Omnivore - Chapter 9

Chapter 9 does a little romanticizing of pastoral farms and doubts some of the claims by organic food producers these days. Pollan traces the organic movements roots to the counterculture movement and radicalism of the sixties. He also identifies the beginnings of industrial agriculture has when German chemist Baron Justus von Leibig introduced the "NPK mentality" in an 1840 paper. Leibig successfully reduced the mystifying property of soil fertility into the elements nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. No longer did farmers have to rely on the interconnected relationships of microbes, plants and animals to sustain soil fertility; instead synthetics could be added (slowly draining fertility unsustainably). This allowed the familiar petroleum-fueled monoculture farms to prop up industrial agriculture, nevermind that polyculture farms have lower disease rates, healthy animals, equal yield and more nutritious crops.

Next up is a brief summary of the USDA's official recognition and regulation of organic. Basicially, "big organic" won out because regulations are very flexible, allowing synthetic preservatives in organic food (to allow global distribution). Organic food still must use organic fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides (no more dousing fields in petrochemicals), but has accommodated the specialization (monoculture, no intradependence) and economics of scale (consolidation, no more self-sufficient, diverse farms) of industrialization.

The (long) chapter ends with a summary of organic's pros and cons. Overall, the use of natural fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and organic feed does lead to more nutritious food (its postulated that is either because the lack of pesticides forces plants to synthesize pesticides that are nutritious to humans or that the lack of a reductionist, simple soil composition leads to more compounds being synthesized). However, the use of conventional processing and mass transport to supermarkets all over the country still lead to a reliance on petroleum.