To be fair, one shouldn't compare an organic TV dinner to real food but to a conventional TV dinner, and by that standard Cascadian Farm has nothing to be ashamed of. Still, the chunks of white meat chicken had only a faint chicken taste. That probably came from the "natural chicken flavor" mentioned on the box. The "creamy rosemary dill sauce" was made without cream or milk. I'm betting it got its creaminess from xanthan gum or some other additive.

AIRLIFT ASPARAGUS.

The dinner went much better, if I don't mind saying so myself. I roasted the bird in a pan surrounded by the potatoes and chunks of winter squash. After removing the chicken from the oven, I spread the crinkled leaves of kale on a cookie sheet, sprinkled them with olive oil and salt, and slid them into the hot oven to roast. After ten minutes or so, the kale was nicely crisped and the chicken was ready to carve.

The one vegetable I cooked that wasn't grown by Cal-Organic or Earthbound was the asparagus. It had been grown in Argentina. It had been picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north and put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, and steamed, by me, Sunday night.

Source: USDA Economic Research Service That one bundle of asparagus presented its own little dilemma. How much fossil fuel was burned to keep it refrigerated and fly it to the U.S.? Should farmland in South America be used to grow expensive food for well-off North Americans? Should we even try to eat asparagus (or any vegetable) out of season?

Yet there are good arguments on the other side. My purchase helps the economy of Argentina. It also keeps some of that country's land free from pesticides or chemical fertilizer. This was all a lot of baggage for a few spears of asparagus to carry, I admit.

So how did it taste?

My jet-setting Argentine asparagus tasted like damp cardboard. After the first spear or two no one touched it. All the other vegetables and greens were much tastier-really good, in fact. Of course, we live in California, so they didn't have far to travel to our table. Whether they would have been quite so sweet and bright after a cross-country truck ride is doubtful.

I have to admit that the Earthbound greens, in their plastic bag, stayed crisp right up to the expiration date, a full eighteen days after leaving the field. This is partly due to the s.p.a.ce-age technology used to pack them. But as the Goodmans had explained to me, organic greens just last longer. Since they're not pumped up on synthetic nitrogen, the cells of organic leaves grow more slowly. These slower-growing leaves develop thicker walls and take up less water, helping them stay fresher longer.

IS ORGANIC BETTER FOR YOU?.

My industrial organic dinner certainly wasn't cheap, considering I made it from scratch. Rosie cost $15 ($2.99 a pound), the vegetables another $12 (thanks to that six-buck bunch of asparagus), and the dessert $7 (including $3 for a six-ounce box of blackberries). That comes to $34 to feed a family of three at home. (Though we did make a second meal from the leftovers.) That's a hefty price compared to the same meal from the industrial food chain. So why buy organic anyway? Is the extra cost worth it? What exactly are you paying for?

Does organic food taste better? I think the answer is probably, but not always. A freshly picked non-organic vegetable is bound to taste better than one that's been riding in a truck for three days. On the other hand, organic Rosie was a tasty bird, with more flavor than ma.s.s-market birds fed on a diet of antibiotics and animal by-products. Those "unnatural" feeds make chickens with mushier and blander meat.

Okay, so organic food sometimes tastes better. But is it better for you? I think the answer to this is also yes, but I can't prove it scientifically.

I know the dinner I prepared contained little or no pesticides. Those chemicals have been proven to cause cancer, damage nerve cells, and disrupt your endocrine system-your hormones. These poisons are routinely found in non-organic produce and meat. Yet I can't prove that the low levels of these poisons in food are enough to make you sick. The government says the levels are low enough that our systems can "tolerate" them.

Very little research has been done to determine the effects of low levels of these poisons. One problem is that the official tolerance levels are set for adults, not children. Since children are smaller and still growing, the danger for them is greater than for adults. Given what we do know about the dangers of these chemicals, it makes sense to keep them out of a kid's diet.

It was important to me that the organic ice cream came from cows that did not receive injections of growth hormone to boost their productivity. We don't know if these hormones are affecting kids who drink non-organic milk, but again, I think it's better to avoid them. Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. The tiniest amount of this chemical (0.1 part per billion) has been shown to change the s.e.x of frogs. There's been no study to show what it does to children.

So it seems to me I have two choices: I can wait for that study to be done or I can decide that it's better to be safe than sorry and buy foods without atrazine. As you may recall from chapter four, although the U.S. government allows atrazine spraying, the chemical is already banned in Europe.

IS IT HEALTH FOOD?.

