A rant about organic food

I’ve just been reading some facts (I like me facts, me) about how it’s actually more environmentally friendly to buy New Zealand lamb in the UK than Welsh lamb. This is a thorny subject which I suspect will elicit a response from a certain blogee and I have to say I’m not convinced entirely, but it’s interesting to consider the facts. What appears to be the right thing to do so very often isn’t. For the curious or the Welsh amongst you, this is apparently due to the fact that production in New Zealand requires virtually no energy and the meat is cheaply transported by slow, densely packed boats.

Take organic food. Well, if you must. It is now a talisman of being posh and English to buy organic food, as to feed kids anything other than organic food is seen as downright evil. I’m afraid I think the evil is the school run filling the middle class roads with cars and helping fragment society, but that’s a different matter. Here are a few facts about organic food that somewhat challenge the bogus green credentials of “going organic”:

It takes vastly more space to produce than intensively farmed food, especially organic meat. There’s not enough land for Britain to feed itself organically.

Organic is resolutely NOT a synonym for environmentally friendly. It is very rarely produced locally, often instead being airlifted from warm places far away. Sorry folks, but if you want organically produced asparagus and mandarins with your Christmas dinner, they didn’t grow in the Costwolds. They started their journey to your table being packed into a crate to fit into a 747 somewhere a long way away, quite possibly by people who would see a job with Nike in Indonesia In environmental and ethical terms, the avoidance of pesticides isn’t the issue. as a bit of a step up in their earning potential.

Farmers’ markets are bollocks. Have you ever seen the inside of a Tesco truck? It’s packed to utilise every centimetre and is a remarkably efficient way of getting stuff from its point of production (“A”) to its point of consumption (“B”). Driving a 4x4 with one passenger to a farmer’s market 20 miles away to buy some carrots and broccoli produces a warm feeling of being at one with nature, but also a much bigger carbon footprint than Tesco’s mass logistics. Of course, it would be rather good if Tesco favoured local suppliers and they would if we really wanted them to. Tesco would sell pretty much anything if we showed any sign of wanting to buy it. That’s the plus side of them being psychopaths.

I am always amused at the sight of 4x4s parked outside organic shops (there’s one in Chorlton in Manchester if you fancy a look at what I mean). The irony would be funny if climate change weren’t such an immediate crisis. The reality, of course, is that people aren’t actually buying organic food. They’re buying the idea that they’re a nice person and they don’t care to look too deeply under the surface to things as pesky as facts.

While we’re on a roll, let’s have a look at the Common Agricultural Policy.

The CAP is an abomination. It may have made some slight sense in the 1950s (especially if you were French) but it’s a nonsense now. It indisputably keeps the price of produce higher than it would naturally be. I’ve heard reliable estimates that each family in the UK pays EUR 900 more than it would need to each year because of CAP subsidies.

Such things don’t especially bother me because, let’s face it, me and pretty much all of my friends can afford to pay this premium for keeping Provence real priddy for our biannual trips to the Med. But a high proportion of Britain’s population get by courtesy of the ASDA value range. These kinds of costs matter to somebody earning the minimum wage. They matter a lot.

By keeping prices artificially high in the EU and paying EU farmers to over-produce, it makes it mightily difficult for farmers in developing countries to get a fair price for their goods. The CAP is a cruel barrier to fair trade and we owe it to people in developing nations to abolish it.

Which leads me onto “fair trade”. Ah, perhaps I should leave that for the next post while I wait for your shouts at me.