Organic Resistance


Book Description

France is often held up as a bastion of gastronomic refinement and as a model of artisanal agriculture and husbandry. But French farming is not at all what it seems. Countering the standard stories of gastronomy, tourism, and leisure associated with the French countryside, Venus Bivar portrays French farmers as hard-nosed businessmen preoccupied with global trade and mass production. With a focus on both the rise of big agriculture and the organic movement, Bivar examines the tumult of postwar rural France, a place fiercely engaged with crucial national and global developments. Delving into the intersecting narratives of economic modernization, the birth of organic farming, the development of a strong agricultural protest movement, and the rise of environmentalism, Bivar reveals a movement as preoccupied with maintaining the purity of the French race as of French food. What emerges is a story of how French farming conquered the world, bringing with it a set of ideas about place and purity with a darker origin story than we might have guessed.




Global Development of Organic Agriculture


Book Description

Modern agriculture and food systems, including organic agriculture, are undergoing a technological and structural modernisation and are faced with a growing globalisation. Organic agriculture (OA) can be seen as pioneering efforts to create sustainable development based on other principles than mainstream agriculture. There are however large differences between the challenges connected to, on one hand, modern farming and consumption in high-income countries and, on the other, smallholder farmers and resource poor consumers in low-income countries. The point of departure is the increasing globalisation and the production and trade of food and fodder and how this influences the role of OA. This book provides an overview of the potential role and challenges of organic agriculture in this global perspective, as seen from different perspectives such as sustainability, food security and fair trade.




A Textbook of Organic Chemistry, 4th Edition


Book Description

The book 'A Textbook of Organic Chemistry' was first published 40 years ago. Over the years it has become students’ favourite because it explains the subject in the most student-friendly way and is revised regularly to keep itself updated with the latest in research. This edition presents the modern-day basic principles and concepts of the subject as per the CBCS of UGC guidelines. Special emphasis has been laid on the mechanism and electronic interpretation of reactions of the various classes of compounds. It provides a basic foundation of the subject so that based on these, students are able to extrapolate, predict and solve challenging problems. New in this Edition • A new chapter 'Energy in Biosystems' explores the fundamentals of biochemical reactions involved in storage as well as continuous usage of energy in biosystems. • Structural theories like VB and MO, hybridization and orbital pictures of resonance, and hyperconjugation. • Woodward-Fieser rules for calculating ?max, and Norrisch type I and II reactions of special photochemical C-C cleavage in the chapter on 'Electromagnetic Spectrum'. • Polanyi-Hammond postulates and Curtin-Hammett principle, along with several new mechanisms, e.g., Favorskii, Baeyer-Villiger, and Birch, in Chapter 5. • McMurry, Wittig, Stobbe, Darzen in Chapter 19. • Study of antibiotics, antacids and antihistamines in the chapter on 'Chemotherapy'. • Biodegradable and conducting plastics in the chapter on 'Synthetic Polymers and Plastics'. • Benefits of 'Green Chemistry'—the latest trend for sustainable chemistry as Appendix II.







Becoming Organic


Book Description

A rich, original study of the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality that challenges assumptions of what organic means Tracing the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality, this book yields new understandings of this fraught concept. Shaila Seshia Galvin examines certified organic agriculture in India's central Himalayas, revealing how organic is less a material property of land or its produce than a quality produced in discursive, regulatory, and affective registers. Becoming Organic is a nuanced account of development practice in rural India, as it has unfolded through complex relationships forged among state authorities, private corporations, and new agrarian intermediaries.




Organic, Inc.


Book Description

A “lively, comprehensive, and . . . definitive account of organic food’s rise” from a “first-rate business journalist” (Michael Pollan). Who would have thought that a natural food supermarket could have been a financial refuge from the dot-com bust? But it had. Sales of organic food had shot up about 20 percent per year since 1990, reaching $11 billion by 2003 . . . Whole Foods managed to sidestep that fray by focusing on, well, people like me. Organic food has become a juggernaut in an otherwise sluggish food industry, growing at twenty percent a year as products like organic ketchup and corn chips vie for shelf space with conventional comestibles. But what is organic food? Is it really better for you? Where did it come from, and why are so many of us buying it? Business writer Samuel Fromartz set out to get the story behind this surprising success after he noticed that his own food choices were changing with the times. In Organic, Inc., Fromartz traces organic food back to its anti-industrial origins more than a century ago. Then he follows it forward again, casting a spotlight on the innovators who created an alternative way of producing food that took root and grew beyond their wildest expectations. In the process he captures how the industry came to risk betraying the very ideals that drove its success in a classically complex case of free-market triumph.







The Soil and Health


Book Description

During his years as a scientist working for the British government in India, Sir Albert Howard conceived of and refined the principles of organic agriculture. Howard’s The Soil and Health became a seminal and inspirational text in the organic movement soon after its publication in 1945. The Soil and Health argues that industrial agriculture, emergent in Howard’s era and dominant today, disrupts the delicate balance of nature and irrevocably robs the soil of its fertility. Howard’s classic treatise links the burgeoning health crises facing crops, livestock, and humanity to this radical degradation of the Earth’s soil. His message—that we must respect and restore the health of the soil for the benefit of future generations—still resonates among those who are concerned about the effects of chemically enhanced agriculture.