Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States By Brian K. Obach MIT Press. 2015. 328 pp. $29 hardcover

In an age when consumers are increasingly conscientious of their food choices, the “organic” label doesn’t have a lot of radical cachet. With the rise of “Big Organics” (read: corporate organics), it is now possible to pick up an organic apple at Walmart, or peruse an entire aisle of organic snack foods in a conventional supermarket. Brian Obach’s book, Organic Struggle, explains how this situation has come to pass—how organics became popular with consumers and converted millions of acres to more sustainable production practices, but ultimately lost its radical appeal. Writing with a scholarly, measured approach that is still sensitive to organic’s transformative ambitions, this book yields new insights on the organic label’s lost opportunities, ecological gains, and pragmatic underpinnings. Obach’s book rests on the premise that to truly understand the political significance of “Big Organics,” we need to understand precisely how the organic food movement evolved. Accordingly, he spends a considerable proportion of the book’s pages documenting organics’ emergence from Rodale’s Organic Farming and Gardening (first published in 1942), to countercultural farms in the 1960s and 1970s, to a nationally certified labeling schema—the National Organic Program—overseen by the United States Department of Agriculture and the target of Washington lobbyists. Sometimes the level of historical detail is overwhelming, but readers of Organic Struggle will be rewarded with a richer sense of how small organic firms (e.g., Odwalla) came to be owned by large corporations (e.g., Coca-Cola), and will better understand the complex array of actors that mobilized to support, contest, and critique national organic standards. More broadly, readers will gain a clearer sense of how challenging it is to balance market growth with social justice and sustainability. For this reason, the book’s appeal extends beyond those with an interest in organic agriculture, as it speaks to a more wide-reaching political tension of how to make eco-social change through market mechanisms—and whether this is even possible.

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