What does the word 'organic' conjure up for you when you see it on a label? Do you see horse-drawn ploughs tilling the earth in some idyllic pastoral scene? Does it make you think that whatever foodstuff you're buying is produced in a vaguely defined way redolent of seventeenth-century farming practices? That's what the marketeers would like you to think. They'd like you to associate that word 'organic' with wholesomeness, purity and with the naturalness of times past.
But is that necessarily the truth? And more importantly, is the price you pay in any way related to the quality of what you buy?

Taste is by its nature profoundly personal. Our language is littered with phrases like 'one man's meat is another man's poison', so finding absolute truths in matters of taste is no easy task. Yet there are certain givens that are hard to deny. If you've ever eaten a tomato straight off the vine, you'll know that it has a very different taste from one that's been on a supermarket shelf for a week or so.

Wine growers have known for millennia that vines do best in certain soils. The French use the word 'terroir' to describe the flavour that a particular soil imparts to a vine. It's a given that the soil in which a vine is planted has a major effect of the resultant fruit. And that's the simple truth at the root of the organic movement. If you treat your soil properly, you'll reap a healthier and tastier harvest.

That's why you'll find 'The Soil Association' as the arbiter of who gets to put their logo and the word 'organic' on their products. The first job of a prospective organic grower is to get their soil purified from chemical contaminants, and only then can they start to grow organic produce. The question is, of course, why isn't every grower doing this?

The answer to that lies in the 'cheap food' policies that have been pursued by governments over the past 100 years. There has been a continual drive to provide cheaper and cheaper food to the consumer. That very policy has resulted in some of the more extraordinary food scandals. Take beef production. Once cattle were kept in fields where they grazed on grass. We milked the cows and raised the bullocks for beef in a system that had served mankind for millennia.

Then the push started to find ways of producing cheaper beef. We started to keep them in sheds on slats rather than in fields because they put on weight faster. Then we looked for cheaper feedstuffs. That move led to feedstuffs that contained just about everything from chicken droppings to waste parts of other cattle. Should we really be surprised to find out that this system resulted in BSE and CJD?

Today in America there are cattle batteries run on the same system as our chicken batteries, where up to 30,000 animals are raised and slaughtered in batches. Bigger numbers mean larger savings on management and feed costs, but there is a downside. Put any organism - be it a cow or a lettuce - in a vast monoculture and you're subject to disaster from disease. A sick cow in a field may infect one or two others in the same field, but a sick cow in 30,000 head feedlot becomes catastrophic. The only insurance policy against this is huge amounts of antibiotics for animals and chemical pesticides and herbicides for plants.

It's the intensive farming methods that end up causing us problems. They do produce cheap food, but there are hidden costs which we're not taking cognisance of. Farmed salmon has made affordable salmon available to everyone, but the effects on marine ecology have been pervasive. And here, as in other cases, putting huge numbers of fish in confined cages results in build-ups of parasites, which can only be controlled through chemical management. So to have cheap food available to us, the consumers, has meant that we are forced to eat along with our cheap food all the chemical additives that went into its production.

It's easy to get into an 'organic panic' over this. I know people who eat only organic food, dress their children in organic clothes and give them organic toys to play with. There's a sense that the word is being over-used by the marketing men, because when it's displayed prominently on a product it tends to help sales. It made me wonder what else could be marketed as 'organic'. Organic houses? Organic cars? Organic water?

Actually, it's worth looking at water closely. If you're an organic vegetable grower in Ireland you're not allowed to use tap water to irrigate your plants. That may seem a trifle extreme, until you discover just what goes into our tap water. Irish tap water contains fluoride. Every country in Europe has banned its use in water supplies and only a few water companies in England still use it, but 450 water schemes in Ireland use it to supply 2.7 million people, despite the fact that it failed a formal EU vote on safety in 2001. The Soil Association rightly believes that the fluoride in the water will become assimilated by the plants, and subsequently assimilated by you when you eat those plants. So tap water isn't good enough for organic lettuces, but it's good enough for this country's children.

