Organic, Inc. tells how an $11 billion industry arose out of an alternative food movement, bringing backwoods idealists into the age of the organic tortilla chip. A juggernaut in the otherwise sluggish food industry, organic food is now a consumer phenomenon growing at 20 percent a year. But what is organic food? Is it really better for you? Where did it come from and why so many of us buying it?

Fromartz set out to answer these questions when he realized his own food choices were changing with the times. Tracing organic food back to its anti-industrial origins more than a century ago, he saw how these ideas bore fruit by influencing a generation of innovators and iconoclasts. Starting on small farms and store-front shops, their alternative way of producing food took root and grew beyond their wildest expectations. In the process, he found the industry came close to betraying the very ideals that drove its expansion, opening a schism at the heart of its free-market success.