Fashionably lame.

. . . the fad for organic foods has never been about vitamins and minerals, and eating more healthily. Rather, consuming organic is about adopting a mystical and reverent attitude towards nature, and a dim view of hoi polloi.

It's the same in the US as in the UK. The urban bi-coastal romance with alt.food was never about health, it was about signaling, status and the joy of rubbishing rubes.

. . . the simplistic claim that organic is always more nutritious than conventional food was always likely to be misleading. Food is a natural product and the nutritional content of different foods, and even of different varieties of the same food, will vary for a number of reasons, including: freshness, the way the food is cooked, the soil conditions it is grown in, the amount of sunlight and water crops have received, and so on. The differences created by these things are likely to be greater than any differences brought about by using an organic or non-organic system of production. Indeed, given that farmers vary in their ability and commitment, even two ‘organic’ farms could be quite different from one another. How on earth could any study control for such a multitude of variables?

If crops vary in how much nutrition they contain, then people also vary in how much fruit and veg they eat. Fretting about the exact quantity of beta-carotene in your food is irrelevant if you are a vegetable-phobic salad-dodger. On the other hand, if you eat the government’s recommended five portions of fruit and veg per day (a hefty 400 grams), then the conventional-versus-organic differences will be irrelevant.

Indeed. Very complicated. The answer is imprecise because the question is poorly formed.

Furthermore, some crops are just really good sources of specific nutrients. If you really want to get lots of beta-carotene, eat plenty of carrots (the clue is in the name). Organic milk may contain more omega-3 fatty acids than regular milk, but neither of them is a particularly good source of those acids - if you really want omega-3 fatty acids you should be consuming lots of oily fish.

Even better, since the world really needs to give the fishes a break, is to eat cheese for therapeutic doses of omega-3. In fact, the fish option looks increasingly bad these days while the cheese option looks increasingly good. But even this has nothing to do with organic. It's the wrong question. The issue is what the cows eat. If they eat grass rather then grain then they will have high omega-3 no matter whether the grass is organic or not. And if the fish are farmed rather than wild, and fed grain rather than their traditional wild diets, then they will not be high in omega-3 no matter how unctuous their flesh. Another wrong question.

The irrational, seemingly instinctive desire to get close to ‘the source’ has been a recurring theme of the organic movement from its inception in the 1920s. The rise of the pro-organic lobby in the early twentieth century was a reaction against industrial society, led by precisely the kind of people - aristocrats, vicars and so on - who found their positions of authority and respect undermined by the modern world. No wonder Prince Charles and Lord Melchett are such fans of organic food; they are the heirs to Lady Eve Balfour, the founder of the Soil Association. The fact that these aristocratic, anti-modern views have now become quite mainstream is a symptom of the collapse of belief in both capitalist society (amongst the ruling classes) and in any progressive alternative (amongst the working classes). The end result is that the middle classes - the dregs of political life - now have a disproportionately influential role in Britain, which means that their fads and outlook can dominate public debate.

The organic lobby’s rejection of all things manmade also extends to rejecting other people, too. Many of those who choose organic seem to have a holier-than-thou desire to distance their own caring view of the world from the ravenous masses who are deemed to consume without caring about the consequences. AA Gill, food critic for The Sunday Times, summed this up well: ‘What I really mind about all this is that organic is making food into a class issue. Organic brings back this pre-war system of posh, politically correct food for Notting Hill people, and filthy, rubbish chemical food for filthy, rubbish chemical people. Either you are a nice organic person or you are a filthy, overweight McDonald’s person. I find that really obscene. It has very little to do with food and a lot to do with weird snobbery.’

The central idea of organic agriculture is the importance of spreading crap on fields. It seems it’s also about spreading crap everywhere else, too.

Hilarious, but again I need to neep about the technicalities. All agriculture is about spreading crap on fields, not just the superstitious organic posers. The problem is that there isn't enough crap to go around, and that it's expensive to transport. Solve that problem and crap will be the soil amendment of choice for all. Then the snobs will have to invent yet another way to distinguish themselves from hoi polloi. The details vary over time, but the behavior is a constant.