Organic, grass-fed, sustainable... do any of these words actually mean anything?

Organic, grass-fed, sustainable... do any of these words actually mean anything?

Let me take you back to a decaf cappuccino after Pilates.

I'm sat with my Nicola. We're chatting, like we do every week.

And she tells me what she actually does for a living.

Professor of evidence-based agriculture and agroecology.

I stopped her right there. You're coming on my podcast.

Because, I stand in the supermarket like everyone else.

Organic this.

Grass-fed that.

Sustainable everything.

And I genuinely didn't know what any of it meant.

Turns out, neither do most of us.

Some of these words are legal. Most of them aren't.

Organic is actually enforced. At least 95% of the ingredients have to be organic.

No synthetic fertilisers. No pesticides. No GMOs.

There are real rules behind that word.

Grass-fed? Not so much.

It's marketing.

It doesn't mean the cow spent its whole life in a lush green field having the time of its life.

It just means it can't be misleading.

Which is a much lower bar than the picture in your head.

Sustainable is the biggest one. It sounds like it means something. It doesn't have to.

Red Tractor. RSPCA. What are they actually checking?

Not the same thing. That's the bit that surprised me most.

Red Tractor is about British provenance and traceability.

RSPCA Assured is about animal welfare.

Neither one is telling you anything about carbon footprint.

So when you see a logo and assume it covers everything?

It doesn't. It's usually one piece of a much bigger picture.

And then there's the guilt trip about ultra-processed food.

You know I can't do an episode without my relationship with food coach hat going on somewhere.

Because here's what nobody says out loud. A lot of people relying on ultra-processed food aren't doing it because they don't know better.

They're doing it because they don't have the time. The budget. The energy.

Demonising it just adds more shame to a pile that's already too high.

So what do you actually do with all this?

Nicola's answer wasn't buy this, not that.

It never is with people who actually know what they're talking about.

Her answer was smaller than that.

Know what matters to you.

Local?

Fair trade?

Organic?

You probably can't have all of it, all the time, on every single shop.

Awareness over perfection.

Good choices, made consistently.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

We talk about all of it, palm oil, food miles, why "sustainable" on a packet basically means nothing, in this week's episode of Chatting with Cara.

Please have a listen to this really interesting conversation here or search "Chatting with Cara" where you get your podcasts.