Kris Murray today makes very clear why she doesn’t like organic foods following a critical piece in the Observer about especially the taste of organic foods, and William Sjostrom reacts to the same piece by taking on the sanctimony that is so often part of the organic culture. While I fully buy into a very critical examination of environmentalist and green excesses, advocating to enthusiastically cut trees and exterminate excess wildlife, I have a problem with an across the board bashing of everything organic, which is what Kris does. Irene and I started to bring organic foods into our lives when we lived in Hong Kong, prompted by the fact that most vegetables available on the local wet markets there where imported from China where every farmer still enthusiastically uses the most lethal pesticides and chemicals banned in any other country in the world. So we got our weekly vegetable delivery from a small farm in the New Territories, an equally polluted part of the world, but the beets they produced were some of the best we ever had. It didn’t make any difference to our diet or health, really, but we liked the initiative and after a visit and lunch with the former fisherman and hyped ex-lawyer who together ran the place we knew this was a pretty unique initiative that deserved our full support.

A more critical examination took place when we moved to North America where pretty soon half of our entire intake became organic, a practice that gained momentum during Irene’s pregnancies. We are not trying to make a statement, save the earth or otherwise, but plain logic will have it that certified organic goods do not contain the artificial supplements and hormones, or are exposed to certain pesticides, that so often can be found in regular food. I like Bjorn Lomborg, but if he can convince me that there are no issues with red-colored fat dripping with hormones passing as beef, I will have to start questioning some of his methods. People that enjoy healthy lifestyles and a balanced diet should by the way be sufficiently healthy to withstand all the potential diseases that Kris identified come with organic produce. As for taste, true, not all of it tastes necessarily better, but I will gladly put forward that if I throw a handful of MSG in my evening dinner it will no doubt make it taste better, but it surely doesn’t make it any healthier. I am not positioning this as a religion, on the contrary, a big chunk of our food intake is non-organic, but I think in some areas, notable meat and dairy, you’re better off going organic or natural. Especially in North America the spectacular physical growth rates of children have been linked to an overabundance of hormones in meat and dairy. As for fish, the orange dyed pieces of salt that these days pass for salmon are indicative of the need to pay a premium for chunky pink salmon from the wild. The same holds true for the watery grey stuff that is chicken filet, for a few bucks more you can have some very tasty free-range or organic stuff.

That brings me to the last part, Kris’s assertion that it is a big con. She may be onto something here, consumers with disposable cash love being led by a feeling that they get premium stuff for inflated prices and the organic industry has like any other industry taken advantage of this. Some up-market fancy bio-retailers have raked in huge profits on the basis of this fad. Large retail chains have jumped onto this and now offer “organic brands” at a premium to their normal offerings, but at a discount to what organic specialty stores charge for their goods. This is where I get suspicious as nothing stops me from believing that regular milk and orange juice are simply wrapped in an organic label and sold at a premium price. Bring a higher middle class fad to those with smaller purses and you have just written your ticket to solid revenues by selling more items as well as luring green consumers away from the traditional organic outlets.

The key in this is probably some common sense. Neither an exclusive regular diet, nor an exclusive organic plate offers us a road to tasty health, and ignoring organic foods on the presumption that they negatively affect your basic health seem ludicrous. But so is forking out a fortune for some poorly tasting spinach.