Okay, getting rid of poisons is a no-brainer. But there's still another question about organic food. Is it healthier for you? Does it contain more nutrients-vitamins, minerals, and natural substances-that our bodies need to stay healthy?

As far as the USDA is concerned, all carrots are created equal, organic and non-organic. Yet there is some real evidence that this is not so. In 2003, a study by University of California, Davis, researchers studied two crops of corn, strawberries, and blackberries. The plants were identical and grown in side-by-side plots. One set of plants was grown using organic methods. The other set was grown conventionally with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.

The study showed that the organic fruits and vegetables contained higher levels of vitamin C. They also had a wider range of natural chemicals called polyphenols. Polyphenols are a group of chemicals made by plants that seem to play an important role in human health. Some help prevent or fight cancer; others fight infections. You may have seen one of these polyphenols advertised on your ketchup bottle-one called lycopene. There are many others.

Why in the world should organically grown blackberries or corn contain more of these polyphenols? These compounds help plants to defend themselves against pests and diseases. Perhaps plants that are sprayed with man-made pesticides don't bother to produce much of their own.

The soils in industrial farms are often lifeless. Perhaps these dead soils don't supply all the raw ingredients plants need to make polyphenols. Artificial fertilizer may be enough to get plants to grow, yet still may not give a plant everything it needs to make enough lycopene or resveratrol (another one of the polyphenols).

Here is what we do know. We have evolved over millions of years eating plants that today we would call "natural" or "organic." Those plants, growing in complex, living soils, produced polyphenols to protect themselves from pests and disease. Our bodies evolved to use those same compounds to protect us from disease. Yet in the last fifty years we have built a food system that strips many of those healthy compounds out of our foods.

Who knows what other healthy substances are in plants that we have yet to discover? The industrial food chain breaks all food down into a few simple elements. But what if our bodies need more than that? The evidence is starting to come in that this is the case.

EATING OIL.

I hope I've made it clear that I think organic industrial food is a big improvement over the non-organic food chain. To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were wasted, no government subsidy checks were written. And yet . . .

The wages and working conditions of the farmworkers in an organic field aren't much different from those on non-organic factory farms. "Organic" factory farm chickens live only slightly better lives than non-organic factory chickens. In the end a CAFO is a CAFO, whether the cattle are fed organic corn or not. An organic label does not guarantee that cattle have spent any time in a real pasture, any more than "free-range" chickens really range freely.

To top it off, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as a non-organic meal. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked to the moment I walk it out the doors of my supermarket. That takes a lot of energy and a lot of fossil fuel. Organic farmers generally use less fuel to grow their crops. Yet most of the fuel burned by the food industry isn't used to grow grow food. Almost 80 percent of the fuel burned is used to process food and move it around. This is just as true for an organic bag of lettuce as a non-organic one. food. Almost 80 percent of the fuel burned is used to process food and move it around. This is just as true for an organic bag of lettuce as a non-organic one.

The original organic food movement thought organic farming should be sustainable. That means it should be, as much as possible, a closed loop, recycling fertility and using renewable energy. The industrial organic food chain is anything but a closed, renewable loop. The food in our organic meal had floated to us on a sea of petroleum just as surely as the corn-based meal we'd had from McDonald's.

Well, at least we didn't eat it in the car.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF FOOD CHAIN.

But I wasn't done searching for more responsible food. As part of my research I kept hearing about this incredible farmer in Virginia. His name was Joel Salatin and he and his family ran a 500-acre spread called Polyface Farm near the town of Swoope. So I gave him a call. I wanted to interview him and I also wanted him to ship me some of his food so I could taste it myself. Well, I got my interview, but Salatin said he couldn't ship me any chicken or steak. I figured he meant he wasn't set up for shipping, so I offered him my FedEx account number.

"No, I don't think you understand. I don't believe it's sustainable-or 'organic,' if you will-to FedEx meat all around the country. I'm sorry, but I can't do it."

This man was serious.

He explained that just because we can ship organic lettuce from California, or organic apples from Chile, doesn't mean we should should do it. Shipping food thousands of miles and burning up fossil fuels went against his whole philosophy as a farmer. do it. Shipping food thousands of miles and burning up fossil fuels went against his whole philosophy as a farmer.

"I'm afraid if you want to try one of our chickens," he said, "you're going to have to drive down here to Swoope to pick it up."

