by Jay Rayner
The quality of the food is, of course, only one of three reasons why you might choose to buy food designated organic. There is also its impact on both human health and the environment. The evidence for the first is what might, politely, be called scant and, impolitely, cobblers. Time and again there have been studies and, more importantly, meta-studies – reviews of many different studies, looking for trends – and each time they come up with the same result. Nutrient levels might be slightly higher in some organic produce than in conventional. There may, for example, be more polyphenols in organic tomatoes than non-organic, more minerals in organic milk than non-organic. But the scientific evidence that any of this has any impact on human health, especially on people already eating a generally balanced diet, isn’t there. In the developed world we may be over-nourished occasionally, but we’re not malnourished. As a major study by the UK’s Food Standards Agency put it in 2009, there were ‘no important differences in the nutrition content or any additional health benefits of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food’.
Ah, but what about the pesticides used in conventional farming? Haven’t there been studies which have shown that they have been linked to higher incidences of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s? By eating non-organic food don’t I risk ending my life not recognizing my own kids and wearing an adult nappy? No, you don’t. There have been such studies. But in each case those studies were of farm labourers in direct contact with the filthiest of chemicals, not of consumers who had eaten the produce they had been used on. Calling flimsy the evidence that eating organic food is better for you would be a terrible insult to the sturdiness of tissue paper. The chef Antony Worrall Thompson may say things like, ‘Instead of popping pills we should eat more organic food,’ but that just tells you more about him than it does the food.
The biggest problem with the organic movement is that it is based on a false premise which says: man-made really bad, non-man-made really good. Oh yes? Antibiotics are man-made and they are a very good thing. They have saved hundreds of millions of lives, perhaps billions. The next time you or a loved one develops a raging bacillus infection, or a suppurating abscess eating away at your innards, trust me, you will be grateful for every single man-made antibiotic in the medicine cabinet. (The fact that some of them have been overused, resulting in resistance in certain cases, does not make the antibiotics themselves bad, only the protocols around their prescription.) Likewise, E. Coli O157 is entirely non-man-made. People have had nothing to do with it. It’s found in the guts of cattle. It can cause haemorrhagic diarrhoea, kidney failure and, funnily enough, death. Being dead is absolutely no fun. There are lots of things not made by us which can do that to you. There are berries and mushrooms, spider bites and radioactive minerals. Not being made by people does not prove anything. Copper sulphate is also naturally occurring, which probably explains why the Soil Association, which accredits organic farms in the UK, allows its use to tackle potato blight. It’s horrible stuff, toxic to wildlife and not great for people either, causing major damage to the liver.
‘If somebody attempted to introduce copper sulphate as a pesticide now,’ says my Fenland potato farmer Bill Legge, ‘there’s no way it would ever get approval. It’s just too nasty. It’s only still around now because it’s been in use for so long.’
That mother nature: she really can be a bitch sometimes.
Copper sulphate aside, the most persuasive argument in support of the organic movement is its impact on the environment and, more importantly, the debate we have around our stewardship of it. On issues like biodiversity, soil replenishment and water management, organic farmers have clearly been leaders. Indeed it’s arguable that they have been too successful, at least if their aim really is to see all food move into a certified system of organic production. Notions of sustainability in agriculture have shifted from the fringes over the past two decades to become so completely mainstream that the organic movement has been left looking redundant. Even Patrick Holden, who was director of the Soil Association for sixteen years from 1995, admitted as much to me during a question and answer session at the NFU’s annual conference in 2011. ‘We have been too exclusive,’ he said. ‘We have separated ourselves from the rest of agriculture; and we have said we are right and you are wrong. That has to end.’
On top of that comes the ‘intensification’ bit of sustainable intensification. If we need to produce more food to feed more people, is organic really the way to go? In 2012 the highly respected journal Nature published a paper by Professor John P. Ragnold of Washington State University which said that ‘organic farming systems in developed countries produce yields that are 20 per cent lower than their conventional counterparts’. (The paper was a meta-analysis of multiple studies into the yields of organic farming systems.) Ragnold could hardly be dismissed as a critic of organic farming: he ran the only undergraduate course in organic agricultural systems in the US. In an interview with Julian Baggini, working on his own book about the philosophy of food, Patrick Holden’s successor as director of the Soil Association, Helen Browning, acknowledged there was a problem. ‘On biodiversity, organic clearly has a lot to offer,’ she said. ‘On climate change, on the greenhouse gas side of things, it does in some areas and not others.’
Except even on biodiversity it’s not that great, because the benefit is entirely local. We have to think globally when it comes to food production. If organic yields are 20 per cent lower than those of conventional farming, that shortfall will have to be made up somewhere. And that somewhere will almost certainly mean a conventional farm abroad. The biodiversity issue is simply being shunted to another country. Plus there is the issue of ‘virtual hectares’. All the food we eat requires land for its production. Any food we can’t produce domestically requires the economic annexing of land – those ‘virtual hectares’ – in a another country. It is as if we are pretending the land mass of the country in which we live is millions of hectares bigger than it actually is. And if that land is growing food for us, then it’s not growing food for the people who live on it. This is a Very Big Problem.
