Thinking about food, that is. The San Francisco Chronicle has been running a whole series called The Faces of Organic — there’s this profile of Jim Cochran, who started Swanton Berry Farm and grows organic strawberries (regular strawberries use approximately one ton of pesticide per acre). There’s a good piece on Earthbound Farms, about which I have such mixed feelings. It’s definitely organic, but also industrial, which I find troubling — the article does a good job parsing the issues. There’s a nice piece on Clover Stornetta — organic milk from non-industrial co-ops is one of my pet issues — Horizon is famous for essentially running standard industrial dairies that differ only in the use of organic feed and lack of antibiotics. Think about it, especially for cream and half-and-half — all the toxins tend to be fat-borne, so this is one of those places where organic would seem to make sense. The series also contained an article on saving money while buying organic, and one on whether organic is actually better for you. There was a nice piece on Sunday called How Michael Pollan Ruined My Life and one today (behind the Times Select firewall, I’m afraid) by Pollan himself indtroducing the series he’s going to be writing for them about industrial versus organic versus local food issues. It made me miss the Union Square Greenmarket, which not only allowe me not to starve to death when I lived on an editorial assistants salary in NYC twenty years ago, but kept me from dropping entirely into despair. Once a week I’d go over and visit the farmers, people who were still connected to something. Saved my life.

Not the only