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Despite hostility from government officials and the conventional food establishment, organic grew in popularity among consumers throughout the 1970s and 80s. During this period organic farmers in different regions began to form associations for mutual support and to formalize organic standards and certification procedures. Yet, the movement remained decentralized with independent associations operating in different regions. By the late 1980s three factors forced organic farming associations to increase coordination nationally and ultimately to turn to the federal government to rationalize the organic system: growth and complexity in the organic market, increasing cases of fraud, and food scares which rapidly bolstered demand for organic goods. These pressures led some organic leaders to call for a federally supervised organic certification system, a goal that was also supported by consumer groups. While some organic proponents remained sceptical of government involvement, a coalition of organic groups and their allies were able to win passage of the Organic Foods Production Act in 1990. This created the framework for the National Organic Program, which placed oversight of the organic system in the hands of the USDA.

American agriculture has been the backbone of American industry since the eighteenth century, and American agriculture has long embraced industrial practices. Peter Coclanis argues that we should acknowledge the successes of industrial agriculture and the inability of current alternatives to feed a growing population in the United States and around the world.

This chapter discusses the passage of the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990 and the subsequent development of the National Organic Program (NOP), which established federal rules for the organic trade. It argues that OFPA and the NOP sparked conflict in the organic sector by prioritizing market growth and by marginalizing transformative ideas and practices. The chapter explains how problems associated with the expanding organic trade and a disruptive food scare created the conditions for OFPA’s passage. It also examines how sector members worked at the legislative and institutional levels to bring democratic arrangements associated with the transformative logic into the regulations. These efforts resulted in a stakeholder advisory group known as the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), but they did not prevent dissident organic foods farmers and consumers from mobilizing around frames that questioned the legitimacy of the federal regulations.

This chapter examines the certification standards for “green” foods in Southeast Asia. It highlights the role of transnational corporations in setting and enforcing standards that are required for local firms to export organic foods from this region to international markets, and their discursive power in framing “organics” as a key marketing point for Western markets. The chapter also describes the complex relations of transnational corporations with other actors such as the state, aid agencies, and farmers’ associations in the context of the fast-growing international market for organic foods.

Food activism in the United States has followed two broad currents that are critical of the conventional food system. The first seeks to reform the system by improving wages, working conditions, and the environmental impact, and the second focuses on alternative methods of production, transportation, and marketing. Steve Striffler argues that neither of these approaches has been terribly successful in changing the conventional food system because they are quickly co-opted by profit seeking corporations. Meaningful change, says Striffler, will only come when we remove the profit motive from the food system, and build a new system based on human need.

Chapter five examines natural foods stores that sold vegetarian and organic products with the goal of advancing the causes of environmentalism, animal rights, and pacifism. Natural foods sellers understood their small, independent storefronts as ethical alternatives to American supermarkets and agribusinesses’ relentless pursuit of profit through exploitative labor and environmentally destructive systems of production and distribution. Like feminist businesses, natural foods stores were eager practitioners of cooperative ownership and collective management. By the late 1970s, the natural foods market had become more lucrative than anyone could have imagined a decade earlier. Yet as companies like Whole Foods Market aggressively pursued profits in the 1980s and ‘90s, they would move far from natural foods sellers’ original values of shared ownership, democratic workplaces, and collaboration with social movements.

This chapter examines the scaling and diffusion of green entrepreneurship between 1980 and the present. It explores how entrepreneurs and business leaders promoted the idea that business and sustainability were compatible. It then examines the rapid growth of organic foods, natural beauty, ecological architecture, and eco-tourism. Green firms sometimes grew to a large scale, such as the retailer Whole Foods Market in the United States. The chapter explores how greater mainstreaming of these businesses resulted in a new set of challenges arising from scaling. Organic food was now transported across large distances causing a negative impact on carbon emissions. More eco-tourism resulted in more air travel and bigger airports. In other industries scaling had a more positive impact. Towns were major polluters, so more ecological buildings had a positive impact.

