find the time to can when the farmers have tomatoes.

• Cost of one small jar of conventional tomato paste plus two fresh tomatoes: $3.70

• Cost of one small jar of organic tomato paste plus fresh organic tomatoes: $5.70 (or $4.70 with Jeff’s discount)

• Cost of one quart of home-canned organic tomatoes standing in for above: $2.14

Garlic is a lily with origins in Asia. Unlike the tomato, garlic has no sex life. No flowers. No bees. No fruits. No seeds. Domesticated garlic reproduces solely by cloning itself. Thus, garlic growers plant whole garlic cloves, which then sprout leaves and roots and bud off more cloves, each of which results, nine months later, in an underground bulb of twelve to fifteen cloves that is about the size and shape of a doorknob. This is not, admittedly, a lot of bang for the buck. Garlic farmers who save their own planting stock must hold back between 10 and 12 percent of their harvest. The miserly asexuality of garlic is one reason for its high price.

Gluttony, not lust, characterizes garlic. Insisting on lots of nutrients and water, garlic is what farmers call a heavy feeder. Such crops pose real problems for conventional growers because the soluble nitrogen the plants require can easily be swept away in the irrigation water. Garlic also dislikes growing alongside weeds and is prone to a number of fungal diseases. Conventional farmers address these problems with a battery of herbicides and fungicides whose trade names—Stomp, Prowl, Repulse, Squadron, Rout, Sabre, Torch—sound like designations for Special Operations forces. One of them is a suspected developmental toxicant. At least two can contaminate groundwater. Two are suspected carcinogens. Three are suspected endocrine disruptors. One is a brain poison. And one is methyl bromide.

These are the chemicals we spray into our environment in order to bring to market a food that many people buy for its health benefits. Which are real. Garlic has been shown to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, stimulate the human immune system, and slow tumor growth. Frequent garlic consumption lowers the risk for colon cancer and may well do the same for breast cancer.

Organic garlic growers also rely on a battery of weapons to defend their prized crop, but they go by other names: fire, flowers, mulch, and crop rotation. Some growers pull flame weeders behind their tractors to get a jump on the weeds. Some growers plant sweet alyssum and cilantro in their garlic fields to combat insect pests. (The flowers of both species support populations of serphid flies, which, in turn, eat aphid larvae.) To protect her many heirloom varieties from weeds, Margaret, Curator of Garlic, swears by thick slabs of oat straw mulch. Out at the CSA farm, garlic is protected by the sheer force of agricultural diversity, which allows for an incredible thirty-year crop rotation. Garlic is never planted in the same plot two years in a row, and, in fact, may not see the same patch of ground again for three decades. Eternal relocation shakes off pestilence. And mulch takes care of the weeds.

According to historian Joan Thirsk, cheese-making received a big boost from the Black Plague. During two remarkable years, 1348 and 1349, one third of the population of Europe died, and demand for food plummeted. As labor for cultivation became scarce, many farmers let their land go fallow, and cows grazed where crops had once been sown. Consequently, milk production increased, and techniques for cheese-making improved. An unexpected benefit emerged: Farm fields that had spent some time as meadows became more fertile. By the 16th century, there was no longer any reason to rotate fields into cow pastures, but peasant farmers lobbied the nobility for the right to do it, arguing that this practice enabled the land to “regain heart.” In this way, cheese-making became enshrined in western agriculture.

During two remarkable years, 2008 and 2009, the U.S. economy collapsed and milk prices plummeted. As the wholesale price for 100 pounds of milk fell from $18 to $11—far below the cost of production—many farmers folded, and the rest barely hung on. Almost no U.S. dairy farmer made money in 2009. Organic milk prices declined less steeply, but the resulting price gap that opened between conventional and organic dairy products became too great for many shoppers to leap. Organic sales contracted.

No one was hurt worse by the economic downturn than dairy farmers who were in the process of transitioning from conventional to organic farming. The three-year transition period required to become certifiably organic is the eye of the needle for any farmer. It requires taking on the higher costs of organic practices without the ability to command premium organic prices. For dairy farmers, it means giving up antibiotics to prevent illness in the herd and forgoing artificial hormones to increase milk production and control reproductive cycling—and finding reliable veterinary care that doesn’t involve chemical and hormonal solutions. It means finding a source of organic feed and access to pasture. To accomplish this, according to a recent analysis in Review of Agricultural Economics, most organic dairy farmers “utilize primarily unpaid operator and family labor” and a seven-day workweek.