Putting it simply then, the economic argument is this. If you want cheap food in the supermarkets, then it has be produced by industrial methods. The trade off is that you have to put up with a lot of extraneous chemicals as part of your diet. If you want food free of herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics, then you have to pay more for the higher labour content in its production.

When you walk into a supermarket and find a chicken on sale for less than the price of a pint of beer, you may wonder how we got to this point of insanity. Surely a chicken for €3.99 must ring alarm bells. What could it have been fed on that cost so little? I spoke to a gamekeeper recently who told me it costs between €16 and €18 to raise a pheasant for a shoot. The reason why you can buy them in a poulterer's shop for €5 is that it's been subsidised by a shooter who paid for the privilege of shooting it. But the figure does correlate with what you'd pay for an organic chicken.

There's no getting away from it. Food that complies with the definition of 'organic' does cost more than food produced with the help of petrochemicals. Growing organically is more labour intensive, and you get to pay for that. But what you're also getting is certainly more flavour and possibly more vitamins and trace elements - and no chemical residues.

Where you need to be careful is in recognising when the word 'organic' is used simply as a marketing ploy. Like any food descriptions it's subject to strict EU labelling rules, but the big agri-businesses are constantly pushing to get more liberal interpretations.

There's no doubt that as a nation we're becoming increasingly concerned about what we eat, and it's right that we are. The same market forces that brought you the cheap food policy are now pushing for genetically modified crops to be used in Ireland. Just as before the battle cry is that GM means greater yields and cheaper food, so the arguments in its favour are similar to those used to back-up intensive farming methods.

But there's an emotional side to this as well, one that strikes to the very essence of who we are and what we want from the world around us. Wouldn't you prefer to see cows and sheep in fields, hens pecking under orchards, and vegetables grown in a natural way? What kind of world would it be if all the fish in the sea were in cages, animals could be found only in feedlots and vegetables only in hydroponic polytunnels?

It is the business of big business to get bigger, it's the nature of the beast. We've already turned over most of our food production to their hands. There are virtually no small bakeries left serving local communities, our milk comes from huge co-ops and real eggs are illegal. Small, independent butchers are finding life almost impossible under the new regulations, which seem designed to enshrine in law that all our food is processed by multinational conglomerates. But each time you buy an organic product, you're helping to keep small producers in business, people who care about food and its production.

Try the Taste Test.

Chicken
Try a frozen 1,600 gr. chicken and a free-range organic one. The cheap chicken will cost around €4-€5, it will have pale, watery flesh and little taste. The legs will be short and fat.
An organic chicken at about €15 will have darker flesh, more flavour, less water content and will have longer, thinner legs that it will actually have walked about on.

Apple Juice
A litre of apple juice from the supermarket will cost about €1.50. Try it side by side with an organic apple juice, like the excellent Irish made Karmine. At €3 it's twice the price, but once you've tasted it you won't want to drink the other kind again.

Rocket
Try a salad of Mark Michel's organic rocket, and then one with rocket from a Dutch greenhouse.

Salmon
Here's an example when the word 'organic' doesn't do anything for me; 'Organic' farmed salmon. Farmed salmon is the antithesis of everything that I believe organic should mean. Wild salmon is truly organic, farmed salmon is an abomination.

Eggs
The difference between battery eggs and free range organic eggs is huge, although both kinds come from a battery. Real eggs from hens that wander about pecking in fields cannot be sold legally. If you can get these eggs, you'll be eating eggs just like those your grandparents so fondly remember.

Lamb
Although organic lamb can be found, it is expensive. A leg of organic lamb can cost as much as €60, while a leg of frozen New Lamb in Lidl costs €10. Lamb is one of the few meats that I'm prepared to eat even if it's not organic, since most lambs are still raised on pasture.

Pork
Because pig rearing is so intensive, pigs tend to be dosed with more than their fair share of antibiotics and as a result it's a meat I rarely eat. Organic pork is a treat, although just like other organic meats it is expensive.

If there's a moral to all of this it's that you should think about what you eat. Ludwig Feuerbach once famously said 'you are what you eat', and if that's true you should try to avoid foods that have been produced chemically, unnaturally and intensively. Bon appetit.