How sustainable is a world without organic food?
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Lisa
20 Augustus 2012 | Noorwegen, Oslo
So here we are in Oslo, the day before going home. Tomorrow morning, at the cracks of dawn, we will take the train to Amsterdam. It will be a journey of about 30 hours. And right now, on our very last day, we’re not sightseeing but we’re trying to avoid the rain by writing in-depth blogs about organic food at the computers of the University of Oslo.
Organic products, according to Chen (2009), are goods that respect the environment and that are manufactured without the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, growth hormones, antibiotics or gene manipulation. Basically, you can say that when a person eats organic food, s/he is trying to take care of the environment. Nature and More (www.natureandmore.com) sells these products and tells you exactly which farmer grew them. But if you’re reading this blog you probably already knew that.
Organic products in Norway are a lot more expensive than conventional products. Even though Norway has had success with a campaign of no VAT on organic products, they are now about 25% more expensive than conventional products. This makes it harder to buy them, even for me, because conventional products are already so much more expensive than in the rest of Europe. I just bought a sandwich that cost me 43 krones, which is about 5 euros, even though I wouldn’t have paid more than 2 or 3 euros for it in Holland.
Norway’s market of organic products is also a lot smaller than the markets of other European countries. Germany and France spend the most money on organics, while Norway doesn’t appear in the list of top-5 countries. Being here feels like a step back. In every single country supermarkets would focus at least a little on organic food by putting signs above it, but even that doesn’t happen here. Vegetarian food is hard to find, if not almost impossible.
Even though the worldwide market for organic food is growing quite fast, and the demand is in a lot of places bigger than the supply, Norway seems to have fallen behind. Oslo might be a sustainable city (see yesterday’s blog), I doubt it’s an environmentally friendly one. Probably the most important thing I have learned over the past month is that when it comes to helping the environment, saving energy is not the one thing we should focus on. Eating organic food and using water in a sustainable way is just as important, and that doesn’t seem to happen here at all.
Organic products, according to Chen (2009), are goods that respect the environment and that are manufactured without the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, growth hormones, antibiotics or gene manipulation. Basically, you can say that when a person eats organic food, s/he is trying to take care of the environment. Nature and More (www.natureandmore.com) sells these products and tells you exactly which farmer grew them. But if you’re reading this blog you probably already knew that.
Organic products in Norway are a lot more expensive than conventional products. Even though Norway has had success with a campaign of no VAT on organic products, they are now about 25% more expensive than conventional products. This makes it harder to buy them, even for me, because conventional products are already so much more expensive than in the rest of Europe. I just bought a sandwich that cost me 43 krones, which is about 5 euros, even though I wouldn’t have paid more than 2 or 3 euros for it in Holland.
Norway’s market of organic products is also a lot smaller than the markets of other European countries. Germany and France spend the most money on organics, while Norway doesn’t appear in the list of top-5 countries. Being here feels like a step back. In every single country supermarkets would focus at least a little on organic food by putting signs above it, but even that doesn’t happen here. Vegetarian food is hard to find, if not almost impossible.
Even though the worldwide market for organic food is growing quite fast, and the demand is in a lot of places bigger than the supply, Norway seems to have fallen behind. Oslo might be a sustainable city (see yesterday’s blog), I doubt it’s an environmentally friendly one. Probably the most important thing I have learned over the past month is that when it comes to helping the environment, saving energy is not the one thing we should focus on. Eating organic food and using water in a sustainable way is just as important, and that doesn’t seem to happen here at all.
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