Heart Beat: 'There is no sincerer love than the love of food." Thus wrote George Bernard Shaw. Having explored the margins of starvation on my diet, I know exactly what he meant. I am now feeling very aggrieved. Having lost 16lbs by being good and resisting temptation and backsliding, on weighing myself today I found that I had somehow regained a pound. My first unworthy thought was to think that the Highest Authority might have readjusted the scale. Suspicious though I was, I could find no evidence of tampering.
Nonetheless it was pretty disheartening and threw considerable doubt on my facile assertions that I would review the situation when another stone had been shed, Methuselah and I. I get the impression that I was not cut out for a life of asceticism.
On a related matter, I was recently dispatched to our supermarket to acquire, among other articles, some parsnips. The fact that I hate parsnips was deemed irrelevant. Having located them, I tore the plastic bag off the roll to carry them. I couldn't open the bag. There didn't appear to be any discernable top or bottom. I rolled it between my hands as I had observed other shoppers do and prayed to the Lord for a break.
Dozens of lady shoppers passed by me, taking the bags and opening them with no obvious difficulty. I cautioned myself to hold the head. Then it dawned upon me. I must have had a faulty bag. I was mightily relieved, as I had been beginning to doubt my competence to perform this elementary task. Thus it proved, and after discarding four more I was at last able to fill the bag.
I continued shopping as nonchalantly as I could, filling the basket with the real necessities of life. There can't be too many calories in an anchovy, can there? My progress was then arrested by my noticing a fruit I had never seen before. It was yellow-green in colour, almost straight and about four inches in length. It was unlabelled. My curiosity getting the better of me, I inquired as to what it might be. I was told it was an "organic" banana. It bore little resemblance to its fat, cheerful, yellow, banana-shaped cousin and was considerably more expensive. The aristocracy, I suppose, are always that little bit different. I presumed these fruits must be special somehow, and I braved the roll of plastic bags and the weighing scales once again. Ordinary bananas could be weighed there, but their aristocratic counterparts required a different facility. I might have known.
I returned home with all my wares and proudly pointed out the latest delicacy. After enduring the usual "fool and his money" routine, I explained patiently that everybody knew organic produce tasted much better. The only problem with this hypothesis was that on this occasion it wasn't true. It tasted bloody awful. In baseball parlance: strike one, against organic food and the myth that it tastes better. Strike two was a given: as these fruits had been transported half way round the world, they could hardly be described as "fresh". Strike three was their cost: 30 per cent higher than usual.
I appreciate that one cannot make a case on a few bananas but it did set me wondering, and then set me looking for answers as to how it was that this vogue for organic food was sweeping all before it.
I suppose the answer lies in that phrase, "everybody knows". Whenever I hear this it instantly puts me on my guard. "Everybody" in this context is frequently wrong or at least has no scientific basis for expounding adherence to the latest fad - often aggressively so, I might add. Incineration, mobile phone masts and a veritable host of other perceived problems attract "everybody" armed with the certainty of the zealot. Lest the roof should fall on my hapless head, let me declare at once that I have no cavil with so called "organic" food. However, there are problems to be faced based, I am sure, on a lack of understanding on my part. The plant root absorbs nutrients only in solution. It does not absorb particulate matter. Surely, therefore, it does not matter to the root whether its nutrients derive from manure, compost or commercial chemicals? At the end, the plant root treats them all the same.
The other great claim for "organic" food is that it is pesticide-free. My humble understanding is that such compounds are there for sound purposes, namely to increase the crop and therefore feed more people, and to avoid food spoilage. The doses involved by the time the food arrives at your table are minuscule and, in the case of fruit and vegetables, easily washed away.
Food producers of whatever kind - conventional, organic or using genetic modifications - are entitled to advertise and market their produce in a reasonable way. It's a free market, and the consumer can usually choose. If you wish to pay a premium for your choice, that is your prerogative. I would point out that the Food Standards Agency in Britain in January 2004 stated that: "On the basis of current evidence, the agency's assessment is that organic food is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from food produced conventionally." I think I'll stick to the yellow, friendly, banana-shaped banana.
Not everybody can exercise choice on economic grounds. It is not fair to make people feel that they have to settle for second best, when there is little evidence to show that this is the case.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon.