David Miliband, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said organic food was more of a “lifestyle choice that people can make”.
Miliband was interviewed by the Sunday Times, and he also spoke at the Oxford Farming Conference.
Another straw man, and only a couple of tiny paragraphs at the end of the article (quoting the Soil Association) question or put in context Miliband’s statement. There are two primary reasons for consumers to choose organic food products over others: one is they use no (or almost no) pesticides and herbicides or additives, which, apart from the concern about their longterm impact on human health, get passed into the food chain and have seriously damaged the environment, and the other is they are usually grown by small, independent growers who offer an alternative to the food conglomerates.