David Masumoto and Organic Farming Discourse

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.2 Sept. 2009: 337-354 Working with Nature: David Masumoto and Organic Farming Discourse Shiuh-huah Serena Chou Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan Abstract David Mas Masumoto, a third generation organic farmer, reflects on his experience substituting pheromones for chemicals in his organic peach orchard and suggests that organic cultivation is a practice through which farmers respond to the rhythmic order of nature. Like many organic enthusiasts, Masumoto defines organic farming as the antithesis of industrial agriculture––a mode of production that relies on synthetic herbicides, fertilizers, and other technological control of nature. However, this powerful dichotomy that Masumoto establishes between the organic and the industrial becomes less tenable when his stance against chemical pesticides and fertilizers comes into conflict with his attempt to work with nature’s order. Working with nature, Masumoto finds his organic approach depends as much on controlling nature and its irregularities as industrial ones, and his vision of a pristine organic farm devoid of human traces an unattainable dream. His fascination with organic naturalness manifests an obsession with the supposed pastoral innocence and moral order of the organic landscape in popular belief. Keywords David Mas Masumoto, organic farming, nature writing, pastoral literature, ecocriticism 338 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 337-354 Nature is the supreme farmer and gardener, and . the study of her ways will provide us with the one thing we need––sound and reliable direction.1 —Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947) 18 Upon monitoring his peaches, third-generation Japanese American farmer David Mas Masumoto reflects on his experience substituting pheromones for pesticides in his organic orchard, and suggests that organic agriculture is a cultural practice through which farmers respond to the intricacies and rhythms of nature. Recounting his experience of “giving up on [his] feeble attempts to control the natural chaos,” and “grow[ing] accustomed to the diverse patterns and changes” of nature in Harvest Son (1998), Masumoto’s nature writing reiterates vocabularies of pioneers of the organic movement, such as Sir Albert Howard’s postulation in the epitaph above (285, 19). In a nutshell, organic farming serves as the antithesis to modern industrial agriculture, which relies on synthetic herbicides, chemical fertilizers, genetic engineering, and other technological control of nature in the production process. Contrary to the beliefs of ardent organic consumers, “organic farming” has existed for centuries, and the origins of the organic movement can be traced to the 1840s as a response to the introduction of artificial fertilizers. As an alternative method of cultivation, the organic approach is a trenchant critique of chemical and energy-intensive food provision system of the West. Beyond preserving soil fertility from the outset, organic farming has encouraged what Phillip Conford argues is the public’s “positive acceptance of the natural order and the intention to work with its laws” (17). What is striking about Masumoto’s and Howard’s remarks is not so much their similar idealist aesthetics, but the extent to which organic agriculture provides a common grammar and narrative shape for both literary and cultural criticism, and reconfiguration of natural landscape. Most notably, as organic enthusiasts have done for decades, Masumoto speaks confidently of his farming according to the immanent order of cosmological holism, even though the concept of “nature” has been proclaimed a complex material reality and an unstable concept, loaded with socio-historical implications. 2 Despite recognizing “chaos” and “change” as 1 See Howard’s introduction to the 1945 edition of Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould. 2 As Raymond Williams writes in “Nature,” “[n]ature is perhaps the most complex word in the language” (219), and in Problems in Materialism and Culture, nature, the idea, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history . both complicated and changing, as other ideas and experiences changed” (67). In the introduction to Uncommon Ground, Chou / Working with Nature 339 characteristic of organic landscape, Masumoto celebrates nature’s order, practicing the teachings of Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the first organic agricultural society, the Soil Association (1946), declaring that “[d]isorder and chaos are not natural phenomena. Left to herself, Nature always produces order. It is Man who causes chaos by his persistent attempts to resists or ignore natural laws, an attempt doomed to failure from the start” (qtd. in Merill 181). The supposed oppositions between conventional and organic systems of production reveal that popular conceptions of the “organic” have replaced “nature” in their manifestation of a mystic, if not naïve, reality of stability and order. The wide appeal of organic food, however, also encourages the commodification and industrialization of organic farming, which, for advocates, undermine the ecological and social implications of the ideal of farming in nature’s image. Organic cultivation, paradoxically, has become “less dependent on how a farmer manages production than on what crops he or she grows” (Guthman 173).3 Why then has the organic persisted in utopian visions of pastoral harmony so compelling for consumers, writers, and ecocritics alike, despite their interrogations of nature as the locus of pristine landscape and moral purity? In what ways has an organic imaginary like Masumoto’s remained more or less an ahistoric, transcendent concept, and an uncontested material reality that revives the nature-versus-culture binary popular in pastoral literature? Growing organic Sun Crest peaches in California in the 1990s, Masumoto contends that “[i]f there is any [farming] tradition in California, it is a tradition of innovational change” (Epitaph 19). Redressing a tradition that idealizes the “organic,” this article intends neither to dismiss organic landscape as an objective material reality devoid of valuation; nor does it advocate the organic imaginary as a simple, contemporary environmentalist repackaging of the pastoral mode as it evokes romantic images of rural landscapes. Rather, this article questions the much taken-for-granted concepts such as “nature” and “natural order” through Masumoto’s narratives to pinpoint the cultural fantasies and limits of organic farming discourse. environmental historian William Cronon makes a similar point on the perception of the transparency of nature when he contends that “[p]opular concern about the environment often implicitly appeals to a kind of naïve realism for its intellectual foundation, more or less assuming that we can pretty easily recognize nature when we see it and thereby make uncomplicated choices between natural things, which are good, and unnatural things, which are bad” (25-26). 3 National Organic Standards Board’s emphasis on the standardization and simplification of organic production and marketing has ascribed organic farming to the centralized, capitalist food production mechanism that it first set out to curtail. See, also Nicolas H. Lampkin’s “Organic Farming: Sustainable Agriculture in Practice” 5-7 and Vijay Cuddeford’s “When Organics go Mainstream” 4. 340 Concentric 35.2 (Sept. 2009): 337-354 The extent to which harmony and order serve as key metaphors/principles for an environmental discourse that encourages the healing of the land and the purification of human spirits remains a point of contention and has been tackled by environmental writers with great ambivalence. Literary scholar’s concerns over the social or “practical” functions of environmental literature also call attention to the credibility of the much-revered “natural order” in addressing the dynamics of the ecological and socio-cultural household.4 Concerning the belief in an ecological system of grand design, Masumoto’s nature writings that ennoble the virtue of “working with nature’s pattern” echo the rhetoric of the organic movement. His narrative not only foregrounds the normative principles of, and assigns ethnical values to, what is an essential, inherent natural law, but also finds the holistic underpinning of organicism both a means and an end to an ecologically benign and socially just agricultural practice and mode of life. In the opening of Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My family Farm (1995), Masumoto constructs a geographical and moral landscape of the organic that relies on such pastoral tropes as loss, alienation, and nostalgia: The family farmer is a tough species, and we will find ways to continue. But when I think of that Sun Crest orchard, it hurts to see a slice of my life ripped out, flavor lost along with meaning. Life will be different without Sun Crest peaches, and with the loss of variety consumers will be the ultimate losers. (xi) In this passage, Masumoto reveals organic cultivation as a ritual through which farmers cultivate both the land and their own spirits, sustaining the momentum of nature as well as the farming community. Distinguished by its opposition to industrial agricultural practices––a product of an alleged contaminating, materialistic society––organic landscape is closely bound up with idyllic visions of a lost, paradisical felicity through the supposed innocence of nature, the simplicity of rural environment, and the authenticity of a distant past. Celebrating

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