Matters of taste

There are benefits to organic food that the recent Food Standards Agency report missed. Plus, rediscovering the humble apple
August 27, 2009
THE REAL BENEFITS OF ORGANIC FOOD

At the end of July the government’s Food Standards Agency announced that there were no “important” nutritional differences between organic and conventionally produced food. The organic industry, now worth over £2.1bn a year in sales, was furious. The newspapers, which love the popping of a middle-class faith-bubble, smirked over the exposure of the “fraud of organic.” They had, of course, played a major role in setting up the scam, if scam it was. But there was nothing unusual there, or in the fact that the supermarkets, who profited greatly out of the organic boom, the biggest growth area in food retail this decade, have kept quiet about the shooting of this particular goose.

Why did the FSA feel the need to pronounce at all? Why not take on the big frauds in food marketing—the abuse of words like “natural” and “fresh,” say, or the multimillion pound business of selling tiny pots of sweetened milks and yoghurts as a potion to make your life better? Organic is hardly a villain in an industry that is rife with charlatans and confidence tricksters.

The debatable claim that organically produced food contains more nutrients is only one selling point. The FSA failed to consider that organic food production spurns pesticides, or that organically-produced meat is not pumped full of antibiotics. These are important to the shopper reaching for the organic product rather than the conventional one. And, leaving aside the fact that organic is kinder to the environment, it tastes better, especially in fruit and veg. What’s a decent Food Standards Agency up to, if it doesn’t consider the importance of pleasure?

I suspect the organic fad’s most beneficial effect has been to persuade people to pay more for their food. Reversing decades of decline in the real price of food is good for farming, for independent retailers, and it has a bearing on the pressing issue of the ridiculous amount of good food we throw away: these are all important to the government’s aim of reducing our dependence on food imports. According to Defra, 63 per cent of British farms are unable to make a workable profit. Conversion to organic was one of the few ways farmers had of making their businesses more viable. So the FSA’s damning of the sector seems about as un-joined up an approach to tackling Britain’s problems with the rural economy and “food security” as a government agency could possibly come up with.

THE FRUIT OF EDEN

In its outraged response to the FSA report on organic food, the Soil Association quoted many statistics: one was that the average conventionally produced apple may be sprayed 16 times with 30 different pesticides. In a new book The Fruit Hunters (Souvenir Press), Adam Leith Gollner mourns the debasing of the apple—the first fruit—by modern farming and food retail. He quotes Pablo Neruda, who said that when we eat an apple we become, for an instant, young again. When King Arthur died he went to Avalon, “Isle of Apples,” to munch on them for eternity. But what Thoreau called “fairy fruit—too beautiful to eat,” are now mundane, a chore to consume. We push them dutifully at our children, though we don’t much want to eat them ourselves. That’s because today’s system, busy getting apples to us flawless, polished and long-lasting, has forgotten the taste thing.

The other day a television producer rang me up to ask if I could be outraged on camera about the fact that the world’s biggest producer of apples for export is now China. I declined, although it is sad that Britain, an Isle of Apples ever since the Romans introduced them, now imports 90 per cent of them. But western China and the nearby steppe states have a much longer tradition of apple culture. (Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan, means “Rich with apple.”) Botanists believe the Ur-apple, from which all cultivars derive, originated in the forests of the Tian Shan mountains. This would indeed be the fruit of Eden.

The pomologists and “fruit votaries” Gollner encounters in his research are devoted to rediscovering heirloom varieties, like the American cider apple, the Taliaferro, lost in the 19th century. Thomas Jefferson called it his favourite. The juice it produced was “silky and champagne-like.” One man has been hunting the Taliaferro through forgotten orchards and seed banks for 30 years. But isn’t the problem with fruit less that we don’t grow the tasty but fragile species, more that we are jaded by excess?

In July, Texas researchers finished sequencing the melon genome. This will enable gene-splicing to produce fruit with more sugars, they boasted. But we don’t need sweeter fruit—we need less fruit, so we appreciate it again. Gollner talks wistfully of how his father, brought up in eastern Europe, won a rare prize at school: half an orange. And he regrets the passing of fruit orgies, when cultures from Kent to Peru would take their clothes off and celebrate the new season’s apples by indulging in “fruit-fuelled group sex” in the orchards. Anthropologists say this occurs all over the place, as soon as things get ripe. “Whenever I open a fig,” one fruit hunter tells Gollner, “I want to fuck it.”

I wouldn’t go that far. But if I saw an apple—even a supermarket Gala—once a month instead of every day, I might want to eat it. And, who knows, become for a moment young again.