Michael J. Potter is one of the last little big men left in organic food.
More than 40 years ago, Mr. Potter bought into a hippie cafe and “whole
earth” grocery here that has since morphed into a major organic foods
producer and wholesaler, Eden Foods.
But one morning last May, he hopped on his motorcycle and took off
across the Plains to challenge what organic food — or as he might have
it, so-called organic food — has become since his tie-dye days in the
Haight district of San Francisco.
The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big
Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery
store. The industry’s image — contented cows grazing on the green hills
of family-owned farms — is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure
marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big
Organic.
Bear Naked, Wholesome & Hearty, Kashi: all three and more actually belong to the cereals giant Kellogg. Naked Juice? That would be PepsiCo,
of Pepsi and Fritos fame. And behind the pastoral-sounding Walnut
Acres, Healthy Valley and Spectrum Organics is none other than Hain Celestial, once affiliated with Heinz, the grand old name in ketchup.
Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the
fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others — Coca-Cola,
Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills,
Kraft and M&M Mars among them — have gobbled up most of the
nation’s organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from
small family farms? Not so much anymore.
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