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BY STANLEY FELDMAN

THE MYTH: Non-organic foods are covered in harmful pesticides.

THE FACT: One of the pesticides deemed ‘safe’ by organic producers carries a warning that it is harmful to fish.

As I look back to my childhood, it seems that every summer’s day was sunny and filled with joy. I cannot remember it raining so hard that it spoiled a day out in the country. The food tasted better, the tomatoes were juicier, the strawberries tasted sweet and succulent and the peas that came from the pods were so delicious that many were eaten raw before my mother could cook them. I realise that my memory is highly selective – there must have been rainy days, rotten tomatoes, sour strawberries and worm-infested peas, but somehow things today never seem quite as good as they were in our youth.

It is the same rose-tinted nostalgia that is used to promote organic food. The cult of natural ‘organic food’ is based on a belief that, while the sun may not always have shone in days gone by, the food was better and healthier before the advent of modern farming and horticulture, when the crops were liberally fertilised with manure from animal faeces or rotting vegetable waste, in the form of compost.

This belief has been energetically reinforced by the scare stories of the eco-warriors who have blamed every ill – from heart disease and cancer to global warming, pollution, less biodiversity and the rape of the countryside – on the perceived evils of modern farming.

As soon as one spurious claim is disproved another scare is invented. So vociferous and well funded is the propaganda that they have caused many otherwise sensible people, and some government agencies, to embrace the organic bandwagon, although no one has produced any evidence in its favour. By scaring the public, the organic lobby has created a billion-pound market in the UK for food that is up to 40 per cent more expensive than that produced by conventional farming and from which it is indistinguishable.

The term organic food is in itself misleading. The separation into ‘organic’ and ‘nonorganic’ was based on the belief that some substances contained a life-giving property: these were originally called ‘organic’. In recent times it has come to mean chemicals containing molecules based on a carbon atom. So all food is organic (with the technical exception of water). There is no such thing as inorganic food. Whenever a pressure group resorts to a nonsense name, in order to suggest that it has nature on its side, that it has the monopoly on what is good, or that it is the only path that faithful followers of purity and truth can take, one should smell a rat.

The Soil Association, the high priests of this cult, believe that chemicals, whether organic or inorganic, are bad, a danger to the consumer, and will possibly bring death to the planet. Natural substances, by contrast, are apparently good. Yet all infections are caused by natural, organic bacteria; many organic substances produced in plants and berries, such as the belladonna of the deadly nightshade and the prussic acid in almonds, are highly poisonous; the ‘natural’ copper sulphate that is recommended as an organic treatment for fungal infections is so toxic to marine life that copper-based antifouling of boats has been banned in many countries. If a fungicide is not used and the ergot fungus infects cereal crops, then the unsuspecting organic consumer may end up with gangrene of fingers and toes. In all fairness to the Soil Association, it does permit the use of pesticides provided they come from an approved list. Some have reassuringly innocent names such as ‘Soft Soap’, which turns out to be octodecanoic acid and carries a label warning that it is dangerous to fish.

The main thrust of the argument used by adherents of this cult seems to be that organic fertiliser, by which it is implied that it is produced from animal excreta or rotting vegetable waste, is necessary in order to produce food that is both nutritious and safe. This supposition is difficult to support. Manure is teeming with bacteria, many of which are pathogenic, and a few lethal. Compost rots because of the action of these bacteria, and, while they are in the main less harmful than those in manure, most sensible consumers would be reluctant to ingest them in the produce they purchase.

The root systems of plants can absorb only those nutriments that are in solution. They cannot take up particulate matter. Before the plant can use any fertiliser, organic faeces, rotting vegetable waste or chemical additive, it must first be broken down and rendered soluble in water. This necessitates reducing organic matter to its basic chemical form. It is true that in organic fertiliser these are usually more complex chemicals, but they must be rendered into the same simple basic chemicals in the plant before they can be used to encourage its growth.

There is absolutely no rational reason why all the breakdown products of organic fertiliser should not be supplied in a basic chemical form rather than leaving it to the bacteria in the soil to produce them from compost. At the end of the day, the plant uses both chemical and organic fertiliser in the same way in the same chemical processes that are essential for its growth. The main difference is that chemical fertiliser is produced with a standardised value of its content, and does not contain the dangerous bacterial pathogens present in organic waste.

It was reportedly Prince Albert who started the vogue for using natural, organic household waste to fertilise the kitchen garden at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Prince Albert died of typhoid fever, a disease caused by ingesting food contaminated with the faeces from a carrier who may not have exhibited symptoms of the disease.

The other canon of organic law is the avoidance of known effective pesticides and the preference for naturally occurring compounds such as sulphur and copper-based chemicals to control infestations. This again is illogical. It is based on the belief that the organophosphate pesticides are poisonous and naturally occurring chemicals are not. This ignores the fact that sulphur and copper-based ones are also poisonous. Both organophosphate pesticides and naturally occurring chemicals can be poisonous; it is all a matter of dose. The German-Swiss doctor and chemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) pointed out ‘nothing is without poison; it is the dose alone that makes it so’. When one looks at those parts of the world where pesticides are not freely available (usually because of cost), it is found that over a third of all the food produced is eaten by pests, whereas in the Western world, where pesticides are used, the loss is reduced by 41 per cent (figures from the WHO and UN Environment Programme, 1990).

