Inorganic Food History

Organic fertilizers, such as animal waste, and crop-rotation systems, such as growing beans in alternate years with corn, were known and used in Colonial America, but in the land-rich new nation, many farmers didn’t worry about depleting their farmland—they simply moved elsewhere, usually farther west. In an ever-expanding nation with plenty of unoccupied land, this system worked well.² But when fertile farmland was no longer there just for the taking, farmers had to make their acreage produce year after year. They turned to fertilizers—natural and manufactured—for productivity gains on their farms.

The German scientist Justus von Liebig argued for replacing organic manure with synthetic fertilizers. Liebig concluded that only a few components in the manure provided fertility. Add nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil, and plants would flourish, even in depleted soil.³ Despite Liebig’s pronouncement, in 1840, synthetic fertilizers were little used in America until after World War I.

From the chemists’ point of view, the difficulty in making synthetic fertilizer was how to fix nitrogen, which required nitrogen atoms to be split and then combined with oxygen atoms. A German chemist, Fritz Haber, figured out, before World War I, how to do this, but it was Carl Bosch who realized how to commercialize Haber’s discovery. Synthetic fertilizer made according to the Haber-Bosch formula was sold in the United States prior to World War II, but its use did not become almost universal until after the war.⁴

At the same time that American farmers began feeding their crops synthetic fertilizers, they also started to spray their fields with immense amounts of chemical pesticides and herbicides. Naturally occurring poisons, such as nicotine sulfate (extracted from tobacco leaves), had been used as insecticides since colonial times, and they remained in use well into the twentieth century. A few chemical pesticides had been manufactured in the early twentieth century, but the event that changed American agriculture for decades to come was the discovery, by Paul Müller, a Swiss chemist, that DDT, a new synthetic contact insecticide, was devastatingly effective. Shortly after World War II, chemical manufacturers began producing large amounts of DDT and other synthetic pesticides and herbicides, and in the following decades, their use became common among American vegetable and fruit gardeners and farmers.

Synthetic fertilizers became the standard after World War II, when large factories that had produced munitions shifted to fertilizer production. This infusion of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, along with the application of antibiotics and hormones, prevented disease and insect damage in plants and maximized yield in crops and animals raised for meat, milk, or eggs. Farm mechanization and the use of irrigation also became widespread, and large farms began to specialize, growing a single crop or raising one type of animal, thus abandoning the tradition of animal and plant diversity that had characterized the American farm for generations. Each of these changes required major financial investments on the part of farmers, but once these costly shifts had been made on large farms, food production costs dropped, and, in turn, the market value of crops and herds declined. Many small farmers, unable to compete with the large producers, sold out to big corporate operations.

During the postwar years, commercial food processors began using a dizzying array of additives and stabilizers, which lengthened product shelf life and reduced losses from spoilage. Some additives, such as vitamins and minerals, offered health benefits to consumers; too often, though, the substitution of a synthetic (such as vanillin for pure vanilla) simply saved the processor money. During the decade from 1949 to 1959, 400 new additives were incorporated into processed food products. Some additives were emulsifiers, colorings, preservatives, or flavoring agents; others prevented the fat in food from turning rancid.⁵

Rodale and the Organic Farming Movement

Even before the postwar expansion in the use of pesticides, herbicides, petrochemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones, preservatives, and additives, an entrepreneur named Jerome I. Rodale was championing its opposite—organic gardening. One of eight children of an immigrant grocer on New York’s Lower East Side, Rodale had read about and followed the health regimen espoused by physical culture promoter Bernarr Macfadden. Rodale had set up, in 1923, an electrical equipment business with his brother,⁶ and during the Depression, they moved from New York to Emmaus, Pennsylvania. As the business prospered, the Rodales branched out into publishing.

In 1940, Rodale read a compelling book, An Agricultural Testament. Its author, Sir Albert Howard, a British agronomist who had worked in India, extolled organic farming and discouraged the use of chemical fertilizers. Rodale wrote to Howard, and the two corresponded regularly. Impressed with Howard’s views, Rodale bought a farm and promptly put into practice Howard’s ideas of composting as well as his own nutrition-related beliefs. Rodale declared his efforts at organic farming a success, and he set about encouraging others to follow in his footsteps. In May 1942, he started a magazine, Organic Gardening, and for a time, Howard, who lived in England, served as its associate editor. The magazine stressed composting, soil building, and biological control of pests as the fundamentals of organic agriculture. Rodale became so upset about the use of synthetic fertilizers and insecticides, especially the recently introduced DDT, that he wrote a book, Pay Dirt, strongly condemning their use. Howard fully supported Rodale’s views and wrote the book’s introduction.⁷ Neither Howard nor Rodale, however, convinced many at the time of the correctness of their views.

