Samuel Fromartz’ Organic, Inc. might be the most balanced nonfiction book on a contemporary subject I’ve ever read. Even though Fromartz is clearly a pro-organic partisan, he focuses the work on the food and the various personalities that helped turn organic food from tasteless hippie health food into the panoply of choices the organic-minded consumer has today.

Organic, Inc. is part history and part description of what “organic” really means, both today and what it meant in earlier eras. The history is interesting enough, as Fromartz discusses how natural farming methods were slowly and then quickly overtaken by more industrial production methods, from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the loss of critical agricultural techniques like crop rotation, and then shifts gears to focus on the various organic-food advocates who, for health or culinary reasons, pushed back against the agro-industrial complex. While many of the characters Fromartz presents were – to my eyes, at least – certifiable kooks, some, like chef Alice Waters, who is responsible for introducing Americans to “spring mix” or mesclun salad, were just passionate about one specific aspect of organic food (in Waters’ case, taste) and matched it to a niche in the market that would allow them to sustain and even grow their food-related businesses.

Fromartz also provides two chapters that delve more into the way Big Bad Corporate America has gotten its grubby mitts on organic food. One chapter talks about soy milk, going into the history of White Wave, the company behind Silk that has since sold out to Dean Foods, which has introduced non-organic products under the Silk name. (I checked at Whole Foods yesterday; even chocolate Silk can’t call itself organic because the cocoa used in the drink isn’t organic.) The last chapter goes into the pitched battles, some still ongoing, between the hardcore organic community and the growth-oriented side seeking to ease labeling rules and guidelines for organic agriculture and husbandry. Fromartz builds the first six chapters to leave this conflict as somewhat inevitable, and manages to keep his own views out of the fray, although it would be hard to read that chapter and side with the “growth” crowd when you see what they would like to make acceptable under the label “organic.”

Fromartz’ prose was the one obstacle that was tough to surmount, however. His word choices are often awkward and occasionally wrong, referring to one veterinarian as “widely regarded” without saying how he was regarded or what he was regarded as. I also caught a handful of grammatical errors or funky word orders that made the subjects of sentences unclear. I also would have preferred to see inline citations; the book has a thick Notes section, with notes by page number, but the lack of inline citations creates a game where you guess that there might be a citation for what you just read and check the Notes section to see if there’s one there. Given the frequency with which he uses the “Some people say” device, inline citations are a must.

If you care about food, or the environment, Organic, Inc. is a solid and informative read. I know I’ll be looking for organic strawberries wherever possible, and will probably shift what little conventional dairy buying I do to organic as well, all the result of the information Fromartz gave in the book, rather than any rhetorical or polemical arguments I’ve read.

Next up: A return to the TIME 100 with Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.