Savvy Vegetarian Blog

news and opinion on vegetarian diet and nutrition, vegetarian lifestyle, green living, and environment

Got Something To Say? Tell Savvy Veg!

Wed, 03 May 2006

Organic Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew

I'm about half way through reading Organic Inc. by Samuel Fromartz. Although I'm not ready to write a review, I am ready to share a peek at the book, and recommend a good read about the organic produce business.

In SV Organic Articles, I've posted the full excerpt from the chapter 'A Spring Mix: Growing Organic Salad', about the growth of the organic salad greens industry (no other word for it) in California, from hippy roots to a big business dominated by several large corporations.

The following is an excerpt from the book Organic Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew, by Samuel Fromartz. Published by Harcourt; April 2006

Here's the first paragraph of 'A Spring Mix: Growing Organic Salad'

'It would be hard to miss the corporate offices of Earthbound Farm, the largest organic produce company in the nation. The operation is just off Highway 101, a half-hour inland from the central coast of California and five minutes from San Juan Bautista -- a picturesque small town best known for the nineteenth-century Spanish mission tower James Stewart warily climbed in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Beside green fields that stretch for miles toward the Gabilan Mountains to the east sits a squat 205,000-square-foot processing plant -- the biggest of five the company has erected at a cost of more than $110 million. Out back, a row of refrigerated semitrailers lines up, waiting to pick up the twenty-two million servings of organic salad the company sells each week. In front, a huge refrigerated truck idles while a forklift unloads plastic bins of cut lettuce fresh from the fields. The bins whiz by me, headed for a submarine-sized vacuum cooling tube. Within twenty minutes the lettuce is chilled to thirty-six degrees, beginning a cold chain that will continue as the salad is washed and bagged and sent to supermarkets around the country, where it is sold within seventeen days.'

Read the Excerpt from Organic Inc. by Samuel Fromartz