Why Organic

More than 85% of the food sold in the shop is organic, and that includes 100% of our fresh fruit, vegetables and bread. There are many reasons to buy, eat and use organic whenever you can. At Mother Earth we promote organic products because they are exactly in tune with what we are trying to achieve with a shop like ours: quite simply we believe they are better for the environment, animal welfare and human health.

One of the best places to start if you want to know more about what organic means is the Soil Association’s website www.whyorganic.org which features their “10 Reasons to Eat Organic” which makes the point perfectly. The Soil Association is one of the main organic certifying and campaigning bodies and so they are well placed to know “what and why” of organic products.

We are not an “organic shop”: not everything we sell is organic. For some products this is simply because no organic option is produced yet. For others, we offer both an organic and a non-organic version because we recognise that few of us can afford to eat 100% organic and a non-organic health-promoting product is much better than none at all. For most people changing over to an organic life is a gradual process, although it is getting easier all the time as prices for many organic commodities continue to fall or stay the same due to increased production.

We also sell a number of Fair Trade products that are not organic because Fair Trade still has many benefits for people and their environment. The websites of organisations like The Fairtrade Foundation, Equal Exchange and Clipper Teas can tell you lots more about these issues and also about many of the Fair Trade products we sell. You will, however, notice that many Fair Trade products are organic as well and of course those are the products we try to stock above all others whenever we can.