Just another Noughties fad?

(c) Darwin Bell

For years, the Chelsea-tractor driving elite of trendy London suburbs have seen organic food, purchased at cosy inner-city farmers’ markets or delivered to the doorstep in rugged looking wooden crates, as a way of perpetuating their desire for country living in an urban context. It conjures up images of rolling countryside, happy-go-lucky animals and an idyllic rural lifestyle.

Look in the right places and it won’t take you long to find countless stories of middle-aged women attributing their miraculous recovery from an untreatable and terminal condition to their new found devout adherence to a regime of organic food and expensive vitamin supplements with complex Latin names. It has been held solely responsible for treating food intolerances we barely noticed we had until they were cured by removing from our diets anything which is not certified organic. It seems that just about anything can be produced organically these days, from teabags to toilet rolls, pet food to printer paper.

When it comes to matters of health food, though, I’m a self confessed cynic. Born in the nineties to a mother who still thought it was the seventies, my childhood was haunted by my mum’s past life as a would-be hippy. Until the age of about seven, my sister and I were sugar-free zones and involuntary vegetarians. Embarrassingly, I still get a slight frisson of excitement when I pass Holland & Barratt, remembering the sweet-shop like attraction it held when I was five years old. Yet I remain unconvinced that the ‘health food’ I grew up on made me any healthier a child than my classmates.

Now it seems the comfortable bubble of ignorance has burst and Britain is waking up to the reality I’ve always suspected; that buying organic is not the way to save ourselves from illness. In 2009, sales of organic food fell by 13% in the UK. Closer examination of the sales figures support the suggestion that it is all a matter of price. The report by the Soil Association, the body responsible for regulating the organic market and whose certification of approval is the key to a product being legitimately described as ‘organic’, admits that the biggest declines in sales were seen in products where the price difference between organic products and their non-organic equivalents were greatest, in particular meat. Only milk and baby food saw growth in organic sales against regular competitors, suggesting that while a few pence per pint more is a price consumers are willing to pay, they are not prepared to shell out an extra pound for a meal, or 25% more for a family roast dinner.

Discussing this issue earlier this week on his Channel Five panel show The Wright Stuff, presenter Matthew Wright expressed his cynicism towards those who praise the health benefits of organic produce when economic times are good, but revert to old habits in light of financial difficulties. Surely, he argued in his accustomed role as devil’s advocate, if organic food is better for you, period, then monetary sacrifices should be made in other areas of your life rather than giving up the cancer-fighting, age-defying benefits it provides. Those who blame the credit crunch for the decrease in sales last year are categorising organic products as a mere luxury rather than a necessity, somewhat contradicting their own arguments in favour of purchasing them.

So where does the government and the people supposedly in the know about nutrition, health and medicine stand in this debate? While it is arguably not a political issue, it is perhaps unusual that the politicians have not seen fit to intervene, stubbornly refusing to say more than that it is a “lifestyle choice.” Even the Food Standards Agency, whose self-explanatory remit would surely include this, had yet to issue a clarification either discounting or confirming the health benefits of organic food.

The reluctance of the government and its relevant agencies to do so has been attributed to a potential conflict of interest with the well publicised yet mostly unsuccessful “5 a day” campaign, which aims to encourage us to eat more fruit and vegetables. The flaws of this campaign were this week highlighted by a report disputing the anti-carcinogenic potential of eating five portions of fruit or vegetables a day.

The theory went that if the government was seen to endorse organic produce as superior to regular alternatives, the public would develop a semi-phobia of non-organic produce and those who couldn’t afford to buy organic, wouldn’t buy at all, thus the campaign would be doomed to failure.

But once a cynic always a cynic, and as the agriculturally-minded folk of Notting Hill will continue to sustain the organic sector in some way, and those who were never truly convinced will continue to be put off by recession and inflation, in the absence of any proof that organic is better, I won’t be paying an extra seventeen pence for a tin of dog food any time soon.