Organic food: Why？ 1. Europeis now the biggest market for organic food in the world, expan

Organic food: Why？

1. Europeis now the biggest market for organic food in the world, expanding by 25percent a year over the past 10 years. So what is the attraction of organicfood for some people？ The really important. thing is that organic sounds more"natural". Eating organic is a way of defining oneself as natural,good, caring, different from the junk-food-eating masses.

2. Unlike conventionalfarming, the organic approach means farming with natural, rather than man-made,fertilisers and pesticides. Techniques such as crop rotation(轮种)improve soil qualityand help organic farmers compensate for the absence of man-made chemicals. As amethod of food produc- tion, organic is, however, inefficient in its use oflabour and land; there are severe limits to how much food can be produced.Also, the environmental benefits of not using artificial fertilisers are tinycom- pared with the amount of carbon dioxide emitted(排放)by transportingfood.

3. Organic farming is oftenclaimed to be safer than conventional farming. Yet studies into organic farmingworldwide continue to reject this claim. An extensive review by the UK FoodStandards Agen- cy found that there was no statistically significant differencebetween organic and conventional crops. Even where results indicated there wasevidence of a difference, the reviewers found no sign that these differenceswould have any noticeable effect on health.

4. The simplistic claimthat organic food is more nutritious than conventional food was always likelyto be misleading. Food is a natural product, and the health value of differentfoods will vary for a number of reasons, including freshness, the way the foodis cooked, the type of soil it is grown in, the amount of sunlight and raincrops have received, and so on. Likewise, the flavour of a carrot has less todo with whether it was fertilised with manure(粪便) or something out of a plastic sack than with thevariety of carrot and how long ago it was dug up. 5. The notion that organic food is saferthan "normal" food is also contradicted by the fact that many of ourmost common food are full of natural toxins(毒素). As one research expert says : "People thinkthat the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simplynot the case. In fact, it is the opposite that is true: the closer a plant isto its&39;natural state, the more likely it is that will poison you. Naturally,many plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years developingagriculture and breeding out harmful traits from, crops. "

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