Before I read the chapter of Big Organic, I thought that it would be just like big organic farm. However, after I read the chapter, I found that it was more like an industrial farm in many aspects. The first theme I want to address is environment and economy in Big Organic food system. According to Pollan (2006), the initial goal of organic was to create a food system conforming to the logic of nature. In a natural ecosystem, there are diverse plants and animals draw fertility and energy from the sun. However, the nature’s logic and the capitalism’s logic do not match. As Anderson (2013) suggests, “economics plays against ecology” because the ecology maximize the diversity while the economics maximize the yield (p. 91). The Big Organic takes advantage of monoculture and economies of scale. To some extent, Big Organic is a masquerade of organic food and it is unsustainable.
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In the past, people just ate seasonal and local food. In the global food market, the Whole Food provides almost everything all the year round, such as the lamb from New Zealand in the spring and the asparagus from Argentina in January. People’s die has changed a lot. The main cause of the dietary changes brought by Big Organic is the “rise of increasingly complex, international food distribution networks” (Pelto & Pelto, 1983, p. 353). With the efficient transportation network, people can get food produced on a farm six thousand miles away in a few days. The Big Organic food system has changed consumers’ diet habits. However, the food distribution network is not sustainable and Pollan (2006) says that the Big Organic food industry is “floating on a sinking sea of petroleum” (p.
In the past, people just ate seasonal and local food. In the global food market, the Whole Food provides almost everything all the year round, such as the lamb from New Zealand in the spring and the asparagus from Argentina in January. People’s die has changed a lot. The main cause of the dietary changes brought by Big Organic is the “rise of increasingly complex, international food distribution networks” (Pelto & Pelto, 1983, p. 353). With the efficient transportation network, people can get food produced on a farm six thousand miles away in a few days. The Big Organic food system has changed consumers’ diet habits. However, the food distribution network is not sustainable and Pollan (2006) says that the Big Organic food industry is “floating on a sinking sea of petroleum” (p.