Originally from: frances fish
                        
Frances spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

Note from Frances:

Interesting, we are what we eat though, even if some lacks taste.

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Don't be fooled
Matthew Fort
Wednesday November 05 2003
The Guardian

I am biased. I have a small plot of land which I cultivate assiduously in the most organic manner possible.

Naturally, my carrots, peas, beans, potatoes, lettuces and tomatoes have a taste beyond compare, although whether it is because they are organic or just mine I am not too sure.

However, even my organic-as-can-be vegetables sometimes fail to deliver the flavour I expect from the man hours and manure matter put in, this year's swedes being a case in point.

And that's the trouble with organic produce as a whole. The high agricultural moral ground is no guarantee of gastronomic delight. Having been a judge at this year's Organic Food Awards I would go further, and say that there are some organic foods I would go a long way not to savour.

Some of the foods were terrific. Others were not. The fact that they were produced organically does not mean that they are inherently better from a cook's point of view.

Of course, it may well be better for you than comparable foods produced by conventional farming.

Remember when the government decided to issue health warnings on carrots a few years ago. We were instructed to peel them and cut two centimetres off the top and bottom because so many turned out to have levels of the chemicals needed to keep carrot enemies at bay they would have had Americans crying "weapons of mass destruction."

Indeed, it is debatable if organic food consumption would have achieved anything like its present levels if it had not been for the succession of agricultural scandals – BSE, listeria, salmonella, E coli, and foot and mouth.

However, even the relatively sluggish economy has not slowed the consumption of organic food, with its attendant higher prices, as some, including me, had forecast that it might.

So it seems reasonable to believe that organic food production still has a healthy future. £1bn is a lot of food, whichever way you look at it.

Having said that, we should bear in mind that something like 75% of organic food is bought by only 7% of shoppers; and even the Soil Association admits that we have a long way to go if we are to achieve the government's target of producing 70% of organic food in this country.

If you take a closer look at the organic food on supermarket shelves, it is remarkable how much of the £1bn worth is still sourced from abroad.

It's all very well trumpeting the sales of organic food, but how much of it actually originates in the UK?

Who sets the organic standards in Spain, Egypt or Kenya? And who enforces them? It is difficult to believe that the supermarkets will insist on standards which may have dire cost, and so sales, consequences.

Food flown in from points around the world still carries with it the same number of air miles, whether organic or not.

In the end the quality of food not only depends on the way in which it's grown, but on a whole complex inter-relationship of other factors – variety, weather, handling, distribution, and in the case of meat, husbandry, slaughter, hanging and the way it is butchered.

Selecting organic seed and animals, and raising them organically may be the start of the process, but it is by no means the end of it if you want the food you eat to have flavour to savour.

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