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Let’s start with corn. To prosper in the industrial food chain, corn had to acquire several improbable new tricks. It had to develop an appetite for fossil fuel (in the form of petrochemical fertilizer).

Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead. (Of course, even that energy originally came from the sun, but unlike sunlight it is finite and irreplaceable.)

The breeders such as Monsanto discovered that when they crossed two corn plants that had come from inbred lines the hybrid offspring seeds produced by these seeds did not “come true”—their yields plummeted by as much as a third, making their seeds virtually worthless. Farmers now had to buy new seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation.

It takes approximately 50 gallons of oil to grow an acre of corn (some estimate are much higher).

Moving that mountain of cheap corn—finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars to burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it—has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand

Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America

Companies like Cargill and ADM help to create many of the rules that govern this whole game, for Cargill and ADM exert considerable influence over US agricultural policies. These companies are the true beneficiaries of the “farm” subsidies.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) have produced more than their share of environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens.

Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. Animal feedlots take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all).

For most American children today, fast food is no longer a treat: One in three of them eat fast food every single day.

Polyface Farm is a small operation in Virginia. It is technically not an organic farm, though by any standard it is more “sustainable” than virtually any organic farm.

Now which chicken shall we call “organic’? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government because now they own the word.

The owner of Polyface, Joel Salatin, said, “Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians—we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians ever wanted—to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn’t care if there was a Washington, DC, or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can’t bear an opt-out option. We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.

Salatin was suggesting that the organic food chain couldn’t expand into America’s supermarkets and fast-food outlets without sacrificing its ideals.

Whole Foods in recent years has adopted the grocery industry’s standard regional distribution system, which makes supporting small farms impractical. Their food comes primarily from the two big corporate organic growers in California, Earthbound Farm and Grimmway Farms.

Some organic milk comes from factory farms, where there are thousands of Holsteins cows that never encounter a blade of grass

We can now buy Organic high-fructose corn syrup

Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composted soils; Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are more vulnerable to diseases and insect pests.

Civilizations that abuse their soil eventually collapse

Organic farming has increasingly come to resemble the industrial system it originally set out to replace.

Agribusiness fought to define the word “organic” as loosely as possible, in part to make it easier for mainstream companies to get into organic, but also out of fear that anything deemed not organic—such as genetically modified food—would henceforth carry an official stigma. At first, the USDA, acting out of long-standing habit, obliged its agribusiness clients, issuing a watery set of standards in 1997 that—astoundingly—allowed for the use of genetically modified crops and irradiation and sewage sludge in organic food production.

An important struggle was underway within the USDA between Big and Little Organic—Could a factory farm be organic? Was an organic dairy cow entitled to graze on pasture? Did food additives and synthetic chemicals have a place in processed organic food? Big Organic won all of these arguments.

If the consumer wants an organic Twinkie, then we should give it to him. In the end it came down to an argument between the old movement and the new industry and the new industry won: The final standards drew up a list of permissible additives and synthetics, from ascorbic acid to xanthan gum.

Along with the national list of permissible synthetics, “access to pasture,” and, for other organic animals, “access to the outdoors” indicate how the word “organic” has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique and an alternative.

Part of the problem is, you’ve got a lot of D students left on the farm today. The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There’s been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the farm and put them to work in Dilbert’s cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems. This isn’t just the farmer’s problem, either. It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.

It isn’t hard to see why there isn’t much institutional support for the sort of low-capital, thought-intensive farming Joel Salatin practices: He buys next to nothing. When a livestock farmer is willing to “practice complexity”—to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to—he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

In nature health is the default. Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.

Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

Salatin said, “Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.”

Ever since Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1963, chefs have been instrumental in helping rebuild local food economies all over America. Waters made a point of sourcing much of her food from local organic growers, cooked only what was in season, and shone the bright light of glamour on the farmers, turning many of them into menu celebrities. Chefs like Waters have also done much to educate the public about the virtues of local agriculture, the pleasures of eating by the season, and the superior qualities of exceptionally fresh food grown with care and without chemicals.

There is a new conception of what it means to be a consumer. People have come to see their decision to buy a chicken from a local farmer rather than from Wal-Mart as a kind of civic act, even a form of protest. Customers at Polyface had gone to some trouble and expense to opt out—of the supermarket, of the fast-food nation, and, standing behind that, of a globalized industrial agriculture. Their talk of distrusting Wal-Mart, resenting the abuse of animals in farm factories, insisting on knowing who was growing their food, and wanting to keep their food dollars in town.

Food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity.

Scientific research indicates that pasture substantially changes the nutritional profile of chicken and eggs, as well as of beef and milk. The large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh of the animals that eat that grass. That flesh will also have considerably less fat in it than the flesh of animals fed exclusively on grain. Also, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat.

Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals. Meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of omega-3s, essential fatty acids created in the cells of green plants and algae that play an indispensable role in human health, and especially in the growth and health of neurons—brain cells.