ANNALS OF AGRICULTURE about Epic Roots and the salad industry. Todd Koons, a farmer and the president of a produce company called Epic Roots, showed the writer a spring of mâche (also known as doucette) at a restaurant in Carmel, California. He’s been called the Johnny Appleseed of salad, but he’s more like it’s Colonel Tom Parker: he takes obscure country greens and grooms them for mass consumption. In 1978, he began working with Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse. Waters reinvented American produce and introduced a whole generation to organic salad greens. Bagged salads are now a $2.5 billion industry and Koons and Waters have been central figures in this revolution. In recent years, they’ve taken organic farming down radically diverging paths. While Waters has continued to preach “slow food” and small farms, Koons has focused on broadening the repertoire of industrial agriculture. Mâche, he believes, is the perfect salad green: sophisticated enough for gourmets yet amiable enough for a truck-stop diner. But, first, it will have to cooperate: when picked fresh in the wild, it’s subtle and complex, but in a farmer’s hands, it can turn flabby and insipid. Koons surveyed a field of mâche in Salinas Valley, south of San Francisco. Salinas Valley is America’s Salad Bowl: 90% of U.S. salad greens are grown there and it has 200 lettuce farmers who sell their harvest to 20 shipping companies. The two largest shippers, Dole and Fresh Express, account for 80% of the bagged-salad business. They have driven prices low enough to force most small operators out of business. Epic Roots is one of the smallest farms around; still, it’s cornered the market on mâche. Koons and his two main growers, David Gill and Mike Hitchcock, keep their mâche under blue-green row covers and use chemical herbicides to protect it. They also use harvesting machines to pick the mâche. Mentions Jean-Pierre Moulle, Chez Panisse’s senior chef. Describes Koons’s fractious relationship with Waters. In 1986, Koons launched an unsuccessful fresh-herb operation for Dalgety, which showed him how to take an obscure crop and reinvent it for the mainstream. That same year, he founded TKO: Todd Koons Organic and leased 40 acres in the Salinas Valley. Describes how the Whirlpool Corporation joined with a California grower in 1966 to create the first bagged salad, but the atmosphere inside the bag was too hard to control. It took Fresh Express until 1989 to mass-produce the first retail bagged salads. Thanks to new technology, lettuce could now be kept crisp for up to 35 days. At first, chefs like Waters grew mesclun greens themselves, from seeds smuggled from France. Then a handful of organic truck farmers began selling them to restaurants, natural-food stores, and farmer’s markets. Describes the challenges of growing salad greens. By 1993, TKO was farming 10,000 acres a year and shipping bagged mesclun nationwide. In 1995, however, TKO’s farms were flooded and the company went bankrupt. After TKO went under, a small organic grower called Earthbound Farm bought its assets and joined with Mission Ranches and Tanimura & Antle. Together, they now sell almost 80% of the U.S.’s organic greens. Describes how Earthbound’s greens are harvested and distributed. Organic growers still produce only 7% of the bagged salad sold in the U.S., but their operations are some of the most competitive. This year, nearly 2,000 stores carry Epic Roots’s mâche and it’s been endorsed by top chefs. Describes Alice Waters’s critique of industrial organic farms. Mentions organic farmer Bob Cannard. A bagged salad is a creature of compromise: the essence of a great salad is the very ephemerality that industrial growers have spent so long combating.