Dear Sanet,
I've copied portions of a message I sent to a friend In San Francisco.
She works for a large organic produce wholesaler. It's some
impressions of mine from the Soil Association Conference in
Cirencester UK last weekend.
It was quite interesting in that they didn't focus on growing
techniques at all, preferring to run the Conference as a series of
general meetings, with all delegates present. They were trying to
come to some understanding of where to go from here. In the words of
the president (Patrick Holden), 'When the ideas of any radical
movement for change are embraced by the mainstream there comes a
moment when it is of vital importance to re-examine one's founding
principals in order to avoid losing direction.' I'm not sure if he
got the direction from the membership he was looking for but it did
make for interesting discussion. There were a number of lectures on
food quality. Basically trying to prove that organic food is better
than the other stuff. To my mind, none of it amounted to much. A
scientist from Denmark has been working with images of plant
tinctures, dissolved in a salt (copper sulphate maybe) solution and
precipitated in petri dishes. A crystal pattern is formed, much like
a tree with many branches and the same pattern remains consistent with
the same precipitate. He's found that organically grown compounds
form finer, more delicate images than non-organic and makes a leap of
faith by calling this difference, 'vitality'. Nothing has been done
to prove that finer images mean the food is better for you and he
admits this but still infers a lot with the term, vitality. BD people
from Germany have taken this further (as is their way) and formed a
vitality index with the images proving (lo and behold) that BD crops
produce the finest images, organic next and conventional dead last.
They seem convinced that these fine images indicate quality and do
make this assumption but I saw nothing to convince me this was the
case. That conventional and organic crops produce consistently
different images was interesting if I believed their research (I'd
want to see it replicated) and could be a valuable tool for
certification or further research into food quality but I think is
possibly the wrong way to go.
Many of us in the movement are looking for conclusive scientific proof
that organically produced food is healthier than the other stuff,
which we can use (I suppose) as ammunition in the marketplace. My
feeling is that this is likely to backfire on us because of background
pollution among other things. It is also going to alienate
conventional farmers who are threatened enough when they see organic
food placed alongside their own products in the supermarkets. Just
the presence of organic food implies a hierarchy of sorts and is the
impetus behind the interest in 'Natural' or 'Greenprint' certification
schemes as we've seen in B.C. Don't we want conventional farmers to
convert? My obsession with organic farming has always been drawn from
my dedication to the environmental movement. I think organic farming
is better for the earth and naturally I want to see more of it so
there's less poisons produced and spread around.
From your perspective in the wholesale business you probably
understand people buy organic food because they believe it is
healthier for them, but I never tell them this. I tell them it's a
better way to farm; better for the soil, for farmers themselves, and
for their communities. This stuff does not require a leap of
faith - we know it and we can prove it. But the health aspect does
require that leap and rather than obsessing about scientific proof
perhaps we should be promoting our food based upon what we do know -
the reasons most of us are organic farmers in the first place.
Paddy
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