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ShareThe food, particularly the vegetables had an indefinable sense of authenticity, giving me the feeling that what I was eating was the real thing.The way food had been from time immemorial.
It does help to have a chef of the calibre of Mischal Nischan, but other than that the organic food revolution so evident in supermarkets of the West is not so well known here.
We do have the marvellous Down to Earth organic shop in Tardeo, but not much else. It is, of course, trendy to refer to everything as organic, but unlike the US and Europe, in India there is no proper certification system and it has become a political football.
This is irony of the most extraordinary kind as India can legitimately claim to be the home of organic farming. In fact, the person closely identified with the growth of the organic movement in England, Sir Albert Howard worked in the Imperial Civil Service as an agricultural scientistand was won over to the virtues of organic farming during his stint in Bihar in the 1920s.
So Bihar which otherwise enjoys such a bad press can claim another first, as the place where agricultural farming and crop rotation methods gained scientific respectability, along with the Buddha, Nalanda and Lalu Prasad.
What is organic farming? Broadly speaking it is a form of agriculture that relies on crop rotation, green manure, biological pest control and mechanical cultivation to ensure soil productivity.What it is not is any agriculture which involves the use of synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GSMs).
In India, before the green revolution, most farming was organic, and the Sanjeevan system is an example of such organic farming methods.
Organic farming has been under attack in the West.The present British foreign minister, David Miliband called organic food "a lifestyle choice" and claimed that there was no definite proof that it was any better than conventional farming methods.
George W Bush even forced the adoption of Federal Organic Standards that ridiculed the whole notion of organic, like describing milk from cows who live in barns without access to grass as "organic". The processed food industry represents a powerful lobby against anything organic.
Yet research confirms that organic food is good for you. A Scottish study showed that organic cows produce milk with 71 per cent more omega3 than your average cow. Organic vegetables have 40 per cent more antioxidants than conventionally grown vegetables.
The problem looming up is the cost of organic farming and population growth. It is recognised that organic products are more expensive (between 10-40 per cent), they use more land and also spoil more readily than normal produce.
It is these observations that have prompted some scientists to argue that organic farming is not capable of feeding the world population.
Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winner and father of the green revolution, argues that organic farming practices can feed around four billion people after expanding the cropland exponentially and in the process, wiping out whole ecosystems. This view is contested by the organic lobby. The jury is still out as the environmental impact, but for the food critic, taste is all.
