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First came the news that the Mayor's “food champion”, Rosie Boycott, has had to wind up her Somerset organic farm. Now we're told by the Food Standards Agency that, according to a long-term study, organic food is no more nutritious than chemical-drenched fruit and veg.
Partly it's the fault of those marketing organic food, partly of our own inflated expectations in an era overshadowed by a succession of food scares. For despite the widespread assumption that organic food is better for you, there have in fact been few previous large-scale studies into the relative amounts of nutrients provided by organic versus non-organic produce.
As for being safer, it's true, for example, that the conventional lettuce in your fridge will have been sprayed with an average of 11 chemical pesticides, as well as having imbibed nitrate-based fertilisers, and the organic ones won't have. But while studies regularly find some conventional fruit and vegetables to have higher-than-permitted pesticide residues, most have only tiny traces, within the guidelines. How safe is that in a normal, balanced diet? The simple answer is that we don't know, and testing to find out reliably is too complicated and long-term an exercise for anyone to have done conclusively.
The real problem here lies in the marketing of both these tender organic morsels and their non-organic equivalents. Most people in this country are completely cut off from the sources of their food: never mind me shopping in gritty south London, my parents in rural Devon shop at Tesco, too. As such, we are all prone to bucolic fantasies of ruddy-cheeked farmers lovingly pulling up carrots or cuddling piglets prior to their one-way trip to the bacon factory.
That is encouraged both by chemical agribusiness and the organic farming industry, from the photos of happy hens on your box of supermarket eggs to the pictures of beautiful people cuddling piglets at their farm. Unfortunately it's largely rubbish.
Thus while organic carrots might be a bit more likely to have come from a small farm, the chances are that if you bought them in a supermarket, they won't have done. The organic food and drink market has been growing steadily for more than a decade, worth more than £1.9 billion in 2007, and commercial producers have noticed. The result is that most organic agriculture is now no closer to Blackberry Farm than a can of Stella is to home brewing.
The most efficient organic farms in the world, in California's central valley, are as big, mechanised and, yes, thoroughly capitalist as, for example, the new, non-organic Thanet Earth hydroponic plant in Kent, designed to provide 15 per cent of the UK's salad needs.
That doesn't mean that there is no difference between them: large-scale organic agriculture still uses a lot fewer chemicals and fertilisers —many derived from petroleum by-products — than conventional farms. It tends to be more conscious of other sustainability issues such as energy consumption, too.
Organic is still, as a rule, better for the environment — it just might not make much difference to the salad on your plate. And the taste? I once conducted a taste test on Prince Charles's organic carrots, grown without chemicals but perhaps with the odd royal pep talk, and the bog-standard version from the Somerfield over the road from his shop in Tetbury, Gloucestershire. The royals came out well ahead.
The moral is that anything grown at a small farm that really cares about its products — certified organic or not — will probably be better than anything that's mass produced. Buy organic to save the planet, by all means — but not for the sake of your own health or tastebuds.
Reader views (1)
RUBBISH! Who cares whether or not it has more nutrition: the important fact is that it does NOT contain loads of chemicals, pesticides and hormones so it is definitely better for your health.
What's more, if you buy organic meat it hasn't been pumped full of water and doesn't shrink before your eyes as you cook it - the greater expense is often merited by a 300g of meat being bought and 300g of meat being eaten. Unfortunately organic food is more costly to produce which makes it difficult for most people to become strict converts, however certain key produce like eggs, milk and poultry have such ghastly things done to them in the ordinary run of things that's worth eating more of those and foregoing something else.
I know a diary farmer who used to produce milk for a major British super-market that was deliberately optimised to be the lowest nutritional value because he earned more from lots of low-grade milk than he did from high-grade stuff. The electronic milking parlour works out what Daisy needs in her diet and whacks some into her nosebag whilst milking her - obviously it is cheaper if you don't give the cow too much.
'You are what you eat': organic food IS definitely better for you.
- Roz, France, 07/08/2009 15:38
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