Left out of all this is the issue of raising livestock under organic standards. While there’s little doubt that the intentions of organic livestock farming are good – to give the animals as good and healthy a life as possible – there are long arguments over the virtues of the way it is meant to be achieved. For example, is it really in the interests of animals to not vaccinate them, unless there is a specific threat of disease nearby? We don’t treat our own children like this. We vaccinate because of what we know about the way diseases might spread in the future, not because of what’s already happening. Indeed, were cannibalism to be less of a tiresome old taboo – I can think of a whole bunch of people who would make good eating – it’s hard to imagine that any of us humans, even the most head-banging, locavore, grow-your-own, farmers’-market food warrior, could ever be certified organic. Most of us would be fit only to be ground down and turned into the lowest-quality value-range sausages, the protein levels bulked up through high levels of our own ground-down skin.
Then again, the amount of meat we consume and the way it is raised under all farming systems leads to such messy arguments that the pros and cons of the organic system are frankly little more than a sideshow. Be in no doubt: killing animals for your dinner is a filthy business. That was something I got to grips with a very, very long time ago; indeed, well before I got that lovely wedding suit made.
It was three decades ago, to be exact.
Let me explain.
8.
SOMETHING TO CHEW ON
When I was 16 I took a Saturday job as a butcher’s boy. My greatest advantage in the position was my size. I was bigger than the butcher, and in a shop full of large bits of dead animal this was a good thing. I was built for carrying carcasses. This also meant it was very difficult for me to damage the stock. My one other Saturday job had been in a delicatessen in Stanmore, where so many of my Jewish brethren lived, and
it had ended badly. There I filled up on sweet, crumbly fish balls nicked from the walk-in fridge out back, and disgraced myself with a huge tray of cream-heavy cakes. Going to restock the front window, I carried the tray high over my head, trying to prove my dexterity, balance and poise, none of which were words anybody would ever have associated with me then or now. Naturally I lost control of the tray, but only once I’d reached the display. I destroyed both the cakes in the window and the new ones I was bringing up from the back. At the end of the day I did the decent thing and resigned. They didn’t try to stop me. They may actually have held the door open for me.
So now I had a new job, in a butcher’s shop, and that seemed a much safer place for a boy like me to be, even allowing for the knives and the graters and the mincers and the bleach. Plus I liked meat. When I was little I was the one who was always given the bone to gnaw on: the narrow end of the roast leg of lamb – the ankle, if you like – which was more tough, crisped skin than meat; the chicken’s wing and drumstick; the curving rib from a proper joint of beef. We made jokes about cavemen and how really I was still one of those. I was the short, squat boy with the bone clasped between his teeth. Mine was a childhood marred by softness and roundness. From the age of 10 to about 12 I was constantly mistaken for a girl. Once a man came up to me outside a train station where I was waiting to meet friends and said, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I sighed wearily, ‘I’m a boy.’ The man turned to a colleague on the other side of the pavement and said, ‘You’re right. I owe you a fiver.’ My gender was so unobvious, people were taking bets over it.
So the bone thing mattered. It suggested a certain hardness. I defined my boyness by eating animals with my hands.
It would be helpful now if I could say that I understood then that the meat I was eating came from animals, and I suppose, in the abstract, I did. Curiously, given that we lived in the London suburbs, there was a farm not far from where I lived, a real one in the shadow of Harrow on the Hill, where black and white cows grazed. Given they were Friesians, it was probably a dairy farm. I quite liked looking at them. As a very small child I did the endless pointing and gasping thing. But that enjoyment in no way interfered with my ability to eat their sisters. There were no flirtations with vegetarianism, fuelled by youthful outrage and disgust. As far as I was concerned, meat came from my mother’s bountiful nature. She was a deeply unsentimental woman. I think the privations of childhood had led her to regard sentiment as at best an affectation and at worst a luxury she could ill afford. She rolled her eyes at slush and dewy-eyed posturing. The meat we ate was just part of dinner, for which the animals had always been destined. I liked it very much. Certainly the job in the butcher’s where my parents did their weekly shopping made a kind of sense.
On my first morning I was introduced to George, the owner. I had expected someone big and heavy with tree-trunk arms, a machete tucked into the waistband of his apron, blood on his hands. He was nothing like that. He was short and thin and his nose was sharp and pointed and had a little groove at the end so he looked not unlike a weasel. And he smoked far too much. His cough rumbled upwards from the soles of his boots, a lank forelock bouncing on his forehead each time his lungs twitched. He balanced his burning fags on the edge of the butcher’s block, red smoking tip over the edge, ash tumbling to mingle with the sawdust on the floor, where I would later sweep it up. Distracted perhaps by a customer, or stock coming in, he would often forget that he had placed it on the block and light another. The neglected cigarette would burn all the way down and leave a blackened groove where it had taken the wood away with it. All of the butcher’s blocks had these charcoaled grooves. Eventually George’s smoking would kill him.