This chapter introduces the transformative and expansionary logics that exist in the organic sector, using both illustrative vignettes and formal exposition, and explains the book’s twin goals of (1) understanding the development of these logics during the sector’s history and (2) examining the relationship between these logics and the activities of sector participants. It locates this project in the context of scholarship about institutional logics and discusses the book’s relationship to other literature about organic farming and the organic movement. It also explains how the concepts of interpretive framing and organizational/institutional work provide insight into links between contradictory logics and social processes of conflict and compromise. Finally, the chapter provides a summary of key arguments and a plan of the book as a whole.

With the passage of the U.S. Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) of 1990, organic food left the fringes of America’s agricultural economy and received federal recognition— and regulation. But how did organic farming become a niche market governed by regulations aimed at limiting the use of synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers, rather than by more holistic concerns about society and ecology? This chapter provides an overview of the regulatory processes that yielded both the OFPA and the final USDA organic standards implemented in 2000. While the federal government’s approach to organic farming began with a holistic, process-based definition of organic agriculture in the USDA’s 1980 “Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming,” the final standards came to focus on issues surrounding chemical inputs. This process served to settle the organic market by providing commensurability, offering a consistent basis for consumer choice, not broad agricultural sustainability.

This chapter examines how grocery stores and Whole Foods Market in particular, have driven the rise of precautionary consumption. It takes the reader through a Whole Foods Market store to understand how the company both cultivates anxiety about toxics, and promises to protect consumers from harmful substances in their food and personal care products. The chapter then turns to the product package, viewing it as powerful mechanism driving precautionary consumption. While Whole Foods Market is not the only market actor encouraging precautionary consumption, the company has helped to mark the grocery store as a site where a new, much more encompassing form of precautionary consumption is possible.

This chapter uses Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop as a case study of community building from a place of privilege. In contrast to food activists who grounded their work in citizens’ rights and government responsibility, the Coop anchored its work in the theory and practice of cooperation and participatory democracy. Established in 1973 as a self-help effort by upwardly mobile, young, white people, the Coop’s high-quality, low-cost, mostly organic health food was a strong draw. At the same time, the Coop provided substantial social nourishment and an opportunity to participate actively in something that affected people on a daily basis. Yet, as satisfying as this community was for many members, the homogeneity of its leadership meant that it unintentionally replicated patterns of white and middle-class dominance that many of its members professed to oppose.

This chapter looks at green business between the 1930s and the 1950s, when most policy-makers, voters, and consumers had little interest in the natural environment. It considers organic food, natural beauty, wind and solar energy, and architecture. This was a very challenging period for green entrepreneurship. Wind and solar were wholly unable to compete with conventional fuels. Most consumers had little interest in organic food or cosmetic products using plants rather than chemical ingredients. Ecological architects had few clients. The figures considered here all worked on the margins of the business world—some were downright eccentric—and they achieved little towards legitimizing their alternative views in the eyes of consumers and others. Yet in retrospect they were laying foundations for the future.

The chapter reviews the literature on frame analysis and narratives in social movement studies and the parallel literature in science and technology studies on technological frames, boundary objects, and other cultural dimensions of science and expertise. It suggests the value of materializing the analysis of cultural meaning in the study of social movements and industry by developing the analysis of design conflicts. Three main types of design conflicts are reviewed: those based on social structural conflicts of race, class, and gender; those based on field-level industrial conflicts between incumbent firms and challengers; and those based on the environmental conflict between sustainability and resilience. This chapter uses examples from work on feminism, race, and design; on the solar energy and organic food movements; and on trade-offs between resilience and sustainability at the household and regional levels.

This chapter examines the pioneering green entrepreneurs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who emerged in natural food and wind and solar energy. They were not conservationists but aimed to create for-profit businesses which were focused more on building a more sustainable future than on preserving the past. Many of them saw profits as a means to the end of remediating the ecological externalities of the conventional system. They are identifiable as precursors of contemporary green entrepreneurs, though their focus and mental framing reflected their own age, rather than ours. The chapter also considers the importance of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who offered a radical vision of sustainability. This period saw the foundations laid for today’s organic food, natural medicine, and renewable energy industries.

