Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States By Brian K. Obach MIT Press. 2015. 328 pp. $29 hardcover
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.056 | 0.031 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".