Food challenges - Our food security may be at risk

EVEN in the best of times organic food was an expensive option, especially if you wanted to buy beef or poultry. The €20 chicken was a Celtic Tigerism too far — even if you could afford it. Getting one ethically produced and supposedly-happier chicken for the price of four supermarket birds never seemed a good deal for the consumer, whatever about the fancy bird.

Like so many trends it was fuelled, like it or not, by more than a soupcon of ostentation. The corn-fed, herb butter-rubbed, organic chicken was indeed the €10,000 Chanel handbag in the flaunt-it-if-you-have-it parade of supermarket trollies.

This week’s report from Britain’s Food Standards Agency, which found that organic food is nutritionally no better than conventional farm produce, may do little to convince more of us to buy organic food.