Extract

Today organic food is carried in conventional grocery stores and revered in mainstream lifestyle publications as a healthier and more environmentally conscious choice compared to non-organic fare. The origins of organic agriculture in Canada and the US, however, are anything but conventional or mainstream. Beginning in the 1960s, a social movement linked with agricultural practices emerged that began to take on broader social and political goals, many of which came to constitute an organized effort to link the process-based definition of organic with organic agricultural practices. But as the ‘organic movement’ evolved in response to the popularity of organic food, the movement began to attract a more diverse group of actors with a wide range of interests and levels of commitment to the principles included in the process-based definition. Many of the newer actors to join the movement in the 1980s wanted to capitalize on the market growth organic food was enjoying while engaging with national and sub-national governments to regulate and label organic production processes – two actions the earlier organic movement largely rejected. Some observers viewed the organic movement as a critique of ‘productivist agribusiness … [that] proposed a new vision of society-nature as a whole’ (Vos, 2000:251).