Once finally certified, none of the organic dairy farmers I have met regretted the decision. Their cows live longer, are sick less often, and seem less stressed. And, as more than one organic farmer told me, the same improvements befall the cows’ human caretakers. Happy cows make happy farmers. Less time is spent ministering to sick animals. Income goes up. Stress goes down. A sense of wellbeing fills both farmhouse and barnyard.

But when the price of conventional milk bottomed out, farmers just getting into organic production—because mothers like me had created what looked like solid demand—were wiped out. Most of them were young and just starting up. Many had small children of their own. All should have had years of chemical-free farming ahead of them. But, in a star-crossed moment, the economic collapse hit at a time when they were bearing all the start-up costs of organic farming and receiving none of its benefits. And nothing in the system reached out to catch them as they fell. Nobody bailed them out. Nobody pulled them through. General Motors and various Wall Street investment banks had softer landings than the transitioning organic dairy farmers of 2009.

As a parent who has continued to purchase organic milk throughout the economic crisis, even as my own income also took a hit, I would appreciate some institutional support for the farmers who build the bones of my children. Moms pushing grocery carts trying to decide between the $3 gallon of conventional milk and the $6 organic gallon should not be the sole safety net for the people who keep America’s cows on pasture and off hormones.

Much of the economic vulnerability of dairy farmers—conventional or organic—arises from the fact that they have no say in the price of milk. They are what’s known in the agricultural world as price-takers. But in a back-to-Middle-Ages trend, some entrepreneurial dairy farmers have responded to the milk crisis by . . . making cheese. And so became price-makers. An unexpected benefit: There are now a dozen artisanal cheese makers near Ithaca, New York. While the number of dairy farms in New York State keeps falling—further eroding the rural tax base and making upstate dairy communities susceptible to the schemes of landmen in the employ of the oil and gas industry (coming up in Chapter 10)—my home community is now on the New York Finger Lakes Cheese Trail.

• Cost of 1 cup (grated) conventional mozzarella: $1.28.

• Cost of 1 cup (grated) organic mozzarella bought at the food co-op: $1.53

• Cost of 1 cup (grated) Red Meck cheese made and bought at Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese, located nine miles from my house: $3.68

• Cost of 1 cup (crumbled) goat milk cheese made at the Lively Run Goat Dairy, located four miles from my house and bought at the farmers’ market located three blocks from my house: $4.50

For the defenders of industrial, chemically intensive agriculture, it’s the right question, and the answer is no. Political scientist Robert Paarlberg, for example, argues that scaling up organic agriculture until it is close to 100 percent of total acreage would have disastrous consequences for at least two reasons. First, because organic crops have lower yields, the world’s forests would be cut down and conscripted into agricultural service in order to meet everyone’s food needs. Second, by disallowing petrochemical fertilizers, universal organic farming would compel a population boom of cattle to provide all the needed manure. And because organic cows require pastures to deposit their manure in, even more forests would disappear to support all the four-legged fertilizer-makers. Paarlberg reminds us that food crises are common across the continent of Africa where chemical fertilizer is scarce and encourages us to stop romanticizing preindustrial food systems. (More on his claims in just a minute.)

Likewise, in a 2010 analysis, a research team at Stanford demonstrates that the trend toward increased use of pesticides, fertilizers, and high-yielding strains of crops has, since 1961, helped food production keep pace with rising population growth. Along the way, say the authors, chemically intensive agriculture has also helped to tamp down greenhouse gas emissions. Were the world’s growing population fed instead by extensification—ongoing conversions of native landscapes to farm fields—the carbon footprint of farming would be far higher.

It’s the wrong question because world hunger is created not by food shortages but by failure to get food to the people who need it. And it’s the wrong question because, however spectacular its past successes, chemically intensive agriculture is dependent on nonrenewable petrochemicals. Like a Hollywood star who requires an entourage of bodyguards, stylists, and personal trainers, intensive agriculture can’t perform in the absence of fossil fuel-derived fertilizers, fungicides, and weed killers. It’s not sustainable. As it is now, 5 percent of global natural gas reserves is turned into nitrogen fertilizer. (All by itself, the United States consumes 22 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer a year.) Do we really want the whole world’s agricultural system to ride a tandem bicycle with the oil and gas industry?

