War Is Not Organic

I live in a semirural area of Northern California where George W. Bush got very few votes. Antiwar sentiment is strong, though usually implicit rather than outspoken; from the start the Iraq war was widely abhorred.

This cluster of towns is interspersed with ranches, dairies, and farms, quite a few of them organic. Sales outlets feature high-quality organics—fruit, vegetables, milk products including exotic cheeses, olive oil, and much more—catering to tourists and locals alike. A countywide organics trade association has gained clout as it markets and promotes an array of wonderful food.

There seems to be no conflict, only complementary affirmation of life’s goodness, between the shared enthusiasm for organic foods and the predominant antiwar outlook. But sometimes I wonder.

In the autumn of 2005 the news broke that Prince Charles and the duchess Camilla would be coming to town, ceremonially shopping at the weekly farmers market.

Before arriving in California, the prince went to a formal White House dinner, where he offered a toast to “the commitment, courage, and comradeship of our two great nations.” He didn’t mention the Iraq invasion or the ongoing war effort led by those two nations.

I wrote a brief leaflet and distributed it around town:

Prince Charles seems like a nice person. Unfortunately, he’s here representing a British government that joined with the U.S. government to launch a war based on deception. While the war continues in Iraq, top officials in London and Washington keep trying to justify their indefensible actions. They are squandering billions of pounds and billions of dollars for killing instead of meeting human needs. This is what Martin Luther King called “the madness of militarism.”

Like many other people, I was in the habit of shopping for fruit and vegetables at the farmers market on Saturday morning. This time it was more crowded than ever. I bought some beautiful chard, glistening green-and-red in the early November sunshine. The hubbub of the scene felt familiar yet strangely not. This was a big opportunity to promote the local organic food industry, and a lot of people wanted to make the most of it. Compared to that, the war in Iraq—then in its thirty-second month—seemed to be widely viewed as irrelevant, an abstraction, on the very day that our community might have been able to make a more clear and far-reaching statement against the war than it ever could before or since.

I’d printed up ten-by-ten-inch green signs that said “War Is Not Organic,” and I offered them to farmers and merchants setting out their wares early, but I just seemed to be provoking indifference or annoyance. Few of the shoppers were any more interested. The imminence of a genuine royal visit had just about the entire town in a protracted swoon.

After I stood for a few minutes holding my sign, next to the stall where I bought the chard, a woman I’d never seen before approached and told me it was time to go across the street, where metal barricades had been erected for the occasion. I said that I preferred to stay where I was.  She called over a man who also told me it was time to go. Both became more insistent. The man informed me that they were from the U.S. State Department and that the concern was security.  I offered to be searched to eliminate any security concern, but the State Department representatives insisted that I’d have to leave.

Minutes later, the prince and the duchess arrived. But I missed them. I’d been dragged out of the farmers market.

The Times of London ended its article on the royal visit this way:

The couple left town as organic heroes to visit a farm and nibble organic canapés over discussions about sustainable agriculture. But there are imperfections in Paradise, even when it’s in California.

Norman Solomon had been staging a perfectly peaceful protest against the Iraq war when he was bundled away by over-zealous security men and held in the back of a police car until the royal couple had left.

His offense had been to stand in the crowd holding up a banner reading: “War is not organic.”

Little did I know.  The next year, a county-based firm named Green Beans Coffee Co. nearly doubled its revenue, to $15 million, on the strength of serving organic coffee—mochas, cappuccinos, espresso chai lattes, and other gourmet drinks—to soldiers at U.S. military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  And the war market for organic coffee kept exploding. In early 2007, the biggest growth area was Iraq, where new Green Beans Coffee outlets were set to open soon on American bases at nine locations including Ramadi, Mosul, and Fallujah.

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An edition of the New York Times Style Magazine—more than a hundred pages of ads and articles dedicated to tastefully conspicuous and pricey consumption—included an essay with an incisive passage about haute organic cuisine of the sort heavily concentrated in the San Francisco area and diffused to broad American enclaves. “I worry that we have begun to reflexively equate an aesthetically beautiful lifestyle with a morally good life,” wrote chef Daniel Patterson, “and that the way we cook and eat has become bound up in that mix.” Recalling a two-hundred-dollar dinner for two at the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, he asked: “How can we build an egalitarian society based on a lifestyle that so few can afford?” In short, “something has gone awry.”

Awry or not, a synergy had kicked in for the personal politics of environmental protection and self-absorption.  Elevating organic food to the stature of a “movement” was always dubious, all the more so after the 2006 announcement from Wal-Mart that its Always megastores (as in “Always low prices”) would jump into the battle for organics market share.  To be sure, healthy-food boosters sometimes complained, on solid grounds, that the corporate version of organic food inside supermarket chain stores was expanding in tandem with degraded standards for regulatory certification.  And some critics pointed out that the relatively high prices of organics—and of nonorganic fruits and vegetables, for that matter, in comparison to most packaged goods along the aisles—were largely due to the federal government’s enormous subsidies for corn that amounted to underwriting of high fructose corn syrup, the base ingredient of countless junky-food products.  But the fact remained that organic food—healthier and tastier while also better for an Earth already choking on chemical fertilizers and pesticides—was, for many people, becoming a kind of substitute for political action, a way of justifying what might otherwise seem like inordinately self-centered fixations.  I can elevate my preoccupation with what I put in my mouth, and in the mouths of my family and friends, to the status of global principle.

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Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of many books including “Made Love Got War.”  He is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign and the local Green New Deal for the North Bay campaign.  For video of his recent appearances on “Democracy Now,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and KQED's "This Week," go to: www.normansolomon.com.  He is a regular contributor to Empire Report.