Organic or GMO You Choose

Are you an advocate for organic food over conventional farming practices?

I never quite know what I’m going to blog about right up to the point where I am sitting at my laptop, but this is a topic that springs to mind and is relevant to food, food choices and kitchens so here’s my spin on it.

When I was a kid growing up in England pretty much everything grown was organic and the word “organic” was never heard. Of course whatever circumstances you’re born into are the norm for you at that time and as a child your awareness is limited to your family and immediate surrounding environment.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a countryside setting of fields and hedgerows, trees and woodlands. Adjacent to our house was a five acre field that my parents allowed a neighboring farmer to grow crops on. I used to come home from school to find Mr. Drumond plowing and I would get to climb on the back of the tractor and go up and down the field watching as the fresh furrows drew all kinds of birds to feed on worms and insects in the soil.

At the back of the house was a small paddock and in spring it would become a magical land of wild flowers, grasses and bracken ferns. They would grow to a height where my siblings and I were just tall enough to have our heads at flower level. There were Milk Maids and Cow Slips, Buttercups. Primroses, corn flowers, poppies, daisies and a myriad others who’s names I’ve long forgotten, but to us it was a sea of color and wonder.

 

Like most people I wasn’t aware of the change in farming practices. I couldn’t say when the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides began to appear. My father always liked to have his own vegetable garden and grew most of our produce, so it wasn’t until leaving home and buying groceries in a local supermarket that I started to realize that store bought fruits and veggies didn’t taste as good.

Over the years, with the huge growth in populations around the world, the demand for more affordable food has pressed farmers and science, to come up with ever more ingenious ways to generate bigger harvests as economically as possible. A scenario that has brought about a system where ever more fertilizers and pesticides are required to grow food crops with depleting nutritional value and a general impoverishment of the soil.

 

One of the scientific developments achieved in recent years, brought about by among other things, the need to reduce the use of chemical pesticides, was the introduction of genetically modified (GMO) foods. Genetic modification is intended to provide plants with resistance to biological attack from both insects and various climatic conditions thereby making crop failure a less likely outcome. 

What the ramifications of all our biological “tinkering” will have on our health is unclear and the jury is still out on that one. Without doubt most of us have already consumed a good deal of genetically modified food without knowing it and as far as we are aware, no ill effects. However, what the long term consequence will be is a question that has many people concerned enough to avoid GMO products at all costs. Is this attitude justified? Perhaps, but we cannot view the question in isolation. After all, what effect does biological manipulation have on the ecco-system. Aside from better harvests and more resilient crops, what are the implications for other plants, animals, birds and insects that depend on a balanced ecco-system for their survival? Making one particular species stronger and hardier than another perhaps makes for a weakness somewhere else.

 

I tend to think of science as a tool which in the right hands can bring great benefit to humanity, but that must obviously include all life forms including those we depend on. It’s a delicate balancing act messing with ecology. No one can see the ‘big picture’ with any degree of clarity, only our individual interpretations of it. Whether they be politicians, scientists, theologians, or philosophers, our views are subject to error and therefore it pays to tread cautiously when introducing technology that can have long term consequences.

All this leads back to the original question, are you an advocate for organic food over conventional farming practices? To my way of thinking we have strayed off course in our need to accommodate the ever increasing demand for food. I do not believe that the continued use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is the best method of providing healthy and nutritious produce. I do believe that a return to sustainable horticultural practices would mean a gradual increase in organic farming and a healthier environment.