Episode #214
David Weinstein: Past, Present, And Future Of Organic

David Weinstein joins Dave Chapman to reflect on the origins of the organic movement and how its initial vision has been compromised by market forces. He challenges the idea that food should be a commodity, instead advocating for a system rooted in cooperation and abundance rather than competition and scarcity. “We farm in a way now where the downstream consequences of our farming are not our problem,” he warns, pointing to the environmental and social costs of industrialized organic. Weinstein calls for a return to the deeper purpose of organic farming—nourishing people and the planet in harmony. Can we wake up from the “trance” of conventional agriculture and reimagine a food system that truly serves everyone?

Our David Weinstein interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews David Weinstein in California, Fall 2023

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to The Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today, once again, with David Weinstein. We’re at EcoFarm. This time we get to do it in person instead of virtually. I’m very pleased with that, David.

David Weinstein 0:17
It’s wonderful. I’m really glad to be able to be with you, in the flesh, so to speak – face to face. I know we all live in the virtual, digital, video world now, but there’s something very meaningful and special about having the chance to be in the same place, in the same time, sharing the same sun.

Dave Chapman 0:40
Yeah, that’s right. We’ve already had some interesting conversations. I was riveted by what you were just saying in that workshop. When we talked earlier, I was also really touched by what you said. Both times you were talking about maybe what we dreamed organic was, what we imagined it to be, what we hoped it would be and become, and the ways in which our aspirations have been disappointed. Would you talk a bit about the aspirations because what you were saying yesterday was pretty poignant.

David Weinstein 1:35
We live in such a cynical time now. We take for granted a level of antagonism and a level of selfishness that makes anything else seem impossible. I’m going to bust an old friend of mine. Wonderful, young woman, brilliantly educated, deeply committed to social justice and to a food system that worked for everyone. She, when I got to know her, identified herself as a radical lesbian, feminist, and Marxist. She was fascinated with a Marxist concept of alienation. She dreamed of an alienated world in which people could be their genuine, authentic selves.

David Weinstein 3:07
We talked about what a food system that really worked for consumers and producers might look like. She had a lot of ideas, and all of them were based on the idea that food was distributed through markets of one kind and another. I thought how really touchingly tragic it was that after 25 years of Reagan economics, this Marxist couldn’t imagine a world without markets. That markets and market competition were so embedded in her life experience that the possibility that we could share rather than compete was just not part of her way of thinking.

David Weinstein 4:24
There was a time in my life when we imagined a world of such productive abundance that the notion of scarcity could be abolished, that we could produce enough and we could consume so little, that there would be enough to go around so that everyone could eat, everyone could be clothed, and everyone could live without the necessity of saying, “I win, you lose.” We don’t live in that world now. We imagine a world where for every winner, there must be a loser.

David Weinstein 5:21
I remember there was – now going back 15-20 years – a very famous court case, regarding the law school at the University of Michigan, which would only admit a certain number of students every year, and the court case had to do with whether or not the university could allocate certain spots in its incoming class by race to make up for historic discrimination. Some folks felt that that was right, and some folks felt that that was wrong.

David Weinstein 6:06
A columnist wrote a column saying, “This is a state school. If the state determines that there are more qualified applicants than there are spaces in the law school, the state needs to allocate more funds to provide more spots in the law school.” Rather than saying, “The admission to a law school is a limited good.” Just make the law school larger, and then you eliminate the problem. No one could imagine such an idea.

David Weinstein 6:51
When I imagine what a food system would look like, I imagine a world in which human beings work with each other to meet all of their joint needs without the necessity of distinguishing some people from others and saying, “These people can have their needs met, but these people cannot have their needs met. Some people can eat, but others must go without. Some people can get healed, and others must die. Some people can go inside when it’s cold and it’s wet, and others must live on the street.” I imagine a world in which no one must live on the street, and no one must die for lack of care, and no one must go without the food they need.

David Weinstein 7:56
I imagine a food system as a part of that that facilitates that goal. I imagine a food system in which no one is deprived of food for money. I imagine a society in which we don’t hate each other for how we look, or what we believe, or what our opinions are. I think that there’s an intrinsic connection between that kind of world and the food system that we have, and therefore, how we farm. We farm in a way now where the downstream consequences of our farming are not our problem. There’s somebody’s problem. The dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of decades of over-fertilizing the Midwest is somebody’s problem. But it’s not the problem of any particular farmer.

