Environmental campaigner Martin Cooper writes about food labelling in his September column.
I was making an order for products in my shop the other day when it struck me that we label things organic, rather than non-organic, which seems bizarre.
For thousands of years, we have grown food using natural methods, using crop rotation, composting and companion planting.
These weren't considered ‘alternative’ practices, they were simply farming and it’s only in recent years that we started covering crops with synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilisers.
Yet somehow chemical-intensive agriculture has become the norm and traditional methods have to be specially certified and labelled.
This just does not seem right.
Take a non-organic apple – it could well have been treated with a cocktail of insecticides, fungicides, synthetic chemicals and post-harvest preservatives, and no matter how well we wash them, residues of these substances remain, yet nowhere on that apple will it say this.
The Pesticide Action Network (PAN UK), a UK charity that monitors official data on pesticide residues on our food, produce the Dirty Dozen - a list of the fifteen most affected crops in the UK.
PAN UK’s research focuses on produce with multiple pesticide residues because government safety limits only focus on one pesticide at a time, ignoring the fact that chemicals can be more harmful when combined, known as the ‘cocktail effect’ – important when we’re eating more than one of the fruit or vegetables on the list in a day.
It’s strange that we demand ingredient lists on processed foods, allergen warnings on packaged goods, and nutritional information on everything yet we don’t ask it of our fresh produce.
The agrochemical industry has normalised chemical farming, while positioning organic production as luxurious and specialty.
We’ve been convinced pesticide residues are so minimal they are irrelevant, despite growing evidence linking chronic low-level exposure to various health issues.
But transparency shouldn't depend on proving harm – we have a fundamental right to know what's been done to our food – we should be allowed to make an informed choice about what we are putting into our bodies.
Labelling that details all the chemicals used to grow our food would transform our food system.
Expecting farmers to go through an expensive certification process to prove organic produce seems like madness, instead, this Organic September we should be putting pressure on those using chemicals to reduce their use, creating better food for us all.
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