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Insight: Oct 12

Insight takes a closer look at organic food. Is it really better for your health?

This week Insight on SBS looks at Australians putting organic food on their plates – or those just considering it. Time to get a good idea of what “organic” means.

Insight will examine if organic food is better for your health, whether it’s nutritionally better for you than conventionally grown food and how it impacts on the environ Insight on Tuesday October 12 at 7.30pm on SBS One.

Just under a year ago, Standards Australia and the food industry agreed to a definition for “organic”, but it’s a voluntary industry standard and not a mandatory regulation. Critics say this type of arrangement fails consumers.

Insight audience members will include people who are sceptical about organics but prize fresh produce and a mother who fed her daughter organic foods even though she couldn’t afford to eat organic herself.

And a Sydney fruit grower will talk about his experience of running a farmers’ market, where he insists all the sellers must be farmers – or leave.

Insight is hosted by Jenny Brockie.

It airs Tuesday October 12 at 7.30pm on SBS One.

4 Responses

  1. Looking forward to this episode. Food is very important hopefully they will have a chef or two maybe even maive o mara will be a guest. THeir is no doubt that organic is the best, afterall you dont want to be putting in pesticides into your temple. The best way is for peopl to start to grow their own food that way they will know what is in it.

  2. @Pat – the diff in taste with fruit is often more down to the variety grown and the greater personal attention received by plants cultivated in small allotments versus those grown by factory farming. For example, the two fruits mentioned below (tomatoes and strawberries) are grown commercially to withstand the rigors of being transported the length and breadth of this country. They are larger and have a higher water content which dilutes the flavour.

    I live in Perth but can’t get WA (Carnarvon)-grown bananas unless I go to smaller supermarkets/farmer’s markets. The big supermarkets, which tend to buy nationally, seem to sell only QLD bananas. These are large, smooth, clean-looking, and very straight, with firm but quite bland fruit. The Carnarvon bananas are smaller, curved and often have sunspots on the skin, but taste much nicer.

  3. I always try to buy organic fruit and vege when I can. It’s a pity though, most of the shows looking into organic produce, always give organics a bad rap. Like there is no difference. Well, I can taste the difference between an organic apple compared to supermarket types. There is no comparison when it comes to organic fruit- so yum…you can argue all you want about nutritional value…but it really comes down to taste. There is a problem though with the voluntary industry standard use of ‘organic’. There needs to be tougher standards- even Coles has organic…what are their standards?

  4. Problem with a show like insight trying to cover something like this, you just get a bunch of what people in the audience know and think. Whether rational and logical or not. It really gets no where.

    Anyway the whole organic thing is the naturalistic logical fallacy. A tomato is a tomato whether it was grown organically or not. Whether it used organic fertilizer and pesticides, or the lasted scientific ones. Everything else is basically anecdotal evidence or flawed studies. Like a recent one that said strawberry’s grown organically had more nutrients per gram or something. However that’s because the conventional modern farming ones were bigger. So it was not that they had more nutrients in total, just more in a smaller amount because they were smaller with less water in them.

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