David Weinstein 9:31
Well, this is obviously wrong. The dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico is the problem of every single farmer in the Midwest. The polluted streams are the problem of every CAFO that dumps its waste into the aquifer. We know these things, but the way we farm doesn’t correspond to what we know. The legal system doesn’t correspond to what we know. The way that land and water is owned doesn’t correspond to what we know. So, I dream of a legal system that corresponds to what we know. I dream of a legal system and a social system that incentivizes cooperation and sharing over competition and hoarding. But we don’t live in that world now. We don’t live in that world.

David Weinstein 10:57
I think there was a time once when we imagined that we could create a world like that. It’s my opinion that the movement to farm organically came out of that time, that movement, that vision of a world in which all could thrive. Now, we have an organic trade that is out of sync with that vision. I don’t think it’s an accident, and I can be very specific about it for you.

David Weinstein 12:02
When we started producing enough organic food so that we could supply stores, we looked around and said, “How do you do that?” What we wanted to do was share the food because we love each other. But we didn’t know how to do that. So, we put a price on it, and we sold it. We knew that dollars and cents didn’t have anything to do with sharing, but we didn’t know how else to do it. So, we began to buy it and sell it. Then we looked around as it grew and said, “Well, how do you buy things and sell things?” “Well, you create farms, wholesalers, and retailers. Wholesalers buy from farmers and sell to retailers.”

David Weinstein 13:08
There were two transactions. Each of those transactions was adversarial. We loved each other, but either the farmer got more or the wholesaler got more. We didn’t share. We didn’t ask each other, “Well, what do you need?” and do that. We competed with one another. When the wholesaler turned around and sold to the store, we had the second adversarial transaction. We created a system for distributing food premised on conflict and competition. It wasn’t what we intended, it wasn’t what we believed, it wasn’t how we wanted to live, but we had no other model.

David Weinstein 14:10
Then, we began to build a distribution system. We looked around and said, “How do you build a distribution center?” This was in 1975. We looked at the conventional distribution system. We said, “Well, we’ll build it like that.” Honestly, for all the talk that we’ve talked, we really haven’t changed very much. We have a system for producing and distributing organic food that is essentially state-of-the-art 1975. The conventional food system has moved on over those 45 years and does not operate this way, but we do. We maintain a tradition of individual entrepreneurs competing in the marketplace, one with another, for the income they need to buy the things they need to operate their individual enterprise.

David Weinstein 15:20
We struggle haltingly to imagine a system that is not premised on individual entrepreneurship and competition – we struggle. We’ve learned a bit, but for the most part, each farm competes individually against all the other farms for the business of the wholesaler or the retailer, who then, in turn, competes with all the other wholesalers and retailers for business. There is no communal recognition that we’re all in this together.

David Weinstein 16:12
We knew that once, but we don’t know it now. What was lost? What was lost was the sense that we’re all in it together. Even thinking about it, I came up with a name for it. It was called a continuity of interest. That we were all interested, wherever we were, in the health of the planet. Each of us, one by one, in our own way, went about our lives in a way that was intended to benefit the health of the planet.

David Weinstein 17:13
Back in 1978, 1979, and 1980, we used to drive a little beat-up truck – from LA up to Ojai. In the back of the truck, we had a whole pile of used, and reused, and abused old banana boxes. We’d take the banana boxes up to the farm where the oranges were, and we’d fill up the banana boxes with as many oranges as we could get. Any orange would do – big ones, little ones, scarred ones, ugly ones, perfect, beautiful ones – it didn’t matter. All the oranges we could get went into the banana boxes. Then we’d turn the truck around; we drove the truck back to the store.

David Weinstein 18:12
We’d put the oranges out on tables, in the banana boxes, at a very inexpensive price. Because they were just whatever came off the tree. The people came into the stores and they were like, “Look at these wonderful oranges for such an affordable price.” Some people bought big ones, some people bought little ones, some people bought some ugly ones and an occasional pretty one because they wanted to put it somewhere on a display. We bought all the oranges because different folks wanted different kinds of oranges. We all saved money. But because we took every single orange that we could find, the farmer got paid for the whole crop not just the pretty ones. The farmer came out ahead.

David Weinstein 19:07
We had evolved a system in which the farmer benefited, the store benefited, and the people eating the oranges all benefited because we recognize that there was a continuity of interest between the well-being of the farmer and the well-being of the store and the well-being of the people who ate the food. We were conscious of it, and we intended to find solutions of that kind – that benefited everyone involved. But that was a long time ago, and we became professionals in our business.

David Weinstein 19:56
We no longer pack into banana boxes. Now, we ship our oranges from the orchard to the packing house, where they’re very carefully washed, graded, and sized. Only certain sizes go to certain places. We waste a lot of oranges because the stores only want number-one fruit of a certain size – because that’s all that the people in the stores who buy want to take home. Because we’ve forgotten the whole idea of a continuity of interest that was the foundation of what was originally known as the alternative food system.

