Organics, food miles, and other tricky questions

From Jan

Saturday morning, sipping coffee in the garden. I love it when it's early and quiet, the weekend stretches ahead, and my thoughts turn to - well - food. Look at all this stuff I grow and tend: hydrangeas spilling over the grass; roses still blazing; a vine already turning with tinges of autumn; tall white japanese anemones nodding on their stems. But why can't I eat any of it? Only the pots of herbs contribute to the kitchen.
Aisling is quite different - she has an allotment that runs the Garden of Eden a close second, with all sorts of wonderful veg and fruit. It's hard work, but a supply of perfectly fresh produce picked just hours earlier is the best thing for any cook.
Especially for any cook concerned about health, allergies, organics and the planet, as well as taste. The rest of us dither in front of the organic vegetables counter in the supermarket and wonder whether it's really worth paying double for those carrots; or worse (as happened to me the other day) we find in a local health food shop a tray full of miserably shrivelled beetroot, coated in soil as if to prove its bona fides, which promised to be unimpeachably organic - but had originated in Chile.
What on earth - pun definitely intended - is the point of sending root vegetables (and their dried mud) right across the globe and selling them with an air of self-righteousness just because they contain no chemicals? It's totally mad. These things grow right here. Apart from the fact that their nutritional value will be so much reduced by the amount of time they've been sitting in some cold store, the question of food miles is a really serious one for the environment.

So - organic or not? Local produce versus food that has clocked up frequent flyer points? Cooking involves all these moral choices, as well as concerns of health, quality and taste. Life is complicated . . .
What we've decided to do in the Choosy Food recipes is to leave the choice to you. Call that a cop-out if you like, but our own view is that freshness, using local produce wherever possible, and a concern for the way things are grown or reared matter to us more than a few chemicals. So if you want to use entirely organic produce for our recipes, that's great, but we won't tell you to. We will, though, urge you to find out about the origins of your food, especially meat. Animals that have had a good, free life and a humane end. Eggs that were laid by a bird free to move around. Fish that isn't as endangered as the leopard.
It quickly becomes clear that these big questions about food are the big questions about the world itself, and we can't solve them all. But we can ask about the meat we buy, go to farmer's markets and buy from local growers whenever we can, plan our meals round food that's in season. Best of all, I suppose, would be to plant a row of beans in among those roses. I'll have another cup of coffee and ponder those good intentions.