Organic Gardening proved, for its first sixteen years, to be a money loser; however, other Rodale publications, such as Prevention, helped them pay their bills until the concept of organic gardening caught on, in the 1960s. Until then, the readership of Organic Gardening and Farming had consisted mostly of small-town and suburban backyard gardeners. Meanwhile, the agricultural establishment dismissed Rodale as a quack, a crank, a gadfly, and a manure-pile worshipper.⁸

Organic farming, according to Rodale, was best practiced on a small scale, and it thus challenged the idea of corporate agriculture and the American food distribution system, which was growing increasingly centralized and dependent on long-distance transportation. Organically grown foods were often more perishable, so they could be distributed only locally. Ideally, farmers and customers would deal directly with each other in farmers’ markets, and the middlemen—shippers, brokers, wholesalers, supermarket owners—would be eliminated.

Rodale retired in 1960 and died eleven years later, but he left intact a publishing empire that continued to flourish. Rodale’s passionate belief in organic gardening might well have remained a fringe view had it not been for a set of unusual circumstances. The potential dangers of additives and pesticides became apparent—and were made known to the public at large—during the 1960s. Writer William F. Longgood, in The Poisons in Your Food, questioned the safety of additives in processed food that had invaded the daily diet of Americans. Two years later, Rachel Carson, a biologist and nature writer, exposed the evils of DDT, first in a series of articles and then in her book Silent Spring. Although Rodale had condemned DDT beginning in 1944 and Rodale and Carson corresponded from time to time, there is no evidence that his views influenced hers.⁹

Organic gardening complemented other antiestablishment activities, including opposition to the Vietnam War, the promotion of civil rights, the rise of the women’s movement, the hippie subculture, and New Age spirituality. These coalesced into the so-called counterculture. Besides opposing other mainstays of the establishment, countercultural advocates revolted against the mainstream American food industry, with its factory farms, concentrated animal-feeding operations, chemical-laced canned goods, and corporate lobbying.

Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming offered an alternative: a food system free from the domination of corporate agribusiness. At first, those adopting his organic methods were small communal operations based on a utopian agricultural model of a simpler, more “natural” lifestyle. For city dwellers, it was sometimes possible to establish organic gardens on vacant city lots, in parks, and at botanic gardens—as long as the soil had not already been poisoned with the toxins of urban life. Subscriptions to Organic Gardening leaped tenfold, from 60,000, in 1958, to more than 600,000, in 1970.¹⁰

To make organic foods available to a wider audience, some advocates established food co-ops, self-run by members who each contributed a certain amount of time to the project. Initially, these co-ops were no-frills sources of chemical-free staples, such as brown rice, whole-grain breads, herbal teas, nuts, seeds, beans, dried fruits, honey, bean sprouts, and soy products. As they became more commercial, the co-ops began offering natural cheeses, yogurt, organically grown fruits and vegetables, pure juices, granolas, oils, and vitamin and mineral supplements. By the 1970s, there were an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 food co-ops in the United States.¹¹

By the late 1960s, vegetarianism had become ingrained in the counterculture as a health-promoting measure and as a means of fighting hunger in America and around the world. The popularity of this view can be attributed, in part, to dietitianturned-social-activist Frances Moore Lappé. Discouraged by an unrewarding career in social work, Lappé turned, in 1969, to the field of ecology. In her studies, she read about the immense quantity of farmland devoted to growing feed grains for livestock, learning that 21.4 pounds of feed-grain protein was required to produce 1 pound of beef protein. She also encountered the theory of protein complementarity—that specific combinations of legumes, seeds, grains, and dairy products in the daily diet could easily supply a person’s protein requirements without resorting to ecologically wasteful meat. Lappé’s groundbreaking book, Diet for a Small Planet, sold over 3 million copies. The book explained that, by feeding vegetable protein to animals rather than directly to humans, Americans were wasting scarce protein resources at a time when much of the world was going hungry or suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies. This inefficient process required, she argued, disproportionate amounts of land and water as well as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Lappé pointed out that, if Americans ate their protein directly in the form of plant products, these wasted agricultural resources would be available to produce food for the hungry. Lappé recommended “getting off the top of the food chain” as a way of transforming consciousness, reintegrating mind and body, and embracing social responsibility.¹²

