It's A Fact: Nothing In The World Can Be Quite As Fulfilling As That First Fresh Taste Of Fascism

"Whole Foods Market, the American grocery chain that does organic, free-range, over-the-rainbow food, that came to Kensington and opened a mega moral shop, having first bought out and closed the competition. Well, dears, in their first year they lost — hold your breath — £10m. It couldn’t have happened to cuter people.

But all this is just an amuse-bouche for the really exhilaratingly good news. Now it’s still only a rumour; it’s not confirmed. They haven’t actually nailed down the recycled coffin yet, but I think we can safely say that the organic charade and marketing opportunity — the movement that started out as a cranky health fad and hippie allotment nostalgia and became a Stalinist orthodoxy, that allowed angry urban liberals who didn’t know loam from tilth to tell farmers who didn’t know Notting Hill from Bayswater how to do their business — is on life support. Not since the Black Death has so much quasi-medical health-spa science been devoted to beetroot — resulting in the sort of exploitative, chic pricing that is generally reserved for celebrity perfume. It invented the most illiberal, unegalitarian, two-tier food market. There was good, healthy Oxfordshire food, and then there was the poisonous, processed, cancerous muck that the rest of you stuffed into your toothless faces. The organic movement made food the distinction of class and privilege that it hadn’t been for a hundred years, and for that alone it should be eternally and utterly ashamed of itself. Supermarkets grasped the increased margins and bent the definitions and distinctions until they were cynical tatters and meant no more than expensive packaging and a lot of smug adjectives.

It looks like the first big casualty of tightened belts will be organic eggs. Rising commodity prices has meant that there isn’t enough home-grown organic feed to stuff down the throats of organic chickens. So they’re shipping corn from Kazakhstan, and if you think that’s not a travesty of everything organic once claimed to stand for, then you’re dafter than your yoghurt. The abysmal hypocrisy and failure of the organic movement should be a warning to all environmentalists. Rules, laws, exclusions and dogma are only useful if they facilitate change and universal wellbeing. Conviction reformers begin with an imagined nirvana and work backwards through self-serving facts and draconian instructions. They are made ridiculous by their own unmovable orthodoxy. Pragmatic reformers start with the problem, not the solution, and make it better, a chip butty at a time. The organic movement always cared more for hens than people."

-- AA Gill, finally figuring how food fits in Liberal Fascism, for The Times Online.