Dave Chapman 20:52
Earlier you were talking about the divergence of the movement in the trade. This would be an example of that?

David Weinstein 21:07
I honestly don’t remember what you’re referring to. But EcoFarm is where you come to learn why we do this. Everywhere else you go you learn how to do it. Which means that most people, because they don’t come here, don’t know why we do this. Because they don’t know why we do it, they’re not to be critical, but they’re simply ignorant of why we do this. They make very bad decisions. They distinguish between fancy, choice, and standard oranges. That’s not a decision you would make if you wanted to work with farmers who need to sell all of their oranges to make a living.

David Weinstein 22:25
We can’t, in our marketing, find a way to distinguish between blueberries that are grown 150 miles from where we shop, and blueberries that spend two or three or four weeks on a boat coming from another hemisphere, and a country in which blueberries are anything but native and grown on soil expropriated from campesinos who can no longer sustain themselves, instead have to become industrial labor. These are, from the point of view of a merchandiser, equivalent products. They are – they’re both blueberries. Why wouldn’t they be equivalent products? Unless you come to EcoFarm and find out why we do this.

David Weinstein 23:27
From a movement point of view, a Peruvian blueberry or Chilean blueberry and a California blueberry in California are not equivalent products. From a conventional standpoint, they’re perfectly equivalent products. If you don’t know why we do this, why wouldn’t you take the conventional point of view and treat them as equivalent products?

Dave Chapman 24:03
David, how do we spread an understanding of why we do this? EcoFarm is wonderful, but just in our country, it’s a very small event.

David Weinstein 24:19
Fifteen hundred people for three days, it’s not going to mean very much. No end of people spends their lives talking about peace. The reason that they talk so much about peace is because ever since the end of World War Two, the United States essentially has been at war. We divide up the war into bits and we give it names. We call it the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghan War, the Cold War, and all of these different bits. We have divided up the war. But there’s never been a time since the end of World War Two – which is now 75 years ago – that the United States has not been at war.

David Weinstein 25:31
We have raised generations for 75 years to live with war, to accept the idea of atomic catastrophe at any moment as normal, to accept the endless flow of flag-draped coffins coming out of the bellies of aeroplanes as normal. We create movies to celebrate war and the violence of war. We take that violence into our homes. We have laws that promote the ownership of weapons of combat. We live in an enormously violent country. It’s not true everywhere, just here.

David Weinstein 26:41
Inevitably, we talk a lot about peace, because we see so little of it. To me, the prerequisite for a food system we can pass on to our grandchildren’s grandchildren is peace. Otherwise, we pass on a kind of agriculture premised on violence. We need to kill all the bugs. We need to make the soil sterile so we can add nutrients to it and farm it. We live in a country in which violence lives in the soil. If we want to farm in a way that nurtures the soil, we need to become people who do not do violence. With every step we take with every breath we breathe, we need to become the peaceful people who can farm peacefully.

David Weinstein 28:04
This is a big order. But the hardest part is how ridiculous we look. We look ridiculous. You look at Allen Ginsberg compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Allen Ginsburg looks ridiculous. Thich Nhat Hanh looks ridiculous. These are not figures that Americans look at and admire. They admire Vin Diesel. They don’t admire Thich Nhat Hanh. So, our challenge is to develop the courage as individuals to look ridiculous and behave peacefully. It means that you will look ridiculous; the people you meet will look at you like you are ridiculous – because you are behaving peacefully. If you learn to behave peacefully, you will farm peacefully, and the food that you grow will have been grown and harvested peacefully. That’s a very, very hard challenge.

David Weinstein 29:46
You ask how we go out from here and do that. I think that we need to learn the techniques of farming peacefully. If it wasn’t normal, we would be embarrassed. I was at a farm one time that specialized in growing baby vegetables – salad mix. You know what a salad mix looks like; it’s a leaf about this big, growing in soil, and there’s miles of them. Little tiny leaves one after another in rows going on for miles in every direction.

David Weinstein 30:46
What do you do with all these teeny-weeny little leaves? You build an enormous machine powered by diesel fuel, weighing many tons, and you drive it down the rows with a little wire stretched between its jaws that slides under the leaves and cuts them ever so gently, while a vacuum at the top of the machine sucks them up off the ground as they’re cut into the bowels of the machine, where they are carefully sorted, cleaned, and prepared into bins that can be delivered to the factory and washed, cleaned, and put into bags for people to buy.