And even if the fossil fuel party could somehow flow on forever, high-yielding varieties may be unable to keep the high going. Already there are signs of diminishing returns, argues author and agricultural analyst Anna Lappé. These take the form of pesticide-resistant bugs, herbicide-resistant weeds, antibiotic-resistant pathogens, declining soil fertility, and the need for ever more petrochemical inputs to keep the whole enterprise pedaling forward.

Author and family farm advocate Terra Brockman offers another kind of critique: High yields of chemically produced corn and soybeans are not feeding the world. They are not even feeding the farmer who grows them. Central Illinois, for example, is carpeted in chemical-intensive, high-yielding corn and soybeans. But many rural towns in central Illinois—where soybeans grow right up to the back door and cornfields bristle near the football field—are food deserts. With taxpayer-subsidized crops in the field destined for feedlots, ethanol plants, processing plants, and export markets, the peculiar truth is that, too often, there is no food in farm country. Even in agricultural regions with spectacularly high yields, food insecurity abounds.

A 2010 health ranking study undertaken by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showed that some of the least healthy counties in the United States are located in bumper crop regions. And yet, for many of these counties, the list of their underlying problems includes the phrase “lacks access to healthy, affordable foods.”

In Illinois, Brockman points out, only one rural county received a high health ranking. That was little Woodford—the third healthiest county in the state. On the map, this small agricultural county stands out as an island of health in an otherwise not-so-healthy zone. Because of an accident of geology—the last retreating glacier dumped a pile of rocks there—Woodford does not contribute much to the impressive tonnage of corn and soy harvested from the state. Its rolly terrain and steep ravines make it unfit for the giant machines of industrial farming. Instead, it’s gone its own agricultural way. Woodford County is home to a cluster of organic farms that produce, with no chemical inputs, fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, and grain—healthy food for people’s tables at reasonable prices through farm stands and CSA subscriptions. Undoubtedly, other factors also contribute to the unusual healthfulness of Woodford’s 35,000 residents—it has a county hospital and a tightly knit Apostolic Christian community—but the number of bushels of soybeans per acre isn’t one of them.

Can organic agriculture feed the world? Beside the point or not, the answer is yes, say critics of industrial agriculture, as well as peer-reviewed, long-term studies. First, they refute Paarlberg’s assertion that, under an organic regime, the world would have to choose between insufficient quantities of fertilizer and ripping down rainforests for manure-making cows. Organic farming does not require manure, and most organic farmers do not use it. Compost also works. And many organic farmers enrich their soil solely through rotating crops and planting legumes. (They’re called green manure for a reason.)

It’s worth pausing a moment to think about this fact: Legumes are plants that can pull naked nitrogen out of the air—which is totally unusable by living organisms—and turn it into ammonia, which is highly useable. It does so by studding the stubbornly unreactive nitrogen molecules with hydrogen atoms. Voilà: ammonia. That’s the hard part. From ammonia, it’s but two easy chemical steps to nitrate, the essential material for plant growth.

Legumes can perform this miracle because their root nodules serve as housing for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The bacteria, with their special enzymes, actually do all the labor of chemical synthesis. When the legume dies—or the farmer plows it under—its carefully hoarded nitrogen is released into the soil and can be used by other crops. Legumes and their microbial workforce accomplish all this ammonia manufacturing while sequestering carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. (Cue song of thanksgiving to the humble clover.)

Carried out in massive chemical facilities under conditions of high heat and intense pressure, the so-called Haber process can also accomplish this feat—synthesizing ammonia for use as fertilizer—but consumes natural gas reserves to get the same result. The gas donates its hydrogen atoms; the nitrogen comes from the atmosphere. Voilà: ammonia. A German chemist, Fritz Haber, invented this method in 1913. It’s still what we use to make synthetic fertilizer.

