Why do we need organic food?
(As in the picture above of the beautiful stall from Somerset Organic Link, the farmers’ cooperative, at the Organic Food Festival last September).
What kind of topsy-turvy world do we live in that organic food has to be ring-fenced by regulations? Organic food should be the norm. It is food grown with chemicals that is the aberration!
NON-organic food should have to jump through all the hoops to be certified. Those that use the farm chemicals and potentially-harmful food additives should be paying extra in time and money to be regulated.
And people should pay more for the privilege: if industrial food factories had to pay for the damage they do – for instance polluting rivers and encouraging obesity – non-organic food would be very expensive indeed.
Instead it is organic food that attracts a “premium” (i.e. costs more).
Sometimes I wonder: Why? Who profits?
I include this letter from a farmer in the latest issue of Organic Farming which indicates that the profiteer is the supermarket.
“…If the Soil Association is serious [about challenging the public’s perception that organic is too expensive] it might do well to investigate the ongoing disparity between the supermarket shelf ‘premium’ and the ‘premium’ paid to farmers. Take lamb mince as an example: on 1 July 2010 Tesco was selling organic at £7.48/kg, compared to £5.74/kg for non-organic – that’s a difference of £1.74/kg or 23 per cent. Yet I am lucky to get a 5 per cent premium…..”
It’s annoying that eating organic often costs more (unless you are canny and take the extra effort to eat organic on a budget.)
It strikes me as grossly unfair that those of us who want to eat food – grown as nature intended – have to take more time, effort and money to do so.
What do you think?
Real Food Lover 