organic fever

From the very first moment after my arrival I realized that the word "organic" were going to be omnipresent during my British stay.

The adjective "organic" applied to "food" produces the English expression to say "ecologic food" (which is how we call it in Spain). The difference is that in Spain it's just a new fashion whereas in Britain it's a ftotally consolidated trend.

At the shop, in the fast-foods, in the ads... , "organic" is just the golden word. There's even a supermarket chain specialised in organic food which has become the shopping temple of the educated middle class and the upper-middle class. Buy/eat organic is a maxim repeated by the media and followed by the consumer community.

We, at home, are also somehow devoted to this postmodern faith. Our favorite chocolate is a new organic brand, called "Green and blacks" and the other day Jaime, one of my flatmates!, was shocked after discovering in the shop they are even selling organic cat-food!

But has this organic fever a rational foundation?

Yesterday my doubts about this matter started to rise. In "BBC Focus", a science magazine, I read that the scientific community is skeptical about this kind of products. There are not empirical evidence about the benefits of eating organic food instead of conventionally cultivated one. Moreover, there is cases in which the organic agriculture might be worse for health. The researchers have discovered, for instance, that the bacteria of the salmonella is three times more present in organic chicken than in those grown in conventional farms.

Neverless I must recognise also that there are good points on the organic way of eat. The products commercialized under the label organic very often happen to be actually healthiest. But that's because of the ingredients chosen and not because this ingredients are organic. Olive oil is healthiest than palma oil no matter it is organic or not. The mistake is to mixed up the importance of the healthy diet with the necessity of eating organically cultivated stuff.

The second positive side of organic food is that it tends to be better tasting. Country free range eggs, seasonal vegetables, etc. are tastier than the equivalent products coming from the intensive agriculture. Here the objection is that I can enjoy it because I belong to a privileged minority of the rich Western World. But what would happen if the whole 6 billion people who populate our planet would enter into the organic way of eating? The answer: we would need the surface of 3 or 4 extra planets earth to cultivate the food that the world eats today with the organic agricultural techniques.
Organic is an unsustainable luxe.