Stakeholders in the organic food movement agree that it has the potential to transform our food system, and yet there is little consensus about what this transformation should look like.

Tracing the history of the organic food sector, Michael A. Haedicke charts the development of two narratives that do more than simply polarize the organic debate, they give way to competing institutional logics. On the one hand, social activists contend that organics can break up the concentration of power that rests in the hands of a big, traditional agribusiness. Alternatively, professionals who...