The words ‘organic produce’ when used honestly, describe fruits and vegetables grown without the use of any chemicals whatsoever — fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, growth hormones, genetically modified seeds, colour enhancers, artificial ripeners, etc. An organically grown fruit/ vegetable doesn’t use chemicals for intensive monoculture crop-crowing either.

Organic farming is an activity which is synonymous with nature. It is practised to create a harmonious balance between the earth, its resources and all its inhabitants including man. And contrary to popular opinion, organic farming is both scientific (in consonance with nature’s laws) and intuitive (in consonance with common sense).

When the descriptive ‘organic’ is applied to prepared foods like snacks, it means they are produced using raw organic ingredients. Therefore it is imperative that organic snacks should follow new age health food guidelines by eschewing preservatives, additives, flavouring and refined versions of foods. However, that’s not the norm. Therefore product labels need to be read with great care because the words ‘organic, natural, healthy’ are used liberally and in misleading ways.

In the good old days, we ate food put on the table and thanked the good Lord for it. Of late, with all the new research and information available, the task of choosing the food we eat has become complicated. And promises to become more so in the future.

In Conscious Food, a certified organic foods company where I work, we are often tempted to display calorie counts, fat content, carbohydrate and protein quantities on our labels. But as a nutritionist who firmly believes this is not the way food is meant to be consumed, I have deliberately resisted this temptation.

Planning food consumption the chart way (counting calories as you go along) can never be of any use. In fact it works against you if you want to get into shape, and become healthy and energetic. I believe that if one strives for natural health, arriving at one’s correct body weight is an automatic corollary.

The reason I don’t advise following charts-instructed nutrition is because early on as a nutrition student, I learnt that calories mean different things to different people. If your metabolism is fast, you need a higher calory intake. For instance, I can eat bananas and potatoes galore and not gain weight. Another person with a slower metabolism would put on serious poundage by ingesting them. However, given bananas and potatoes are health foods, the weight gain would not be as much as with calories from refined fast foods.

Later, experience made me aware that it’s no use knowing the carbohydrate content of foods when knowledge of the simple or complex character of carbohydrates is more important. Similarly it’s no use being aware of protein quantity if the correlating toxin content is not available. Likewise, what is the use of noting the fat content in a food when information on whether the fat is refined or unrefined is missing?

Moreover, even if fibre, vitamins and minerals are listed, what would a lay consumer make of this information? Surely all consumers don’t own nutrition handbooks! Even so, given that every day something new is being discovered in laboratories, ingesting food with only known nutrients is like walking into the trap laid down by the manufacturer. He obviously will add what he thinks will make you buy!

Certainly calorie counting is not the way to view food, let alone eat it. The only way to ensure that your body cells are being fed rather than just your belly, is to choose foods as close to their natural state as possible with minimum ‘value addition’. Minimum taken away, minimum added, combining natural foods is the way to go. And if food in its natural unrefined, unprocessed state is also organically grown, then you derive a double benefit. You are on the way to good health and fitness. Moreover choosing to go organic gives us the opportunity to change the quality of life for ourselves and our children.

The fact that organically grown food tastes better is an added benefit. Chefs all over the world are becoming aware that if their raw material is not best quality (i.e chemicals-free), their gastronomic masterpieces will be less than optimal. While cooking at home we need to be aware that going organic doesn’t mean learning cooking all over again. It simply requires substitution of base ingredients in our kitchen with unrefined and organic inputs. Then whatever we put on the table will contain that natural, real, forgotten taste of food.

Right now not only do we use the earth’s resources indiscriminately, we poison it with chemicals of all types. This not only damages our health but that of the earth itself. City folk seem unaware that if we don’t advise and support our farmers we won’t have food on our plates. 

No action is without a reaction. Therefore there’s a clear and present danger that existing farm practices will increasingly plague us with ill health, low energy, inability to cope with life and depression. Going organic isn’t a trendy fad. It’s about providing the public with safe and pure food to create healthy populations.

(Kavita Mukhi is a Mumbai-based eco-nutritionist and director of Conscious Food)