January 5 2007

Happy New Year! Apologies for the delay in updating this blog. I had meant to write nearer to Christmas but was rather distracted by one of my presents. A violent stomach bug kindly given by my two-year-old nephew.

Generous to a fault, he gave the same gift to the entirety of three different families over the festive season. On the downside it meant I ate and drank nothing for three days, spent two more days restricted to toast and water and couldn't play with my new sonic screwdriver for the best part of a week.
On the upside I lost a stone even before the New Year's Resolutions kicked in.
So that's my diet tip for the year, find a small, sick child and rub them all over yourself.
But, before the illness, we did manage to enjoy a virtually organic Christmas.
Much of the food for the feast was ordered online, many of the recipes were researched online and much of the complex calculation required to cook a Christmas meal for 13 were done online, using NASA's latest supercomputer.
"Computer, I'd like to cook a giant turkey with three kinds of stuffing, four different vegetables, roast parsnips in maple syrup, real gravy and Nigella's goosefat roast potatos without getting up before 8am, and have it on the table for 12.30pm."
"Im afraid I can't let you do that Dave."
You get the gist.
The turkey itself, a 12lb beast, was ordered online weeks in advance from Well Hung Meat in Buckfasteligh and led an idyllic, organic life in the fields of Fowey before arriving at my door plucked and chilled on December 23.
I avoided online shopping for most of the vegetables, knowing that Tesco has a strange habit of throwing in the most bizarre of substitutes if they run out of the thing you ask for. You could order organic parsnips, organic brussels and organic cranberry sauce and instead end up with a small Mongolian tribesman pondering the meaning of faith in the 21st century. Or a bottle of Cif.
So shopping was done in 'the real world' at two supermarkets and a farm shop, but some of the trickier ingredients did involve online shopping and research.
I was determined to ensure all ingredients of every element were organic, which involved ordering the icing sugar for the Christmas cake from a mill shop in the north of England.
You will find, if you ever develop the desire to eat organically to an obsessive compulsive level, that the internet is the only way to track down all the ingredients you need.
And then back to the net for recipes. I tracked down several different versions of sausagemeat stuffing online so I could modify my dad's recipe to cater for my other-half's dad's tomato allergy. Is there no end to what you can do with the world wide web? Did Tim Berners-Lee ever envisage this is what his invention would be used for? Why would you put tomato in sausagemeat stuffing anyway?
And finally various websites allowed me to convert pounds to kilos, farenheit to celsius and perform various other complex calculations to ensure the meal hit the table just an hour later than planned with potatos slightly overdone and brussels just half-cooked. The under-cooking was, by the way, deliberate and thanks to the net. Just tap sulphur and sprouts into Google for the reasoning, but to cut a long story short it means the only smells in your lounge after Christmas lunch are pine needles, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and children regurgitating too much chocolate while bouncing around on moon shoes.
So in the post-25/12 world it is time to start making your resolutions, and going organic is one you could consider.
Check out the benefits at whyorganic. Personally, we ignore the tree-hugging hippy stuff about organic farming being better for producers and the environment. The only reason we're happy to pay twice the price for a bag of carrots is to avoid the kilos of fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, genetically modified organisms, radioactive elements and chemical colourings, flavourings and preservatives we would otherwise eat each year.
Yes, the Government says these chemicals aren't dangerous in the levels you find them in food. Yes, they also said that about DDT, Thalidomide and the Teletubbies.
Truth be told, some of the chemicals are dangerous at any level, the legally permitted herbicide Atrazine, for example, has been found even at levels of one part per billion, to cause male frogs to turn into female frogs and start producing eggs.
So yes, my apples are more expensive than your apples, but at least I won't have to spend my money on college education for a thousand tadpoles.
Interest in organic food is growing rapidly in the UK. By January 2005, 686,100 hectares of land was managed to organic standards. Organic food sales increased from just over £100 million in 1993/94 to £1.21 billion in 2004 (an 11 per cent increase on 2003).
The movement isn't new, in fact the principles go back to the start of industrial agriculture. And while all the study and research on whether pesticides are good or bad is conflicting, the Guardian (aaagh, I'm reading the Guardian and eating organic food, break out the emergency Big Macs) summed it up beatifully in an article last June weighing up the benefits of organic and dangers of pesticide. Journalist Leo Hickman found that the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Pesticides, which is the committee that advises the Government on pesticides, Professor Jon Ayres, eats organic.
If you intend to make it a resolution to join the revolution (and no, you don't have to move to a hippy haven like Totnes to do it) check out The Soil Association and Wikipedia for more information and The Guardian website for places to buy organic.