When the recession hit, one of the sectors hit hardest was
the organic food market. It was a luxury that people could ill-afford when they
were struggling to pay the bills. However, figures published in February this
year indicate that people are buying organic again, prompted in part by the
horsemeat scandal in 2013. The recent revelations about Halal meat are likely
have a similar impact. Four out of five households now buy at least some
organic food and organic baby food “makes up more than 54% of all baby-food purchases.”
Why do people buy organic? The practical reasons generally
fall into three categories – a wish to eat food grown without pesticides;
desire to limit the damage that traditional farming methods inflict on the
environment; and concern for animal welfare. Less practically there is the
feeling that somehow organic produce is more virtuous and representative of a
more wholesome way of life that you can buy into by picking up an organic
yogurt in your local supermarket. I buy into this myself, with my organic veg
box delivered every week and organic joints of meat (when I can afford it).
Growing up on the organic vegetables grown by my parents and
eating eggs from the chickens that scratched around the bottom of our garden,
in my mind, all organic produce comes from a similar source – small family
farms, where the farmers toil happily in the sunshine and the animals skip
freely through the fields – but my eyes were opened when I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
In his examination of this dilemma (what do you eat when you
can eat anything?), Pollan investigates the food industry in the US, tracing a
selection of meals back to their source. The organic farms he visits are a far
cry from the idyllic image in my head: vegetables are grown on an industrial
scale, sometimes by the same agribusinesses that dominate the non-organic food
market, and animals may be kept in pesticide-free environments, but they are
hardly roaming free. The book made me wonder how the UK’s organic standards
compare and whether I am entitled to feel quite so self-satisfied about my
organic purchases.
The good news, I was pleased to discover, is that standards
in the UK are stricter. The criteria are laid down in European Union law and
approved by individual countries. DEFRA have this responsibility in the UK and
for farms and food producers to be approved organic they have to be certified
by an officially sanctioned body, the largest and most recognised of which in
the UK is the Soil Association. The Soil Association guidance lists the myriad
of standards with which organic producers must comply, but on closer inspection
many of them turn out to be just that – guidance on best practice, and not
regulations at all.
Intuitively it might appear logical that food that is not
grown with the several hundred chemical pesticides allowed in conventional
farming by EU law would be better for your health. In August 2013, it was
suggested that up to 98% of some fruit and vegetables sold in UK supermarkets contained traces of pesticides. However, researchers from Stanford University
published a literature review in 2012 which concluded that organic food was no better for our health, a story which was seized upon with glee by the Daily
Mail. And though the findings appeared to back up the conclusions of a study
commissioned by the UK Food Standard’s Agency in 2010, the Soil Association
pointed out that the “US study, of limited application in Europe, found organic
food helps people avoid pesticides in their food” and “recognised that organic milk has significantly higher levels of beneficial nutrients.” A study
conducted in March this year by Cancer Research UK concluded that organic food
did not lower overall cancer risk, though the figures are hugely generalised
from a small sample and the conclusions seem to ignore the finding of a “21%reduction in the risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in women who mostly ate organic food.” Studies also ignore the fact that whilst organic farms continue to
border conventional farms, there will continue to be pesticides in the soil and
water supplies that feed organic produce. The water industry spends huge amounts of public money every year on removing pesticides from our drinking
water which have run off farmland.
There are also less obvious health benefits to buying and
eating organic. Although the UK does not use the numbers of antibiotics in
farming as many other countries (ranking 8th in the EU), there are concerns
that their routine use in the feed of conventionally reared livestock, to
combat the effects of their close living quarters, often standing in their own
waste, and unnatural diets, will help to spread antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans. These bacteria can be spread through the water supply and through
the carcasses of slaughtered meat getting into the food chain. The antibiotics
themselves can get into the food supply, through eggs and dairy products, as
well as through meat, and decrease the effectiveness of antibiotics in
combatting human disease. Organic livestock are not routinely treated with antibiotics
unless they are ill.
The environmental benefits of buying organic are where the
arguments become most contentious. Much is made by those in the anti-organic
camp about the carbon footprint of organic farms. If an organic farm uses
fossil-fuelled farm machinery then its carbon footprint won’t be all that
different to that of a conventional farm. And though organic farms don’t
contribute the same volume of fossil fuels in the production of petro-chemical
fertilisers used by non-organic farms, due to their natural grass diet, organic
dairy cows produce up to twice as much methane as non-organic dairy cows.
Methane is a far more destructive greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. There are
some cases in which conventional methods will win out – an organic tomato grown
under heated glass in the UK, for example, has a far larger carbon footprint
than a non-organic tomato grown in Southern Spain and trucked to the UK. Though
we could negate this by reverting back to eating our fruit and veg in the right
seasons.
Whilst the UK does not have the thousand-acre swathes of
cornfields that blanket the mid-western states of the US, conventional farming
in the UK does encourage monocultures, which are damaging for the biodiversity
of the countryside. Crop rotation employed by most organic farmers in place of
artificial fertilisers is better for the overall quality of the soil, as it
reduces soil erosion and encourages bacterial and insect life. Organic farms
have been found to support “34% more plant, insect and animal species on average compared with conventional farms”.
When we think of organically reared animals, we tend to
think of the lifestyle similar to that enjoyed by my parents’ chickens. Whilst
an organic chicken is not kept in battery conditions, up to ten broiler
chickens can be kept in a 1m2 space, which really isn’t much at all,
and they can be kept in flocks of up to 1,000. Some conventional chicken farms
keep up to 40,000 birds together, so 1,000 in comparison doesn’t sound so bad,
but it’s still a far cry from the image of a small happy band of chickens
pecking around the dirt. All cattle must be fed on a minimum of 60% forage and
any concentrates must be organic, which is certainly a more natural diet.
Organic dairy farmers must not sell bull calves into the veal trade but there
are currently still no rules against them being killed at birth. The life of
organic livestock is unquestionably better than their non-organic peers, but
it’s perhaps not quite the idyll we all imagine.
So am I right to feel smug about buying organic? Perhaps,
but not as much as the higher prices might suggest. Whilst there are benefits
to our health, the environment and animal welfare, under current organic
standards, they are minimal. On the other hand, organic suppliers do vary and
it might be better to do a little research into the source of your organic
food, rather than just throwing it into your supermarket trolley. There are
many organic suppliers who are committed to using sustainable energy to grow
their organic produce. At the end of the day, if you really want to know where
your food comes from, the best solution is probably to grow it yourself. There
is a plethora of brownfield sites with the potential to be used to grow organic
food locally and sustainably and it’s been proven that the soil in our
allotments and back gardens is the healthiest in the country. And whether or
not you think that organic food is better for the environment, animals or your
health, if nothing else, most of the research seems to have concluded that it
tastes better, so that’s something.
