The time for resolutions offers us the chance to take a long, hard look at what we eat, and the way we eat it. Will 1999 provoke yet another binge of dieting, as doomed this year to fail as most other years? Or might it be the chance to take a more productive look at the type of food we eat, and to as whether the food is doing us all the good it should be? If we are overweight, or under-powered, is it our fault, or is what we eat each and every day contributing to a situation where we feel we are not at our best?
Our food culture can be neatly divided into two camps; the intensive and the organic. For years now, the intensive camp has told us the organic sector is merely a minority of people who worry too much about nothing which is important. They assure us that food production has never been safer, or more intensively monitored.
Perhaps they are right. Yet in the 10 years I have been writing about our food culture, I have seen a situation develop where conventional agriculture has lurched from one looming crisis to another, currently reaching a point where confusion and outright despair are endemic among farmers and others in the food business.
By contrast the organic sector has gamely bounced along, finding demand for its produce always outstripping supply, and finding increasing favour with an ever-larger sector of the population.
There is no mystery as to why this has happened. Conventional food production no longer enjoys the confidence of the public, while organic producers are trusted. People feel they have no connection with conventional food, while many people who, for example, share box systems, actually know their local growers personally. In the country's small markets, it is the organic growers who line up proudly with their produce, and who meet the person who takes the food home and cooks it. A decade ago, many organic producers felt that getting involved in the commercial marketplace would involve them in compromise. Today, they realise that the more they are commercially successful, the more they can influence our food culture, and the more they can help to steer it on to a logical, conscientious and environmentally sound path. The following systems and people are examples of how organic food production is becoming more widely available, and more important in all our lives.