In a 2007 study, a team of biologists at the University of Michigan concluded that legumaceous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace all the fossil fuel–derived fertilizer now in use. They thus dispute the idea that organic agriculture is constrained by lack of nitrogen.

More centrally, this same research team disputes the evidence that organic farming suffers from lower yields. In a review of 293 studies that compared yields of organic and conventional farms in both developed and developing nations, researchers found parity. In the United States, yields on organic farms were about 92 percent of the yields produced by conventional agriculture, whereas in developing countries, yields were actually higher on organic farms. The authors then used data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to ask the question: What would happen if all farming became organic? They concluded from their analysis that organic methods could produce enough calories to sustain the current population of the world without resorting to extensification.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, results of a twelve-year comparative study also found roughly equivalent yields in organic and conventional systems. Organic hay allowed cows to make just as much milk. Organic corn, soybeans, and winter wheat also performed equally well—except during years with wet springs when weeds took over. Under these conditions, the organic harvests were fully one-third less than conventional. From this, the authors concluded not that conventional agriculture was therefore superior but that research and development should focus on improving weed control for organic systems.

These results confirm the observations of many farmers who have made the switch from conventional to organic practices: Organic grain fields are inherently more resilient and outperform conventional fields, especially during conditions of drought and unpredictable weather. Organic soils hold more moisture, and crop rotations provide a diversified portfolio or crops with different ripening times. Bets are hedged; economic eggs are carried in many baskets.

Why this debate remains unsettled has much to do with the affiliations of those in the debating arena—Robert Paarlberg is an advisor to Monsanto—but it has also to do with the complex nature of ecology itself. A Consumer Reports–style rating of organic and conventional fields is of limited use. In the real world, organic farmers rarely plant just one crop and may, in fact, rely on the interactions between crops to control pests and boost yields. So you don’t learn much by comparing the performance of two identical monocultures, one sprayed with chemicals and one not. Second, the highest yielding varieties in conventional systems are not always the highest yielding varieties in organic systems. (This is especially true for wheat.) So you don’t learn much by planting identical seed in each of two fields—one conventional, one organic—and comparing yields under two different methods of pest control.

Also, an unpoisoned field is a dynamic field. Over the years, the ecosystem of an organic field diversifies—species richness increases, along with the relative abundance of each species. The soil itself evolves. Typically, an organic field that began as a conventional field shows a dip in yield during the first few years after its conversion and then rebounds as its ecosystem rebuilds. Thus, the results of a comparative study will change as the seasons go by and as living creatures take over from petrochemicals the job of dispatching pests and pulling nitrogen out of thin air.

A paper published in July 2010 in the prestigious journal Nature elegantly documents, in the potato fields of Washington State, just how murderously effective natural systems can be in the targeted assassination of pests. Compared to fields treated to the usual barrage of chemical pesticides, organic fields had fewer problems with potato beetles and produced bigger potato plants if they were managed organically. They also supported a greater diversity of species in its potato-y food web. And the relative abundance among the members of that food web was more evenly distributed. Indeed, the demographics in the organic fields revealed truly integrated communities. Nobody sat in the back of the ecological bus. By comparison, the food webs in the conventional fields looked like gerrymandered voting districts with a few common species dominating and minority groups achieving only token representation.

Through a series of experiments, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the key to bigger plants and superior pest control was precisely this even-handed abundance of species. Within an organic system, the potato beetle—the bane of potato growers big and small—apparently finds itself surrounded by enemies at every turn. While dining on the foliage of the potato leaves, it is soon beset by ladybird beetles and damsel bugs. And should it manage to shake off these girly predators, it sooner or later comes face-to-face with the common black ground beetle. (That’s the shiny, jet-black scuttle-y insect with a pair of pliers for a face that’s seen crossing sidewalks on summer evenings.) There are quite a lot of ground beetles in organic potato fields, as it turns out, patrolling around like U.N. peacekeeping forces.

Neither does the subterranean world of an organic potato field provide safe haven for pests. While seeking a private underground spot for pupating, the potato beetle is easily parasitized by soil-dwelling roundworms and fungi, including the particularly lethal Beauveria. A potato beetle infected by Beauveria fungus is a sight to behold. It resembles a small Volkswagen sprayed with artificial Christmas tree flocking.

