Nick "I’m damned if I can see an alternative to despair" Cohen takes Charles The Dim to task for apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe.

Marie Antoinette never said: 'Let them eat cake' to the poor of her day, but Prince Charles was adamant that today's poor should eat organic. Despite all I have read by him over the years, it was still a shock to listen to the recording of the interview he gave the Daily Telegraph. This raging man, who searched for apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe, was not a street preacher at Hyde Park Corner, but our next head of state.

'Millions of small farmers all over the world are being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness,' he cried. Soon we will face 'the absolute destruction of everything'.

Of everything, your highness?

Yes, and another thing! If agribusinesses think they are going to prevent absolute destruction by using 'one form of clever genetic engineering after another', they will cause 'the biggest disaster environmentally of all time'.

Perhaps despairing Nick has some justification for his sorrow, given that the next head of state for his nation is such a fool. But, he's a fashionable fool.

After that, Julie Burchill felt like sweet reason. In Not in my Name, her and Chas Newkey-Burden's spirited attack on modern hypocrisy, she declared: 'Green is the first sociopolitical movement in which every single leader and spokesperson is filthy rich - they make the Conservative party look like the Jarrow marchers.'

With Lord Melchett, the Right Honourable Jonathon Porritt, George Monbiot and Zac Goldsmith, as well as Prince Charles, all holding prominent positions, the green movement is indeed where the concerned children of the upper class fled when the power of the House of Lords diminished.

Well, it isn't real concern, it's just a pose.

It's too early to be sure, but can we now at least agree that there is a fair chance that Europe's panic about GM foods will be seen by historians as an explosion of irrationality as foolish as the manias about the MMR vaccine and millennium bug?

The Royal Society investigated in 2003 and found GM foods posed no greater threat to human health than other foods. The society has just begun a second inquiry, but no one expects its scientists to alter their conclusions. True, some GM crops may damage the environment, but as the Royal Society points out, others could help it by requiring fewer dosings of pesticides.

I suspect the society is wasting its time because rich Europeans will not be convinced by evidence. Their objections are not rational but visceral. GM foods offend Europe's cult of the authentic, which is as strong now as in Marie Antoinette's day.

Cohen began the article by mocking Marie Antoinette's sincere pseudo-naturalism, part of the late 18th century revolt against science expressed by Rousseau among others. The cult survives and still denies all things scientific unless they happen to support cultish views. It isn't just Europeans who have this mental disorder, America has pockets of infection too.

We are a tolerant society, people have all manner of unscientific beliefs. A Euro style cult of the authentic, however demented, would not be a concern except:

Europe's prejudices wouldn't matter if the world's population weren't shooting up, taking food prices with it. The only solutions are a global socialist revolution to redistribute wealth (unlikely) or farmers using new technologies to grow more food.

Redistributing wealth would make things worse rather than better, but this is despairing Nick clinging to his own sort of pseudo-naturalism. The problem isn't the price of food. Price is a symptom, not a cause. The problem is food shortage. It's scarce, that's why the price has risen. It can be argued that there would be enough if we didn't make biofuels, or if we didn't feed animals, but this doesn't solve the true problem of insufficient production given that population is still rising. It's just cutting rations rather than growing more food, an approach that can at best delay collapse.

As ugly and stupid as this Euro-trash nonsense is, I find some cause for optimism. They were free to hold their silly beliefs so long as it didn't matter, and that is no longer the case. This is a growth opportunity, a chance for increased maturity. Some other mania will take its place, but food mania is ever more difficult to practice.

A similar argument can be made about energy, which on closer examination is inextricably bound with food. In both cases there is increasing pressure to abandon cult beliefs and face reality. The price of mania is rising too. In the end only the wealthy will be able to afford it, and that's of increasingly less importance.