By the mid-1970s, the countercultural food movement had reached the wider population. Food companies responded by ridiculing food reformers, calling them lunatics, faddists, quacks, or health nuts while lining their own views with such reassuring words as “knowledgeable,” “scientific,” “constructive,” “generally recognized,” “responsible,” and “the best scientific judgment attainable.” Many mainstream Americans had nonetheless become concerned about the issues raised by the counterculture. In response to market pressures, food companies slowly began to alter their labeling and advertising slogans, which soon abounded with such claims as “additive-free” and “all natural.” Eventually, even the large food companies began decreasing or eliminating the additives in many of their products.

The American public became increasingly confused by the new jargon and mixed messages coming from the food industry, medical establishment, government, and self-appointed nutrition experts. Wooed by spokesmen for the food manufacturers and warned by advocates of health foods, repeatedly alarmed by gloomy stories of a chemical-laden food supply only to be reassured by industry-hired academicians, the public was driven into a fog of uncertainty about food and food choices.

Organic Effects

The countercultural food movement spurred interest in food and nutrition. More and more Americans grew distrustful of food companies and the Food and Drug Administration, which many believed was controlled by the food industry. There arose a clear need for independent research and the dissemination of easily understood, accurate public information about food. This concern led to the founding, in 1971, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), in Washington, D.C. Michael Jacobson, one of its founders, had a doctorate in microbiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he had long been researching food additives and the nutritional composition of processed foods. By 1977, the CSPI was focusing almost exclusively on food issues, publishing eye-opening nutritional analyses and critiques of fast foods and convenience foods. Jacobson’s What Are We Feeding Our Kids? and Marketing Madness helped raise public awareness of food and nutrition. The CSPI also established, and continues to publish, Nutrition Action Healthletter, the largest-circulation newsletter reporting on nutrition, diet, and related health issues.

Many enterprises founded in the 1960s and based on counterculture ideals have survived and thrived. Erewhon (named after Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel about an imaginary country where illness is a punishable offense) was founded as a co-op in 1966 to supply food to Boston-area followers of macrobiotic gurus Michio and Aveline Kushi. It later opened retail shops in the Boston area, and then on the West Coast. Celestial Seasonings, begun in 1969 in Boulder, Colorado, offered additive-free herbal teas made from organically grown or wild plants. Erewhon, after acquiring the venerable cereal company U.S. Mills, in 1986, has become one of the largest retailers, manufacturers, and distributors of natural foods in the United States. Celestial Seasonings, sold to Kraft in 1984, became independent again in 1988 and is now the country’s largest purveyor of herbal teas.

Some of America’s most famous restaurants also emerged from the counterculture food movement. As a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, Alice Waters had been involved in the Free Speech Movement. In 1971, she opened the groundbreaking restaurant Chez Panisse, an outgrowth of the home-cooked meals she had been preparing for free-speech activists. Waters stressed the use of fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. Moosewood Restaurant, in Ithaca, New York, founded by Mollie Katzen and other co-op members in 1973, started out as a communal operation, with all decisions made by the entire staff. Improvised daily, the all-vegetarian menu featured a variety of ethnic dishes and plenty of whole grains—a Lappé-inspired example of how to live well without wasting the earth’s protein resources. Both Waters and Katzen wrote cookbooks that have become modern classics: Waters’s initial effort was The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, while Katzen’s was The Moosewood Cookbook. Both women also wrote children’s cookbooks (Fanny at Chez Panisse, by Waters, and, from Katzen, Pretend Soup, Salad People, and Honest Pretzels). The efforts by Alice Waters, Mollie Katzen, and many others of their generation to change the way Americans eat led to a revolution in American cookery that stresses fresh ingredients and locally grown food.

The counterculture food movement also effected a renaissance in vegetarianism in the United States. The North American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1974, and several vegetarian and vegan magazines, such as Vegetarian Times and VegNews Magazine, now boast large subscriber bases. Lappé continues her work through the Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy, in San Francisco, and she and her daughter, Anna Lappé, have published a follow-up book, Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet.¹³ In 2006, there were an estimated 7 million vegetarians in the United States, and even fast-food outlets have added vegetarian options to their menus.