David Weinstein 31:41
You have these tiny, delicate leaves that we treasure because they are so small, so fresh, and so young, being corralled by giant. multi-ton fossil fuel belching machines, driven down rows at midnight – which is when they harvest these things. When we’re all done, we put them in bags and we call the results ‘organic.’ Now, if you didn’t have your nose this close to the process, if you just looked at it at a distance and asked, “What are these people doing?” You would laugh – it’s ridiculous. But if you live in America that has been at war for the last 75 years, and enshrines greed and selfishness as the moral conditions for any action, it looks – to use the favorite phrase of the financially warped classes – rational. It’s ridiculous. But that’s how we farm.

David Weinstein 33:25
Our challenge is to enable people to see how ridiculous it is to plant square miles of baby leaves, harvest them at midnight with giant fossil fuel belching machines, send them to a multi 100,000 square foot factory to be put into bags and little plastic boxes shipped from Alaska to Florida and up into the suburbs of Maine, and call the result… Well, in the first place, we call it food. That’s ridiculous. In the second place, we call it ‘organic.’ That’s even more ridiculous. We all know it. Everybody knows it, but we’re hypnotized.

David Weinstein 35:54
David, if we woke up from the trance, what would we know ‘organic’ meant?

David Weinstein 34:50
You made a podcast one time with this guy, and I just listened to it recently, and I said, “Wow. I like what this guy says. I agree with him.” It turned out it was me. That guy said that we all know that food is meant to be eaten not very far from where it was produced. We all know this. We know if you’re living somewhere where there’s four feet of snow on the ground, you’re not supposed to be eating salad. It doesn’t matter what Dr. Oz tells you; it’s not what you’re supposed to be eating if you live there. We all know this. It doesn’t mean that if you run out of something to eat, that you should starve – we have an obligation to feed one another – but it doesn’t mean that we need to feed each other salad mix.

David Weinstein 36:20
I’ll give you an example. I have a friend who lives in a little town outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he’s retired. So, he decided to go volunteer at a food bank. Every week they get a shipment of produce in, and they divide it up into boxes, and they hand it out to the people who come to the food bank for food. Seems like a good idea. One day he called me up; he sent me a picture on my phone. He said, “What is this, and what do I do with it?” It was a Buddha’s hand. I don’t know if you know what that is; it’s a kind of citrus that is shaped like a hand. There’s a ball at the bottom, and then fingers of citrus coming off of the base of it.

David Weinstein 37:15
It looks like a hand – a citrus-colored, textured hand – and it has more than five fingers – it has many fingers coming off of this ball. The inside of the fingers is pulp. It’s really, for the most part, not essentially edible. It’s a good flavoring; you can cut off the fingers and put them in a martini, stir the martini and you get a little bit of citrus flavor in the martini. You can put in the closet, and it makes the clothes in the closet smell like citrus – and that’s nice – but it’s not food. They must have had a hundred boxes of Buddha’s hands in this food bank.

David Weinstein 38:01
He wanted to know when the people came, and he gave them the Buddha’s hands and said, “What is this? Why are you giving…?” He had to have an answer. You’re in trouble. It’s really not food. We were trying to figure out how a hundred boxes of Buddha’s hands wound up in the tiny town outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s ridiculous, but it’s our food system in action. We know we shouldn’t be doing this. We know we shouldn’t be doing it, and we do it anyway.

Dave Chapman 38:45
This is true of many, many things in life – we do things that we know we shouldn’t do if we just step back and came out of that trance. Again, how do you come out of the trance? How do you do it for yourself? How do you do it as a movement? Because I think the movement was intended to help people wake up. We won’t even say to help people wake up; to help ourselves wake up.

David Weinstein 39:16
People, in my opinion, no matter how rational, educated, or sober we are, we are storytellers. We tell each other stories, we learn from our stories, and we learn what’s most true from the stories that were told when we grow up. So, if we’re told stories of competition and violence, then we learn that competition in violence is most true. If we are told stories that we are essentially bad, wicked, and need to be punished, then that’s what we learn, and that’s what we know to be most true. If we’re told hopeful stories, if we’re told stories of cooperation, stories of love, stories of communities that help each other and nurture each other and respect one another, then we grow up knowing that those things are most true.

David Weinstein 40:36
I’m speaking of my own experience. Because I am a person who grew up with a vision of a world like that – that was possible. We could live like that. That’s the stories that my parents read to me when I was growing up. I think that, to begin with, we need to tell our children stories of the world that could be hopeful, loving, gentle, peaceful stories of the world that could be. We can do that with our children; we can do with our grandchildren now that we’re all old.

