The Food Standards Agency published a scientific review last week which found no evidence of organic food being more healthy than non-organic food.
This is being widely denounced amongst the environmental movement, in particular the Soil Association, as being a corporate scam and “bad science”.
Ben Goldacre in the Guardian makes a stab at seperating fact from fantasy, and explaining how scientific reviews here actually work:
In reality, this is not about organic food. The emotive commentary in favour of organic farming bundles together diverse and legitimate concerns about unchecked capitalism in our food supply: battery farming, corruptible regulators, or reckless destruction of the environment, where the producer’s costs do not reflect the true full costs of their activities to society, to name just a few. Each of these problems deserves individual attention. But just as we do not solve the problems of deceitfulness in the pharmaceutical industry by buying homeopathic sugar pills, so we may not resolve the undoubted problems of unchecked capitalism in industrial food production by giving money to the £2bn industry represented by the Soil Association.
And you thought slamming quack medicine was controversial…
I find it a dismal comment on these scientists (?) who seem to think that an examination of previous papers produced up to 50 years ago to be an objective scientific experiment to find out if organically produced food has any benefits over that produced by industrial agriculture. Not that the media is unbiased either. It has in great part become owned or at least a captive of corporate power. While I prefer organically produced food my preference is not based on whether it is better for me or not. I don’t know this. The danger for all of us is that corporate ownership of food production through the use of patented plant varieties that will dominate or infect non patented plants will control all food production. I understand that 80% of all GM crops, by area not variety, grown in the world today use Monsanto patents. Its my opinion that this company is using and has used its economic muscle to overcome weaknesses in its legal position.