It turns out there's another food chain in America, one that looks very different from the industrial farms I had been visiting. It's based on small family farms like Salatin's, which practice true sustainable farming. These farms aren't owned by big agribusiness corporations. They don't ship their vegetables and meat across the country or across the globe. In fact, they look more like the picture I had of an organic farm when I had started out. So I decided to take Joel Salatin up on the offer he'd extended when I told him about my book. I decided to go to Virginia to see his farm firsthand. My wife called it my Paris Hilton adventure. And she was right-I was about to do a lot of hard work I wasn't quite ready for. I was also about to find out how different an organic farm could be.

PART III.

The Local Sustainable Meal: Food from Gra.s.s

12.

Poly face Farm

GREEN ACRES.

Early in the afternoon on the first day of summer, I found myself sitting in the middle of a bright green pasture. The first day of summer is the longest day of the year. This day felt like the longest day of my life. I was more tired than I thought anyone could be.

I'd spent the afternoon making hay. After just a few hours in the June sun lifting and throwing fifty-pound bales, I hurt. We think of gra.s.s as soft and friendly stuff, but once it's been dried in the sun and shredded by machines, it becomes hay. And the ends of hay are like needles, sharp enough to draw blood. My forearms were dotted red with pinp.r.i.c.ks and my lungs were filled with hay dust.

Joel Salatin had gone off to the barn with his grown son, Daniel. That left me a welcome moment in the pasture to rest before we started up again. It was Monday, the first day of the week I would spend on the farm. After just half a day I knew I would never again complain about any price a farmer wanted to charge me for food. If the work was this hard, one dollar for an egg seemed reasonable. Fifty dollars for a steak was a steal.

TIME TRAVEL?.

The farm machinery had fallen silent, and I could hear the sounds of songbirds in the trees, and also the low clucking of hens. Up on the green, green hill rising to the west I could see a small herd of cattle grazing. The meadows were dotted with contented animals. Behind them was the backdrop of dark woods. A twisting brook threaded through it all. It was an almost too-perfect farm scene. The only problem was that I couldn't just lie there on the springy pasture for the rest of the afternoon.

I thought about how amazing it was that the farm existed at all. This was exactly the way farms had been before industrial food and feedlots and giant wet mills. Yet I had not traveled back in time. This farm was living and thriving today just 150 miles from Washington, D.C.

My first glimpse of the Salatins' Polyface Farm.

Joel Salatin the gra.s.s farmer with his cattle at Polyface Farm.

I'd come to Polyface Farm to find out if it was possible for a non-industrial food chain to survive in the twenty-first century. Was this farm just a lone holdout against industrial food? Or did it represent a new wave of local organic farms that could survive outside the industrial food chain? In short, I wanted to know if this kind of farming was the past or the future.

Looking at those green pastures that afternoon, I thought the only thing missing from the scene was a happy shepherd. But then I saw a tall fellow loping toward me, wearing broad blue suspenders and a floppy straw hat. It was Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface, returning from the barn. Most farmers wear a trucker's cap marked with the logo of an agribusiness giant. Salatin's hat had no logo and it was made of gra.s.s, not plastic. This was fitting because gra.s.s, not petroleum, is the foundation of his farm's success.

THE GRa.s.s FARMER.

Polyface Farm raises chicken, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, grapes, and berries. They do all this on 100 acres of pasture mixed in with another 450 acres of forest. But if you ask Joel Salatin what he does for a living he'll say, "I'm a gra.s.s farmer."

The first time I heard this I didn't get it at all. People can't eat gra.s.s, and he doesn't sell any of his hay to other farmers. How could he be in the gra.s.s business? But of course, Salatin was right. As I was to learn during my stay, the cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits at Polyface (as well as Salatin and his family) all depend on gra.s.s in one way or another. (Gra.s.s, of course, is not a single plant. It is our name for the whole collection of plants that grow together in a pasture or meadow.) Polyface Farm is the opposite of an industrial farm like George Naylor's or Earthbound. Those industrial farms grow giant monoculture fields. Their farms run like factories. They put in the seed and fertilizer (raw materials) and out comes corn or soybeans (product). It's a pretty straight line from start to finish.

Nothing at Polyface works in a straight line. The animals and crops seem to move in circles like some sort of complicated dance. Each plant and animal plays its part and Joel Salatin is the ch.o.r.eographer. The pastures are the stage and the main action of the dance is to rotate the animals through the pastures.

PASTURES OF PLENTY.

The pasture I was resting in was a good example. It was the third week of June and the field had already been occupied several times. It had been grazed twice by beef cattle. After the cattle it had been home to several hundred laying hens. Later, the gra.s.s had been cut to make hay that would feed the farm's animals through the winter.