Meanwhile, out in the chemically managed fields, everybody gets gassed—the beetle-y good guys along with the targeted pest. The structure of the food web skews toward a few dominant species, and the natural enemies of the potato beetle become rare. The potato plants are thereby vulnerable to catastrophic pest outbreaks . . . which only the application of more pesticides will knock back.

Ecosystems services is the name given to the helpful activities of other species that accrue economic value to us. They represent acts of unpaid labor. The bee that pollinates our tomato flowers. The earthworm that tills our soil. The bird that eats the weed seeds before they sprout. The Beauveria fungus that foams up the potato beetle.

In this, ecosystem services are the flip side of externalized costs. And yes, someone with a Ph.D. has attempted to quantify their global economic value: about $33 trillion a year with a range of $16 to 54 trillion. (At the time this estimate was calculated—1997—$33 trillion was twice the global gross domestic product.) In other words, other species on the planet are providing major inputs to the global economy. It is worth thinking hard about what this means. If we had to create machines and pay people to carry out the services that other species provide us for free, the total cost would exceed twice the world’s GDP. Needless to say, replacing nature with machines and labor would have a devastating impact on us and the planet. And yet, as one recent review put it:

[B]ecause most of these services are not traded in economic markets, they carry no price tags. There is no exchange value in spite of their high use value that could alert society to changes in their supply or deterioration of underlying ecological systems that generate them.

Admittedly, attaching values to pollination, nitrogen fixation, and soil improvement is an odd exercise. (Soil turnover by earthworms, by the way, priced out at $25 billion/year.) In another time or context, ecosystem services might just be described as blessings–which we would then be called upon to praise with prayer rather than monetize. Nevertheless, the concept of ecosystem services offers a way of compelling us to pay attention (as does prayer) to the myriad ways in which the natural world supports human existence. It also explains why, for example, yields in organic fields gradually increase over time.

In essence, organic agriculture is a form of farming that replaces synthetic chemicals with ecosystem services. At the same time, by eliminating chemicals—many of which are toxic to the organisms providing those very same services—organic farmers help shore up ecosystem services for future generations. And herein lies a lucky paradox: by recruiting more ecosystem services and relying more heavily upon them, organic agriculture sets the stage for maintaining them. It sows the seeds of its own preservation.

Here in the moist Northeast, the wheat is mostly soft. It’s low in gluten and not valued for baking. With few varieties suited to these growing conditions and no access to markets, wheat production has waned. But the Northeast Organic Wheat Project, a consortium of bakers and farmers, seeks to change all that. In an attempt to bring wheat back into farmers’ rotations, it’s retrieving seeds from heritage strains on the brink of extinction—including from seedbanks—and field-testing them. The local Farmer Ground Flour I used in my most recent pizza test is part of this ongoing project. While researching their big experiment in preparation for conducting my little one, I ran across an observation about the particular flour in my heritage pizza dough that made me pause: The taste will change as the soil evolves.

So, flour was more than just an inert matrix whose job it was to trap air bubbles. It was living thing. Of course, I knew that already, just as I knew that the distinctive flavor of certain wine grapes comes from, say, chalky soil. Yet, the idea that soil imparts the taste of bread was a new thought for me. Something to ponder while kneading. The terroir of flour.

ELLIS HOLLOW PIZZA

Mix 1 cup warm water, a tablespoon sugar, a tablespoon dry yeast, and a tablespoon of flour in a large bowl. Let sit for ten minutes. When bubbles appear, add 3 cups flour (half whole wheat; half all-purpose), ¼ cup olive oil, and a teaspoon of salt. Mix. When the dough becomes stiff, turn it out onto a floured surface. Knead until shiny and smooth. Place back in the bowl. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk—about an hour. Meanwhile, grate 1 cup of cheese, dice 3 cloves of garlic, chop 2 tomatoes, grease a cookie sheet, and preheat the oven to 475°. Ask a small child to punch the dough down. Roll it out and stretch it to fit in the cookie sheet. (Freeze any extra dough.) Brush with tomato paste. Layer on chopped tomatoes. Sprinkle with garlic and cheese. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, until cheese bubbles and begins to brown. Serve with green and orange vegetables. Announce that the pizza is too hot to cut, so we might as well eat our vegetables first.