It’s just gone nine on an overcast Saturday morning at Bristol harbourside, and a group of bleary-eyed journalists have gathered on the top floor of one of the area’s posh restaurants for the start of the Soil Association’s Organic Food Festival. Dozens of people with double-barrelled surnames and ethnic-inspired jewellery mill around proffering air-kisses as they greet their friends and the room fills up.
With the association’s recently published Organic Market Report 2007 proclaiming that sales of organic products hit the £2 billion mark last year, which is 22 percent more than in the previous year, and that sales through ‘local, direct marketing schemes such as veg boxes’ had soared by 53 percent, it feels like this is the place to be - as, evidently, do half of the Guardian’s editorial team: the people behind the bar are struggling to keep up with the demand for organic blueberry smoothies.
The Soil Association’s director, Patrick Holden, begins his opening speech. He’s proud that the organic word has spread so far; he’s proud that now, after seven years, the number of visitors to the festival has increased. It’s taken years of work, he says, but the organic movement is definitely gathering steam.
Outside, it’s all just getting started: a trickle of families made up of 30-something parents, Osh Kosh-clad children and multi-terrain buggies queue up at the cobbled entrance to the festival, whilst traders in white marquees make the finishing touches to their earthy displays, all wood and jute and paper - there’s not a hint of plastic packaging in sight. In one corner of the site, a Ukulele player strums a jazzed-up version of ‘The sun has got his hat on’ to an amused, mostly under-fives, audience; in another, the shriek of a trumpet rises over a jazz ensemble, as people wax lyrical over the organically grown bananas at the stall opposite.
Every aspect of the middle classes is represented: from the easy-to-digest music to the elegant setting to the artfully-arranged stalls, it’s all here, it’s all expensive, and it’s all very, very tasteful.
Looking out at this celebration of all things bourgeoisie, it’s difficult not to question whether despite their good intentions, the organic movement has reached its limit. With all its images of knobbly carrots and earth-covered potatoes, has the Soil Association taken its ideals of ethical shopping a step too far? By marketing organic food as a commodity, rather than an essential, has it run itself into a middle-class rut that it can’t escape?
Andy Jeffery owns Home Farm in Farrington Gurney, Somerset, where he grows over 100 varieties of veg on 35 acres, with 20 still ‘in conversion’ - meaning it has been growing organically for less than two years and is therefore not yet eligible for full organic status. Most of the produce is sold through the farm’s shop, Farrington’s, and the adjoining café.
For Jeffrey, the decision to convert Home Farm to organic had little to do with the movement’s middle-class connotations, and everything to do with practicality. “The costs of chemicals are shooting up at the moment, and the government are continuing to tighten up on the types of sprays you can use all the time. We just couldn’t see a future in conventional growing.”
While the produce from Home Farm is selling well at the shop, Jeffrey acknowledges that despite the common view that organic produce equals higher revenue, the investments required to convert land to organic may not always be as financially viable. “Because we’re selling 90 percent of our produce through the farm shop, whether we call it organic or just ‘in conversion’ is less relevant. You don’t get a premium, though, until you call it fully organic, so for wholesalers who are selling to the supermarkets, that may be a problem.”
Jeffrey disagrees with the idea that buying organic is a middle class thing. “Our shop is very successful, but it’s in a village that wouldn’t necessarily be described as ‘middle class’,” he says, adding that for many, it’s about flavour and quality rather than cost. “It may have been mostly middle-class people who could afford higher prices before, but other people are earning more money now as well.
“A lot of veg is over-sprayed. People are becoming more worried about the over-use of sprays, so they buy organic. Whilst the difference between organic lamb and non-organic lamb isn’t necessarily that great, I think you can really tell the difference between, for example, organic and non-organic iceberg lettuces. It’s quite noticeable.”
Jeffrey has a point: the Organic Market Report points out that people in the ‘C1’ social group - those who work in offices, but are not necessarily management level - are ‘narrowing the gap’ between themselves and the better off social groups - A and B. It goes on to say that last year, the report found that over half of people in the ‘most disadvantaged groups’ had been buying organic food and drink - however, the figures were unavailable for this year.
On another farm in another part of Somerset, Eliza Ross is head grower at Wrington Greens - a 16-acre farm which has its own shop, and supplies restaurants and shops in the surrounding area with everything from chillies to salads to squashes. The farm has been going for a year, and will achieve its organic status next July, but until then they’re struggling. “You have a strange period where you’re paying for and putting in the extra man hours because, for example, you have to pick off caterpillars by hand when you have a cabbage white infestation, but you can’t get the same price as organic, because it isn’t official yet,” she explains.
Ross says that she has intentionally tried to make the farm’s produce accessible to as many people as possible by keeping the costs down, but that there are some retailers who will try to exploit organic produce’s ‘luxury’ image to make money. “The idea behind Wrington was that it was affordable, so everyone can buy our produce. We always try to keep the costs as low as possible, because we want to be able to sell to everyone.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any control over the price shops are going to sell the produce at. Some are obviously marketing to people who have more money than sense - we know that one of our clients is selling it at over twice what they buy it off us for.”
She adds that this season’s bad weather, and particularly the blight that has ravaged the nation’s potatoes, means that organic produce could be even less accessible to certain groups. “At the moment, organic produce will be more expensive than conventionally grown stuff, but there’s not really a lot we can do about that,” she says.
At this point, I wanted to find out why some stores, with their squeaky-clean images and tasteful wooden displays, felt they could charge so much more than cost price. The natural first choice was Wholefoods Market, the recently opened Kensington-based organic superstore that’s being raved about by the media. Not us, though: I was told the company ‘don’t talk to the trade press’.
So the behemoth that is the organic movement ploughs on - but whether, like at Wholefoods Market, the movement’s ‘health benefits’ continue to be a luxury commodity reserved for those who can afford them, or the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls of this world get their way and organic becomes accessible to all, it is clear that far from being up to the growers, it’s for the retailers and their marketing people to decide.
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