It was the cheeses which did it; the five grim, rubbery, flavourless specimens, which died on the tongue and murdered the spirit. Throughout a long, dreary day, I and chef John Torode had been taste testing 80 organic products in 16 different categories. It seemed a good idea at the time. After all, sales of organics are booming, as we learnt last week with the news that they have just topped £1 billion a year. Britain is now the third biggest consumer of organic produce in the world after the United States and Germany. The time had come to see what was out there.
The results, as you can read for yourself in today's Observer Food Magazine, were dismal. Yes, there were some stand-out items that scored five out of five. (Ooh, the Swaddles Farm bacon!) But among the ranks of crisps and dried spaghetti, apples, marmalades, pasta sauces and smoked salmon there was a legion of mediocre products, many that scored zero or one. And then there were those terrible excuses for Cheddar. It confirmed to me what I had long thought: that the billion-pound organic food market is, for the most part, a gigantic con, and that its willing victims are the affluent middle classes.
There are three clear reasons for buying organic. The first is a laudable concern for the environment, but even just a cursory glance at the supermarket shelves would suggest this matters not a jot to its most eager consumers. Sure, an organic apple may have been grown on a happy pesticide-free tree, but what of the aviation fuel used to fly that organic apple to Britain, if it happens to have been grown in New Zealand as many are?
Our supermarkets are heavy with organic bananas from the Dominican Republic and organic mangoes from Brazil, sweet potatoes from the US and pears from Italy. How do you think they all got here? On foot? Then there is the packaging. Organic crisps are sold in non-organic plastic packets. Which brings us to the second reason: the benefit to health. Again it's a myth, as the Food Standards Agency found in a recent report which declared there was no evidence such products were either safer or nutritionally advantageous. And that's just the raw produce.
In an attempt to grow the market the big retailers have expanded their product ranges out of fruit, vegetables and meat and into processed foods. It is the ultimate victory of marketing over reality; there is still nothing healthy about those crisps. Indeed, good old Walkers non-organic ready salted crisps have marginally less fat and salt than Tesco's organic own brand versions.
Food associated health problems in this country - obesity, heart disease, diabetes - are caused by the over-consumption of fat, salt and sugar. They are nothing to do with non-organic raw produce. A chicken nugget is still a chicken nugget.
Which leaves the third and, I would say, most convincing reason for going organic: the quality of the product, and that's where we came in. A lot of what's out there is lousy. Those cheeses really were a gastronomic nightmare. And don't even get me started on the smoked salmon. It is relevant, I think, that I have yet to find a top-flight restaurant chef in Britain who will claim to use only organic ingredients. They know organic is not always best.
I am not, however, arguing that organic can never be better. I earn part of my living as a restaurant critic and I confess an overly-developed interest in what I shove in my mouth. I will spend money on good quality raw ingredients, because I can afford to do so. I also find certain factory farming methods - of chickens, for example - abhorrent. But I know that a free range chicken may not be the same as an organic chicken and that the free range may taste better. I know that crisps are bad for me and I ought not eat too many. And I know that organic food will not make me thinner. More's the pity.
