The cover story of this week's Business Week is titled "The organic myth: As it goes mass market, the organic food business is failing to stay true to its ideals." In Berkeley, where every action is political, organic food is about more than just eating food without pesticides. It's also about sticking it to large megacorporations by buying food from small family farms, instead. The problem is that the economics of true organic farming and the economics of spreading organic food to the entire nation are mutually exclusive, resulting in food being technically "organic" while not being grown on small family farms:

Everyone agrees on the basic definition of organic: food grown without the assistance of man-made chemicals. Four years ago, under pressure from critics fretting that the term "organic" was being misused, the U.S. Agriculture Dept. issued rules. To be certified as organic, companies must eschew most pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, bioengineering, and radiation. But for purists, the philosophy also requires farmers to treat their people and livestock with respect and, ideally, to sell small batches of what they produce locally so as to avoid burning fossil fuels to transport them. The USDA rules don't fully address these concerns.

Hence the organic paradox: The movement's adherents have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but success has imperiled their ideals. It simply isn't clear that organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale. For Hirshberg, who set out to "change the way Kraft, Monsanto, and everybody else does business," the movement is shedding its innocence. "Organic is growing up."

I'm curious to know how many of those people who eat organic for the political implications are aware that "organic" has ceased to be a political movement. Large factory farms are making most of your organic food. As I've written before, there is some question as to whether or not organic food is "better" for you than in-organic food. What isn't in question is that organic food is more expensive and requires more land to produce than "regular" food. Most of the nation's "organic" produce is made by a single company on giant farms in California, Arizona, and Mexico.

A last tidbit: food quality is in the mind of the beholder. In Ohio, brown eggs are cheaper than white eggs because people don't want to buy eggs that aren't white. They perceive brown eggs as somehow not as good as white eggs, because they grew up with white eggs. The only difference, however, is the breed of the chicken laying the eggs. In California, brown eggs are more expensive than white eggs because they're seen as somehow more "gourmet" than plain old workaday white eggs.