Elitist, dear and healthy: certain meat and vegetables have been simmering too long in a stew of misconceptions, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
I ONCE had a friend who was an organic farmer. He gave it up to become a psychiatric nurse. Frankly, we were relieved; we felt that we had suffered enough. There were the problems over getting his organic accreditation, there were the weevils, there was the carrot fly, there was the fact that he could not afford to pay anybody wages. On the rare occasions when he had enough crop to harvest, his single assistant was paid in cigarettes instead of cash. We were not terribly grateful for the cigarettes – we were his friends, after all, and we had to smoke in the poly-tunnel – but he made it clear that we were lucky to get anything. The big organic farmers, he told us, harvested their produce by offering enthusiastic young foreigners free board and lodging in return for the organic experience. Yes, as they built this new Jerusalem. It was as dodgy as hell.
But that was 20 years ago and, in the meantime, the organic movement – as it likes to be called – has gone mainstream. The individual organic farmer has been subsumed into an industry: the purity industry. Sometimes we forget how recent all of this is. It was only in 2006 that the American supermarket giant Wal-Mart announced that it would stock organic food.
Another strange bedfellow of the organic food industry over the past 20 years has been the rock and roll world, which seems to have a particularly fevered relationship with all things organic. The maddest drug takers refuse to consume any vegetable that has not been grown in Evian water. One thinks of River Phoenix here, a committed vegan who died of a heroin overdose, poor boy. And more recently one also thinks of Jo Wood, the virtuous rock and roll wife who turned to organic food as ageing beauties once turned to prayer. Jo fed her husband Ronnie on organic products which were obviously extraordinary in some way, because he ran off with a young waitress shortly afterwards.
Last week came the shocking news that organic food is not manna from heaven. A study commissioned by the British Food Standards Agency and executed by the London School of Tropical Medicine concluded there is no nutritional advantage or significant health benefit to be gained from consuming organically grown food. This revelation will not induce many fainting fits among organic food customers, although the organic producers – notably the Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association here and the Soil Association in Britain – do seem upset.
Well, they shouldn’t be. People buy organic food for many reasons and, strangely enough, its nutritional superiority is probably last on the customer’s shopping list of anxieties. The organic producers, for whom one must feel some sympathy, should take heart from the fact that, for its consumers at least, organic food is a purity issue rather than a nutritional one. Organic food is bought more for what it does not contain – that would be your pesticides – than for what it does. It is even bought sometimes – and in the case of eggs and milk, particularly – for its superior taste.
Taste is very much a secondary concern about food these days – we have so many other food problems to worry about. I was going to say that environmental issues are also a key factor for many buyers of organic food, but then we must acknowledge the fact that organic milk, imported from the UK, is being sold in plastic containers in Irish stores. In fact an awful lot of organic food seems to be imported.
Any sensible person might think that the higher price of organic food, which has always been a part of its snob value, is now the very weevil that could kill it off altogether. But that would be to reckon without the extraordinary mash of motivations that drive the organic customer.
Everybody knows that the most conscientious organic food buyers seem to be hyper-intelligent and diligent mothers who, in another era, would have been spending their time attending political meetings rather than trying to shore up trace elements in their kids. Like most organic food buyers, they are trying very hard to do the right thing.
The term “organic” has somehow come to mean the very best food, despite the fact that organic chicken, for example, tastes of nothing whatsoever – those additives have to be good for something. At the same time, organic food is so expensive that it is not sustainable for an ordinary family to exist exclusively upon it, even though it has become a benchmark of healthy living. How does that leave the true believers of the organic world feeling these days, when money is so tight?
In America, food expert websites are filled with questions about eating well in the recession. One reader wants to know if it is possible to eat healthily when “I cannot afford organic food”.
That is a desperately sad question, as if the questioner is pressing his or her nose against the window of some unaffordable paradise – come on, we’re talking meat and veg here. The term “organic” is now a talisman, a byword for food that is both safe and somehow, weirdly, glamorous. With these kind of issues at stake, it is no wonder that the poor befuddled consumer does not care whether organic food is nutritionally superior or not.