E coli panic putting organic food under the microscope

BEFORE you fall for the scare about E coli in cucumbers and drive your local vegetable farmer out of business, just consider how insanely wrong the authorities were about so many other predicted apocalypses over the last decade.

A common feature of these panics has been that the overblown figures and doomsday scenarios never seem to materialise.

There were the inflated claims of the perils of an obesity epidemic which would soon surpass smoking as the greatest cause of premature loss of life. Tough measures were demanded and we saw campaigns to ban junk-food advertising, the routine weighing of school pupils and even the forcible removal of children from “overfeeding” parents, not to mention Jamie Oliver’s school dinners, served with generous helpings of hectoring and bourgeois moralising. The truth is that life expectancy continues to rise everywhere except Zimbabwe and North Korea. While extreme obesity is certainly a problem, a bit of puppy fat does no one any harm and the fat-but-fit have similar life expectancies to the thin-but-sedentary.