Another impact of the counterculture food movement was a burgeoning interest in organic gardening. In concert with this interest, which has grown further in the past few decades, there has arisen a movement to preserve the farm by connecting consumers in cities with small farmers in surrounding areas. One such effort led to the growth of urban farmers’ markets, where local growers truck in their produce and sell it directly to customers, thus eliminating the middlemen and establishing a direct connection between city dwellers and farmers. A remarkably successful example has been New York City’s Greenmarket, started, in 1976, by Barry Benepe. Today there are twenty Greenmarket sites in the city, and Benepe’s efforts have served as a model for hundreds of other urban farmers’ markets around the nation.

Another attempt to connect farmers to consumers is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Begun in Japan in the 1960s, CSA programs first appeared in the United States in the mid-1980s. In a CSA, farmers and community members work together as partners to create a local food system in which the farmers produce vegetables, fruits, meats, and related products and sell them directly to community members, who, at the start of the growing season, must commit to purchasing produce at a specific price. By doing so, the consumers share the risks of production with the farmers. Today, there are, according to the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, more than 600 CSAs in America.

The 1990 Farm Bill passed by the U.S. Congress contained the Organic Foods Production Act, which set national standards for how organic food must be produced, handled, and labeled. Organic foods could not, for instance, include synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. The bill also established the National Organic Standards Board, which issues a list of prohibited substances, such as synthetic fertilizers and antibiotics, that cannot be used in organic foods. After twelve years of work by the National Organic Standards Board, the National Organic Program (NOP) took effect, in October 2002; it is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The NOP covers in detail all aspects of organic food production, processing, delivery, and retail sale. Under the NOP, farmers and food processors wishing to use the word “organic” in reference to their businesses and products must be certified organic by the USDA. Producers with annual sales not exceeding $5,000 are exempt from the rule and do not require certification. However, they must still follow NOP standards, keep proper records, and submit to a production audit if requested, but they cannot use the term “certified organic.”

Much interest in organic food has sprung from health-food stores. By 1970, more than 300 health-food stores and restaurants had opened in Southern California alone.¹⁴ This was just the beginning. Thousands more appeared in other communities across America. In 1978, college dropout John Mackey and his girlfriend, Renee Lawson, opened a health-food store with the tongue-in-cheek name Safer Way, in Austin, Texas. Two years later, Mackey merged his store with another retailer’s to create Whole Foods. Then a small operation with a staff of just nineteen, the store featured organic and other quality foods. By 1984, Whole Foods had become so successful that it began opening additional stores and acquiring other grocery chains. It now has almost 200 natural-food supermarkets around the nation. It is currently the preeminent distributor of organic food in America—although other grocery stores are expanding their organic offerings and may surpass Whole Foods in the future.¹⁵

As conceived by Jerome I. Rodale and those who followed in his footsteps, the ideal system of food production centers on small farmers growing and selling their own fruits and vegetables directly to consumers. During the past decade, however, large factory farms have taken up organic foods, and nationwide big box discount chains, such as Wal-Mart, have begun selling it. The rise of “big organic” was not what Rodale expected. Yet, his ideas have shaped what some Americans eat today—and what more Americans will likely eat in the future. Although less than 3 percent of the food and beverages Americans buy today is organic, this is expected to grow in the coming decade.¹⁶

Postscript

Jerome I. Rodale and Sir Albert Howard, often considered the father of modern organic agriculture, continued their correspondence until Howard’s death in 1947.¹⁷ In 1971, Rodale was invited as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. While filming the interview, Rodale boasted to Cavett that, thanks to the food he ate and the life he led, he was so healthy that he “expected to live on and on.” He had “no aches or pains” and he was “full of energy.” Minutes later he died of a heart attack.¹⁸

Despite the highly publicized circumstances of his death, Rodale’s work has continued its impact. In addition to Organic Gardening and Prevention, Rodale Press publishes popular magazines on health and wellness. In addition to the commercial company, Rodale also established the Soil and Health Foundation, the forerunner of the Rodale Institute, which, in its own words, “champions organic solutions for the challenges of global climate change, better nutrition in food, famine prevention and poverty reduction.”¹⁹