I asked Salatin why the chickens had been let loose in the pasture instead of fed in a chicken coop. "Because that's how it works in nature," he explained. "Birds follow and clean up after herbivores."

Joel calls the hens his "sanitation crew." In the pasture, they pick tasty grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats. (Larvae are one stage in the life cycle of insects. For example, caterpillars are b.u.t.terfly larvae.) Eating the grubs and larvae cuts down on bugs and parasites-in this case, tiny organisms that live on or in the cow-that would bother the cattle. And while the chickens are nibbling on the gra.s.ses, they add a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture with their own droppings-and produce several thousand rich and tasty eggs. After a few weeks' rest, the pasture will regrow and feed the cows again.

By the end of the season Salatin's animals will have transformed his gra.s.ses into an astounding amount of food. Yet even more amazing is the fact that this pasture will be in better, not worse, shape. Its soil will be deeper, more fertile, and even springier underfoot (this thanks to the increased earthworm traffic). And the whole process is powered by the sun. No fossil fuels or added fertilizer or chemicals needed.

GRa.s.s AND HUMANS-BFF?

When we looked at beef ranching, we learned how gra.s.ses and herbivores formed a partnership over millions of years of evolution. In the same way, human beings and gra.s.ses also have been partners. People in prehistoric times often hunted the big herbivores that dined on gra.s.s. Those hunters would regularly set fire to the prairie to keep it free of trees and nourish the soil. In a sense, they too were "gra.s.s farmers." They helped the gra.s.s, and the gra.s.s in turn fed the animals they hunted.

The bonds between humans and gra.s.s grew even stronger about 10,000 years ago. About that time people learned to plant and grow gra.s.ses like wheat, rice, and corn. These gra.s.ses were different because they produced big, rich seeds. Humans could harvest and eat those seeds. They didn't need herbivores to turn the gra.s.s into meat.

Grains like wheat and corn are gra.s.ses, but they're different from the gra.s.ses in Joel Salatin's meadow. Meadow gra.s.ses can reproduce even if they are eaten (or mowed) before they can make seeds. They do this by sending out shoots or runners that become new plants. They also have deep root systems that help them to recover quickly from grazing or prairie fire. These roots survive through the winter and then start growing new leaves in the spring. Plants that do this are called perennials because they come back year after year.

Wheat, rice, and corn are annuals. That means they don't put down a deep root system. Instead, they survive by making seeds, which have to be planted every year. Because these seeds are edible, human beings took these annuals and helped them spread across the globe. We cut down forests and plowed up the prairies to make room for the giant seed-bearing gra.s.ses. They are the backbone of our agriculture and our food supply.

INDUSTRIAL VS. ORGANIC.

So if you think of corn as a big, annual gra.s.s, then George Naylor in Iowa is also a gra.s.s farmer. But Naylor's farm is one link in a chain that includes fossil fuels, artificial fertilizer, pesticides, heavy machinery, feedlots, antibiotics, and processing plants. The oil comes mostly from the Middle East, the corn comes from Iowa, the beef is slaughtered in Kansas, and then the meat has to be shipped by truck across the country to a Wal-Mart or McDonald's near you.

You can think of the industrial food system as a great machine. It's a machine that stretches over thousands of miles. It runs on fossil fuel and creates tons of waste and pollution.

Polyface Farm stands about as far from industrial agribusiness as you can get. Almost everything the farm uses is grown on the farm. Almost all of the energy used to make the food comes from the sun. There are no pesticides, no artificial fertilizer, no pollution, and no extra waste. Everything is recycled. Just compare the two farms:

ORGANIC VS. BEYOND ORGANIC.

As I discovered in that first phone call, Polyface is so outside the industrial food chain that Salatin won't even sell his beef, chicken, or pork by mail. You can't order them on a website.

"We never called ourselves organic," he went on to explain. "We call ourselves 'beyond organic.'" He talked about the difference between one of his chickens and an organic chicken you can buy in a supermarket. The supermarket chicken is raised in "a ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven." His chickens do eat non-organic grain, but they "see a new paddock of fresh green gra.s.s every day." Then he asked, "So which chicken shall we call 'organic'?"

13.

Gra.s.s

MONDAY.

We see gra.s.s all the time-on lawns, by the side of the highway, on baseball fields (if they aren't artificial turf). But have you ever really looked looked at gra.s.s? at gra.s.s?