Its easy to forget that there are more horrifying things taking place other than the promos and the A levels. However, if anyone bothers to stop mugging for about 5 minutes to read the newspaper (unless you’re crazy and mugging for GP, and reading the newspaper anyway), you’ll see that what’s grabbing headlines is not the Iraq, or Iran, or the Lebanon conflict. It’s organic food, and the discovery of E Coli in organic American spinach. I’m an organic food sceptic myself, and I use this as proof of organic food’s complete uselessness.

To summarise what’s been happening, E-Coli has been found inside the leaves of spinach from Californian organic growers. Many people are ill, some have died, and spinach and other organic food are being pulled off shelves. So you see, organic food isn’t the miracle health cure that people claim it is, it can be as dangerous. "Organic" is just a term to charge three times more than normal food so that you won’t ingest cancer causing agents.

But if you think about it, "organic" really has no meaning. It just means that instead of synthetic fertilizer, your food gets nourishment from, well, bullshit. The thought of having the waste product of cows and all the bacteria concentrated there being absorbed into your food is just revolting. So you aer left with a choice. Eat food contaminated with "natural" pathogens, or risk a death from cancer (which you probably will get anyway even if you eat just organic food)

If you look at it closely enough, organic food is just a symptom of nostalgia, for a time when father and son plowed the fields together with a pair of oxen instead of barely keeping in touch by mobile phone. An offshoot of this feeling is people using typewriters in the computer age, or fountain pens when there are ballpoints. Still, there is a limit to this. Surely with all the technological progress that we’re so proud of, you don’t want to go back to using a quill? Or a club. Ug. Me Man. Me Talk.

The very people who advocate this shift to our ‘natural’ state are really hypocrites. They drive cars, they balance their finances with calculators, and they watch MTV (if not MTV then some TV, but I bet you can’t find TVs in caves).

On the other hand, they reject things like "Western medicine" just because this science allowed us to isolate antibodies and mass produce them. These are the people who advocate TCM. (they used an acronym to make it sound cooler) And really, does TCM make any sense? How do you quantify "cooling" or "heaty"? Likewise, if eating deer penises makes you virile, will eating a whale’s make you…big?? I’d like to see those people try.

This nostalgic feeling may make us realize how far we’ve come, but now its only making us move backwards. Or subscribe to very strange things. Look at "water births", where the woman gives birth to her baby without painkillers, while sitting in a Jacuzzi-thing. There is nothing ‘natural’ about this either. Animals that "naturally" have babies in the water are animals like whales, dolphins, fish, and sea cucumber. Therefore, many claims of human beings going back to the ‘natural scheme’ of things means pretending to be another species.

As for me, I’m going to take a risk. Yes, there is lots of synthetic stuff that can hurt you, but the "natural" stuff is so dubious as well. The important thing is to read the label, and make sure you don’t get duped. If I ever go into contractions in the labour room and someone asks me "You want water birth or not?" I’m going to say no.

Bring on the drugs baby.