The level of pesticides in our food is carefully monitored and kept below a very conservative safety level. The chemicals have a short half-life and have not been shown to accumulate in the body. Their level in food is way below that at which it is likely to cause symptoms, even in the most sensitive individual. Although pesticides in food have been blamed for a variety of ill-defined syndromes, including cancers, extensive medical studies have failed to implicate them as the cause of any known clinical condition. There are no mysterious unknown disease states caused by the prolonged intake of small doses of these chemicals. Since they do not accumulate in the food chain or in the body, chronic toxicity is improbable. As Sir John Krebs, the former chairman of the Food Standards Agency, pointed out in Nature in 2002, ‘a single cup of coffee contains natural carcinogens equal to at least a year’s worth of synthetic carcinogenic residues in the diet’.

The various conditions that have been attributed to these chemicals by the food faddists bear no relationship to any of the known effects of the pesticides. There have been sufficient cases of self-induced organophosphate poisoning to recognise the symptoms of poisoning (pesticides are a common form of suicide in Third World countries). It starts with excessive salivation and lachrymation and is invariably followed by painful gut cramps and an uncontrollable twitching of the muscles. Pesticides are not commonly associated with any allergic conditions.

Virtually all the chemical pesticide residue that occurs in food is found on the outside of fruit and vegetables and is easily washed off. If the choice has to be made between pest-infected food, food exposed to bacterial pathogens and minute harmless amounts of pesticide, then to choose not to use them is the equivalent of a patient with pneumonia refusing antibiotics in favour of leeches and bleeding.

The inconsistent approach of the advocates of organic food becomes apparent when one considers organic eggs. These have to come from organically reared chickens. To be an organically reared chicken, the bird has to eat 80 per cent organic food for six weeks. No effort is made to control the other 20 per cent, which may contain potential carcinogens or toxic material. At the end of that time, any eggs it lays will be deemed organic and therefore much more expensive. Organic eggs and chickens should not be confused with free-range chickens, which can roam more freely and eat whatever they like. Organic chickens are not kept in battery cages. To conform with the organic requirements, they must be allowed 1 square metre of space per 25 lb of chicken.

There are many mysteries about what constitutes organic food. If a banana is squashed and its juice extracted to produce ‘banana flavouring’, it can be analysed and shown to be the chemical amyl acetate. However, if one produces amyl acetate by adding vinegar to amyl alcohol it cannot be called ‘organic’. It is the same chemical, it tastes the same, it smells the same but it is not natural and it is therefore presumed to be bad. The same logic suggests that acetic acid is somehow different from the acid in vinegar, or citric acid from that of lemon-juice extract.

It has been suggested that prepackaged, cleaned lettuce is dangerous, as it is washed in a solution containing chlorine. The initiates of this scare fail to point out that the amount of chlorine residue in the product is less than that found in most swimming-pool water and in some drinking water.

A walk around the organic shelves of a supermarket leaves one amazed at the gullibility of its patrons. The produce is not particularly inviting in its appearance, and its taste is, for the most part, identical to that of the normal produce. A ten-year, obsessively controlled trial of foods grown in similar positions, on the Boarded Farm study in Essex, compared organically grown crops with those produced by conventional farming, using integrated farm management. The study revealed that the best results, judged by soil quality, effect on bird life, biodiversity and yield, came from the integrated farm management fields. Blind tasting of the crops from these studies failed to reveal any consistent difference between organic and nonorganic produce. This is hardly surprising, since taste is largely a result of the genetic makeup of the particular strain of the crop that was planted, the time it has spent maturing before being picked and the climatic conditions during its growth.

Although most produce, be it organic or not, tastes better when freshly picked, the use of preservatives can prolong the freshness of some produce. Some preservatives are available for use in organic foods but they are seldom used in organic vegetables and fruits, which consequently have a short shelf life – as evidenced by wilting lettuces and bendy cucumbers.

Today, the zealots of the cult of organic food are making ever more irrational inroads into the way we live. They are promoting organic clothing and toiletries with the implied assurance that these are somehow less likely to cause allergies and skin disease. There is no evidence to support this claim, which plays on the fears of parents with children who suffer from skin allergies.

So why do people pay up to 40 per cent more for organic products? Is it a cynical confidence trick to exploit consumer ignorance? Is it the belief that, should little Johnny turn out to have allergies/asthma/autism or a brain tumour, this might have been prevented if he had been brought up on organic food and worn pyjamas made from organic cotton? Or is it simply a matter of choice? It is difficult to believe that the proponents of organic produce are all part of an evil conspiracy to defraud the public, although they often use unworthy, unscientific scare tactics, conjuring up all sorts of disasters to frighten the nonbelievers. Most just seem to be victims of their own propaganda, who yearn after bygone days when the sun shone all the time.

However, there is another side to the story. The food industry has to accept some of the blame. It has too often put cost before quality, marketed fruit picked before it has had time to ripen and mature on the tree, and encouraged the production of food that looks good on the supermarket shelf rather than produce that tastes good when eaten. I believe that our memories of apples picked straight from the tree, tasting crisp and juicy, of strawberries that were sweet and succulent and peas that one could not resist eating raw have some factual basis. It is our desire to get back to the days of real, fresh, ripe fruit and vegetables that has encouraged the spurious market for organic food.