Several weeks ago I was contacted by the people behind a new gardening/food blog and website called Organic Guide. The reason for contacting me was to ask me to consider adding them to my blogroll.
I must admit, I was a little apprehensive at first. While I am very much an organic gardener, I don’t often say this because I feel the term has been a bit hijacked recently by corporate interests. Regular readers of this blog will know I have said some unkind things in the past about ‘certified’ foods, including such things as organic or Fairtrade. How could I be against such good things as certified organic or Fairtrade foods? It’s not so much that I am against them, but rather they are only a very small start and many people use them as an excuse to ignore larger issues. I feel I can do a lot more good by making purchases as directly as possible from the people who produce the goods, locally where possible, and based on personal knowledge. I have always felt this was a better approach than buying certified mass market products.
Another thing fresh in my mind was some recent attempts by newspapers or magazines to create their own gardening blogs. Many of these have been at best uninteresting, and in some cases bordering on arrogant.
While I might have expected Organic Guide might turn into a blog run by mainstream journalists, full of banner ads for mass market organic products and articles promoting the health benefits of Omega-3 and oily fish — nothing could have been further from the truth!
In recent days they have published some really outstanding articles, some touching on things I’ve mentioned in the past:
Preserving the cultural value of food
Interview with Sandra Slack from Garden Organic
Public unaware that most milk, dairy and pork from GM
These last two are probably of more interest to Europeans. These are also just a few of the best articles, there’s lots of other good stuff there to read.
While the people behind the blog are professional journalists for sure, they are also bloggers and very much aware of the issues facing biodiversity, gardening and food production. Their definition of organic goes far beyond supermarket certified foods.
This is definitely a site worth paying attention to. They are also looking for input from their readers, as well as guest writers.