David Weinstein 41:30
I think as a movement, we can begin to craft stories for adults that shift our attention away from what is most crass, most venal, most hateful, and most antagonistic toward a world that is not that. I listen from time to time to comedians. Comedians are terrible. They make us laugh by tearing people down. They’re funny – we laugh – but if you ask yourself, “Am I a better person for having listened to this?” The answer is, “No, I’m terrible. It’s horrible.”

David Weinstein 42:35
We ridicule rom-coms. Boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy meets boy; whoever it is, they lose each other but in the end, true love triumphs. We go, “Oh, yeah, chick flicks. No self-respecting, adult person would watch a movie like that.” We want to watch movies of tragedy, violence, and despair. That’s reality. How about we start a whole movement to say, “You know what? I like rom-coms. I like stories where things work out in the end and love triumphs.” How about we start living in that world? How about saying, like, “This is what reality is? This is how we could live.”

David Weinstein 43:33
I remember when I first started in the produce business, we were busy all the time – busy, busy, busy. Everyone’s started to be, “Well, there be shit. The holiday? I have work to do. Why are people taking holidays [inaudible 43:46] …get all the work done?” I hated holidays. Now, I look at holidays, and I say, “You know what? Day off? That’s a good deal. I’ll take a day off if I get it. That’s great.” I also look at it, and I say, “These are old historic days, days of joy and celebration. They tie us in ways that we don’t even know to the subtle rhythms of the planet, and the seasons, and the changes in the year.”

David Weinstein 44:20
How about we take these days – these seemingly random days scattered throughout the year – as a time to reflect on the changes in the season? Every one of us, we all have the solstice holidays. We don’t call them solstice holidays, but they’re all the holidays that come around as the seasons change. How about we take those days and not work and celebrate the fact that we’re here to witness the planet doing its primordial rhythms?

David Weinstein 45:01
How about we invest ourselves in that, instead of saying, “Oh my god, I got PIOs to put in, oh, I gotta order this, I got to plant that – busy, busy.” How about we take time to say, “You know what? The planet is renewing itself. It’s renewing itself in me, and there’s joy in that.” How about we share that joy with all of our friends and all of our children? Say, “You know what? You live on a planet full of the renewal of joy on a regular basis.” How about we begin to do that?

Dave Chapman 50:11
David, before it gets dark, the sun is setting. Is there anything you’d like to say?

David Weinstein 50:23
I was in San Diego one time – there’s a place called the Exotica Tree Farm. It was started 40-50 years ago by a woman who grew up in Hollywood. She started out in Hollywood as a model in the place where you could rent a camera and rent a studio, and they’d have a pretty young woman come in, and take her clothes off and you can take pictures of her. She did that. That was her way of making a living.

David Weinstein 51:03
It was in Hollywood in the 60s. She graduated from that to running around on the Sunset Strip and then partying with Hugh Hefner and being part of the LA 60s scene. One night in 70s, he said, “This is fun, but I think I want to go make a tree farm and collect all kinds of exotic tropical fruit from all over the world.” She did that. She built up one of the most important collections of tropical and subtropical fruit from all over the world. She propagated it and she made a nursery out of it. People go there to buy tropical fruit to plant and to farm, and it’s become a really major, important research institution and source of tropical fruit in the world.

David Weinstein 52:01
Then she died. I happened to be in the neighborhood, and then somebody invited me and said, “Come to her funeral.” So, I did. I was standing there, and I met a young man who…I think the right word is unprepossessing. I said, “Okay, tell me your story. What do you do?” Well, he said…eyes glowing, full of joy and enthusiasm…he’s working on a research project to figure out what kind of soil conditions and what plant varieties he could develop that would allow him to take seawater – and all of the salt in the seawater – and use it as irrigation water to grow crops.

David Weinstein 52:59
He’d had considerable success, learning how not to desalinate the water but to put it into the soil in such a way that it would become useful to the plants that he was growing on the soil. He was going to show everybody and work this out using some of the material from the Exotica Tree Nursery and other kinds of things. But he was figuring out, “How do you seawater for agriculture?” I have no idea what happened to him. I don’t know.

David Weinstein 53:35
But I thought, “If there are people like that on the planet, we’re fine. We’re entirely fine.” It won’t look like anything that I recognize; I won’t understand it, but he was so full of joy, so full of life, and so full of health, happiness, and optimism about what he was going to accomplish in his life. I thought, “We’re fine. Everything is great.” So, that’s where I want to live. I want to say, “You know what? Another world is possible, a better world is possible, and all we have to do is be willing.”

Dave Chapman 54:24
David Weinstein, thank you once again for talking. It’s been a pleasure as always.

David Weinstein 54:31
You’re entirely welcome.