Thursday, 3 September 2020

An Orgy of 'Organic'?

 


In one sense, it's good news that the current UK sales of 'organic' food and drink, has shown a 4.5% rise this year to £2.45 bn (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/05/organic-food-and-drink-sales-rise-to-245bn). This means that a proportion of the population, in these Covid-19-afflicted times, is spending about £200m per month on such products.  There are especially strong sales in the online and home delivery sector. This strongly suggests, that most of this growth occurs in the households of the relatively affluent who can work from home and may have been limited in their opportunities to 'eat out'. I suspect that there are not many 'organic' options in food banks (which have also rocketed in numbers and activity in lockdown). In spite of a claimed drive to encourage healthier eating in the entire population, I think we are actually seeing a reinforcement of very different diets, for the rich and the poor. It would, for example, have been rather nice to redirect more organic food (and the cooking facilities) to people with type 2 diabetes rather than just soup and shakes. This would, however, cost rather more, perhaps making it not 'cost-effective'. I can't really deal with any post about 'organic' food and drink, without launching into one of my reoccurring pedantic whinges. I do wish they would find another description. I appreciate that 'organic', in this sense, is shorthand for foods and drinks where attempts have been made (with varying success and degrees of enforcement) to greatly limit the use of insecticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers. Scientifically, however, it simply means 'containing molecules with carbon', which is true of everything we eat!

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Seeing the Changes 2104

Funnel fungi ( Clitocybe spp) at Bynea.