GOOD TASTE

A lot of cranks swear by organic food,

says Martin Gayford, but that is no

reason for not buying it

ALMOST every Sunday. if I can, I walk into the centre of the town where we live, and shop at the Farmers' Market. There I find stalls piled with — depending on the season — slightly muddy greens and potatoes, pumpkins, beetroot, apples from local orchards, eggs, and various kinds of meat. Almost all of this produce is labelled 'organic', and I return laden with plastic bags full of it. Why?

The question is worth asking because I know, or am quite prepared to accept, that from a scientific point of view 'organic' farming is a load of old hooey — or, at least, a highly dubious proposition. All the hard-headed arguments are against it. Writing in the magazine Prospect, Dick Taverne, the Liberal Democrat peer, concluded that 'organic farming . .. has no foundation in science or logic. It is based on mysticism, a vague philosophy about nature and has some of the characteristics of a cult.' Oliver Walston has written in a similar vein in the Daily Telegraph, also convincingly.

The inspiration of the organic movement, the German thinker Rudolf Steiner, Taverne points out, also advocated planting according to the phases of the moon, and the enrichment of the soil with cows' horns stuffed with entrails. His heirs have moved on, but still the basis seems rooted in a quasi-religious feeling about the evil of technology in the form of agribusiness and the goodness of nature.

Consequently, when I am told — as I was recently by the wife of an eminent sculptor — that non-organic carrots (one can scarcely call them 'inorganic') are filled with toxic chemicals derived from insecticides and fertilisers, I don't really believe it. And when at a dinner party the woman to my left informed me that organic farming was one of those quiet, slow movements that revolutionise the world, I snorted and spoilt the atmosphere. And yet still I buy the stuff.

The reason is obvious: it is likely to taste better. Quite a lot of people know this already. A survey by Health Which? discovered that 68 per cent of consumers buying organic food did so because they thought it had more flavour (as against 83 per cent who are nervous of pesticides and 75 per

cent who want to he kinder to the environment). Taverne is impatient with this point. Homegrown organic produce is fresher, he argues, because it has a shorter shelf-life, and fresher food tastes better; it is nothing to do with whether or not it is organic. But, of course, the fact that it is fresher and tastes better is a strong reason for buying it, irrespective of whether one believes a lot of mumbo-jumbo distantly descended from German romanticism.

And there is more to it than that. Agribusiness, or the industrialisation of agriculture, may or may not be damaging the environment and poisoning us all, but there is little doubt that it has had a detrimental effect on one of the key aspects of food: the way it responds after entering the mouth.

My grandmother used quite often to muse at mealtimes that either her taste buds had lost their vigour with the onset of old age, or modern food was lacking in savour. At the time, I used privately to suspect the former. On reflection, however, it is plain that the latter must have been the explanation for her experience. Anyone who — as she did — began their eating career in the 1890s would have noticed during their lifetime a catastrophic decline in the flavour of food.

Modern methods of farming and retailing may have had the effect of providing lots of cheap and —pace those who believe in poisoned carrots — healthy food; but they have also caused huge increases in blandness. At the extremes the differences are truly dramatic. Compare a frozen, supermarket battery-chicken with a freerange, 'organic' one from a good butcher. The differences in flavour with meat, pork particularly, are spectacular.

We in our family made a useful discovery after a visit to a farm run by the Rare Breeds Trust. While others were photographing their toddlers playing with the fluffy lambs, my wife — who is fearless in such things — asked an attendant how one could eat these creatures. He surreptitiously slipped her the address of an organic butchery concern. In the matter of meat, self-interest and tender conscience are easily combined, since pigs which have lived miserable, tormented lives in pig-units and battery-chickens are not worth eating.

Organic producers, in their soft-headed way, worry much more about the way in which their animals are looked after and how they are slaughtered. Large-scale meat producers sell their animals at market and have no control over how they are killed. And yet the method of dispatch can directly affect the taste of meat.

The long-term taste decline, or flavour slump, no doubt has many causes. It is not simply a matter of the method of farming. The choice of plant variety and breed of stock has a great deal to do with it; so, too, has the amount of storage and transport the stuff has undergone — which in turn helps to determine which variety of fruit or vegetable is grown. But varieties which have good travelling characteristics seldom make good eating. Indeed, beans from Kenya or potatoes from Morocco, whether organic or not, are more or less guaranteed free of taste.

The reverse — the fact that they haven't been transported for hundreds or even thousands of miles, stored and packed in little plastic boxes — helps to explain the sensational difference between the fruit and vegetables you will buy in a Mediterranean market to cook in your holiday villa and British supermarket goods. A pepper bought in Tuscany and a Dutch one grown on water and chemicals are two completely different things. No doubt, climate and soil have something to do with that difference, but so, too, do methods of farming and distribution.

The organic-farming movement may be a rather muddleheaded response to all this, but it is a response. It is true that eatables labelled organic may have all the characteristics of mass-market food, except that they will have been grown with the help of more old-fashioned fertilisers and pesticides, and be more expensive. But, on the other hand, organic producers are more likely to be small, and it is small farms — though not of much interest to the government — which tend to grow food worth eating. (There are days when I feel that the absurd Common Agricultural Policy would justify all the expense and corruption if it truly preserved small farming in Europe.) So, strictly for gastronomic reasons, a local organic producer is worth patronising. That's why I shall continue, weather and work permitting, to make my weekly trek to market. Because the old adage is truer than ever: cooking is quite easy, it's shopping that's difficult.