His hands bore the mark of a hundred missed chops and slices. I expected by the end of my time to have become like him, to have hard, grooved hands to show to my friends, trophies of some courageous struggle with real, working life. That such scars would have been gained in combat with dead things, not exactly known for fighting back, and therefore would be proof only of my incompetence with blades, never occurred to me. I was a butcher’s boy. On Saturday’s my A levels could go to hell. It was meat that mattered.
The only real cut I ever got was on my little finger. I was washing up a sink full of mucky knives and watched with surprise as the bubbles turned pink. That was the only time I got to play with them, thankfully. On my first day George took one look at me and recognized where my talents lay. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Get that leg of beef and take it to the fridge. And mind, pick it up from the bottom or you’ll do your back.’ I quickly discovered that in a butcher’s shop a lump of dead animal becomes just another weight to be moved. I heaved it up and stumbled the ten feet to the large walk-in fridge. I weighed it: 115 pounds. George was pleased. ‘You’ll do all right.’ Cough. ‘It’s a bit of a mucky business, this one.’ Cough. ‘But you’ll soon get used to it.’ He returned to disembowelling chickens.
The fridge was my domain on Saturdays. I was the one who fetched and carried from it and the one who cleaned it out. Being a butcher’s boy was an unending battle with congealed blood. It wasn’t so much the floor that was the problem. These were still the days of sawdust, and it soaked up the blood brilliantly. At the end of the day a hard broom would get that off. It was the white porcelain tiles. They loved the blood, couldn’t bear to let it go. I spent my days with my hand in a bucket of hot water and bleach, scrubbing and running from one end of the shop to the other mopping round the fridge and then starting all over again. At the end of the day I would collect my money, capital for whatever night out I had planned, and head home to stand under the shower for hours on end in the hope that I might be able to wash away the smell of raw dead animal and bleach. I lived in fear that it might limit my chances of copping off, that some girl I fancied would get close to me only to recoil from the whiff of something akin to the cleaning fluids used in public toilets.
I stayed for the best part of a year until the revision timetable for my A levels called. George gave me double my £9 salary that day and wished me well. I’d been all right as a butcher’s boy, he said. Not the soft-handed nancy boy he thought I was going to be. I was proud of that. People may have stopped mistaking me for a girl a few years before. But I hadn’t exactly turned into some big hunk of man; softness and roundness were still my calling cards. So to be told I had measured up in a task that required physical strength mattered to me. In later years, as a journalist writing about food, I would find myself in a butcher’s and would tell them that I had worked in a shop just like this one as a Saturday job. They would nod at me slowly, approvingly. Against all the odds, this made me one of them.
Then again, butchers have always seemed pleased to see me, perhaps because I have always looked like a good customer. A man cannot hide his true nature, and in my restaurant reviews I have never tried to. I eat meat. I like the taste of crisped fat and well-aged muscle seared outside, and the way the Maillard reaction – the browning process which gives a steak its big burst of flavour – delivers a huge hit of that something savoury the Japanese call umami. (It’s also found in big-flavoured foods like fresh Parmesan cheese and salted anchovies.) I like cutting into a steak and finding it still to be the colour of a baby’s hot cheek. I like birds roasted in butter, and the crunchy skin on hunks of lamb and pig and their cured brethren, the sausages and the bacon that ensure very little of the animal is ever wasted. I like cooking these things and I like eating them. I could dress this up with flowery self-justifications, and there are a few of those to come, but I don’t have the feet for dancing on a pinhead. Better for now, I think, to face straight on those who object to my meat-eating and say I do it because I like it.
A lot of my writing about meat cookery has been taken as a shameless attempt to goad vegetarians. Some of it is. There is such clumsy, muddled thinking among so many vegetarians that they deserve to be goaded. They deserve to be made angry. And anyway, they need the exercise. The dairy- and egg-eating vegetarians – the major
ity – fail to recognize that they are as complicit in animal slaughter as I am. Only females produce milk and lay eggs. What do these cheese soufflé eaters think happens to all the males at birth? Do they think they are freed to gambol across field and brook, over stream and through forest, to end their lives of natural causes? Of course not. The overwhelming majority are killed at birth, superfluous to requirements. Bull calves are shot in the head with a bolt, because too many of us won’t eat veal. (The farmers hate it; many have told me they leave the farm on the day it happens.) Chicks are asphyxiated or have their necks broken or worse: look up ‘maceration of chicks’ online. Animal husbandry is an ugly business, even when it’s pretending to be neither ugly nor too corporate. Dairy- and egg-eating vegetarians are as deep steeped in the blood of it all as the rest of us.
Vegans occupy the moral high ground here, of course. Their arguments are philosophically robust. They have an internal logic, which is to say they believe eating animals is wrong and by swearing off dairy and eggs – and, God help us, honey – they are consistent. That doesn’t mean they are right. It is possible to survive on a vegan diet. Millions do so. But there’s an awful lot of evidence that it needs to be supplemented with other things to make it complete. There are issues around protein deficiency. It is labour intensive.