The word ‘organic’ when applied to food is a legally protected term. This means that only businesses which have been inspected and licensed by a government-approved ‘certification body’ can call their products organic. Anyone who does this without a license is breaking the law, which is enforced by Trading Standards departments around the UK.

The number of certification bodies in the United Kingdom varies from time to time as they are independent companies authorised by the Government to carry out this work and are themselves inspected to ensure they are doing it well and fairly.

Farms, food manufacturers, packers, wholesalers, retailers and many more types of business can be certified as organic. To achieve this status they have to prove that they have followed the rules set down by European and UK regulations. These rules govern, for instance: how animals are fed, housed and cared for; how crops are grown (no herbicides are allowed and only minimal, essential and usually natural pesticides are permitted); how organic food is manufactured; in some cases how organic food is sold, although shops selling pre-packaged food do not have to be registered, only the business that packed it.

There is no evidence of any widespread fraud of organic systems in the UK, although occasionally Trading Standards officers have dealt with businesses that were not fully following the rules, or who did not realise they should be certified. If you are dealing with a business selling you organic produce that has grown, packed, cut or weighed out/split by the supplier you can ask to see the certificate issued to them by their certifying body. If they cannot produce one and you think they should you can contact the named certifying body or your local Trading Standards office to have the issue checked.

Organics is about producing food in a welfare-friendly, environmentally sustainable way. This means that care is taken to ensure that the process is in harmony with the environment and ideally puts more back into the earth than it takes out.

Animal welfare is at the heart of organic systems. Livestock must have access to the outdoors, weather permitting, and the amount of living space inside housing is laid-down in the organic regulations. Animals must not be given antibiotics or other routine veterinary treatments unless they are ill and it would harm their welfare not to do so. When veterinary drugs are given the animals are withdrawn from the production system for at least twice as long as is the case with non-organic systems.

In food processing (or manufacture) there are strict rules about the types of ingredients allowed. For instance hydrogenated fats and trans-fatty acids are banned as are many processes and ingredients routinely used in non-organic food, such as preservatives.

These restrictions can result in higher salt and fat content in organic foods because they act as the preservative or structure to the product where chemical alternatives might be used in non-organic production. Proponents of organic accept this is not ideal but argue that, in any case, all foods should be eaten in a healthy balance with neither too much salt nor fat. It can be argued that the benefits outweigh the negatives of this.

Crucially for many buyers of organic food, no genetically modified material is allowed anywhere in the system. This means that animal feed must not contain any GM and no GM-based ingredients are allowed in food manufacture. Where traces of GM are found, up to the lowest detectable level of 0.1% the product must not be sold as organic. It is the ability to avoid GM food that appeals to many supporters of organic.

Organic food is now a £1.6 billion pound industry in the UK (as of 2006 figures) and is no longer considered by most to be a niche market.

This has brought its own problems for organic food production, notably a shortage of organic cereal crops for food production and organic animal feeds. The number of arable farmers converting to organic has not kept pace with demand for organic meat, milk, eggs, poultry and cereal products. This is causing prices for organic arable products to rise, impacting on prices across the sector and the shortage (as at January 2007) is increasingly becoming acute.

Organic could be seen to be a victim of its own success in this sense, but the growth is a clear indicator that people want to feed their families on organic produce – and that’s where OrganicAssistant.com comes in…