Planet mattersInterest in organic products is increasing prodigiously, and the market is growing by 25 per cent per year in Ireland.
This is good news: it means fewer pesticides, fertilisers, antibiotics and hormones in our food, soil and water. But it could be bad news too. Because of its popularity, organic farming is in danger of being swallowed up and regurgitated into something that looks like industrial agriculture.
The foundation of organic farming lies not just in making chemical-free food, but also in fostering fairness - to workers, farm animals and the environment. Biodiversity, not monoculture; recycling, not waste; local, not long-distance; small, not big - these are the cornerstones of the organic philosophy. But every one of them is being chipped away in the attempt to make this holistic form of agriculture fit into the industrial agribusiness model.
In the US, organic food is an $11 billion (€8.6 billion) industry, with much of the demand being served by factory farms, where thousands of cattle never see a blade of grass, where 20,000 chickens are housed in sheds, and where lettuce is grown in 100-acre lots. The products are "organic", but are a far cry from the little red barns and wild flowers portrayed on the labels.
We haven't reached this state in Ireland yet, and hopefully we never will. However, it's worth noting that around 90 per cent of our organic produce is imported - some of it, you can be sure, from operations such as the ones above. Furthermore, the more "food miles" our dinners accumulate, the more the environment suffers.
In Britain, major supermarkets have put pressure on organic organisations to relax their standards, in order to meet demand. If they succumb, "organic food" may have little more meaning than any of the other must-have, highly-marketed consumables that dominate 21st-century living.
For a fuller and more leisurely-paced deliberation on this matter, read Michael Pollan's excellent and elegantly-written book on food production in the US, The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which he devotes 50 pages to "Big Organic". This is particularly relevant now, as next week is National Organic Week. Let's make it a time not just for eating organic food, but for asking hard questions about it, too.
planetmatters@irish-times.ie
For more on National Organic Week, see pages 29 and 31