This chapter charts the history of the Deaf Smith brand of peanut butter. In the early 1970s, the conservative High Plains residents of Deaf Smith County in the Texas Panhandle region were treated to the sight of Volkswagen buses filled with hippies turning off Interstate 40 and heading straight for the county seat of Hereford. The town was named after the breed of cattle first brought to the area in 1898, but these visitors weren't there for beef: they were looking for a start-up company called Arrowhead Mills and the organic foods it made, which included Deaf Smith peanut butter. It was Frank Ford, the son of a county agricultural agent in Hereford, who put Arrowhead Mills on the map and became a leader of the burgeoning organic food movement. A proponent of natural peanut butter, Ford decried hydrogenation, arguing that it makes it harder-to-digest food. Until the late 1980s, Deaf Smith was manufactured at Portales Valley Mills in New Mexico. But when that company was sold, production was moved to American Nut in Lewisville, Texas.

Food is a long-standing productive activity which carries a number of different production and consumption attributes. However, much of the recent literature focuses on a limited number of such attributes—namely, the transformation of the food chain and, more in general, of production sites. In particular, much attention has been paid to globalization, the growing power of transnational corporations and their relentless exploitation of nature. In this chapter we argue that this kind of focus is not alone sufficient to account for the growing complexity of contemporary agri-food geography. Growing concerns about food safety and nutrition are leading many consumers in advanced capitalist countries to demand quality products that are embedded in regional ecologies and cultures. This is creating an alternative geography of food, based on ecological food chains and on a new attention to places and natures, that, as we will see in Ch. 3, reveals a very different mosaic of productivity—one that contrasts in important respects with the dominant distribution of productive activities so apparent in the global food sector (Gilg and Battershill, 1998; Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1998). Our aim is to develop an analytical approach that can aid our understanding of this new agri-food geography and can introduce a greater appreciation of the complexity of the contemporary food sector. To this end, we begin by considering work on the globalization of the food sector and by showing that recent analyses have usefully uncovered some of the key motive forces driving this process—most notably the desire by industrial capitals both to ‘outflank’ the biological systems and to disembed food from a traditional regional cultural context of production and consumption. After considering the recent assertion of regionalized quality (which can be seen as a response to the outflanking manoeuvres inherent in industrialization), we examine approaches such as political economy, actor–network theory, and conventions theory that have made significant in-roads into agri-food studies and have revealed differing aspects of the modern food system.

Chapter 3 connects embodied truths and causal narratives in the service of health justice, using the examples of police violence and climate change, whereby expanding the focus to address their embodied and inequitable harms to people’s health has expanded options for galvanizing constructive change. It then uses ecosocial theory to pose new paths for research and action for a thriving world. Examples considered include: fossil fuel extraction and sexually transmitted infectious disease; health benefits of organic food—for whom? (consumers, workers, other species); public monuments, symbols, and the people’s health (including removal of Confederate symbols and university reckonings with places named after past eugenic leaders); and light, vision, and the health of people and other species (including light pollution and countering rising reading/screen-time-induced myopia with more outdoor time). It concludes by discussing the work that ecosocial theory and “embodied truths” can do for improving knowledge and action for health justice.

Like Congregationalists before them, Presbyterians faded from prominence. New denominations come to the fore. Most valued human presence in the landscape, as exemplified in the artwork of Leo Twiggs, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Alfred Stieglitz. African-American environmentalists, led by black Baptists, advanced the environmental justice movement. Catholics such as Lois Gibbs and Hispanic activists applied the Catholic social justice tradition to toxic pollution of communities. Catholics and Episcopalians developed an ecological cosmology. Catholic and Jewish women, reacting against patriarchal traditions, advocated ecofeminism and neopaganism. Inspired by traditional food rules, Jews took prominent roles in the organic foods movement. Environmentalism diversified, but at the expense of focus and political power.