A recent survey by a leading market research company found that 82% of UK consumers want a return to traditional farming, even if it means paying more for food. Today, many illnesses are laid at the feet of conventional farming. BSE (mad-cow disease), foot-and-mouth, pollution, obesity and the disappearance of many birds have all been blamed on modern agriculture. And governments across Europe are keen to show they care. They are increasingly willing to be seen as promoting not conventional farming methods, but the new age version: organic. Europe is now the biggest market for organic food in the world, expanding by 25% a year over the past 10 years. The German agriculture minister wants to make 20% of German agriculture organic by 2010, and Denmark´s agriculture minister is herself an organic farmer.

Organic farming is often claimed to be safer than conventional farming – for the environment, for our children and for us. Yet, after lengthy and ongoing research worldwide, science continues to reject this claim. The UK´s cross-party House of Commons committee on agriculture announced that, despite exhaustive investigation, it had failed to find any scientific evidence to prove that any of the many claims made for organic farming are always invariably true.

The notion that organic food is safer than “normal” food is contradicted by the fact that many of our most common foods are full of natural toxins. Yet, educated Europeans are more scared of eating traces of a few, strictly regulated, man-made chemicals than they are of eating the ones that nature created directly. Why? For most of human history the more artificial and elaborate your diet, the better; when dominating nature was a constant battle, it was a sign of cultured living. The ancient Romans distinguished between foods not as proteins versus carbohydrates, or even meat versus vegetables, but as cultivated versus wild. Farmed animals were a more civilized food than game. Wine and bread, because they were created by man, were symbols of cultured living – only barbarians ate wild plants.

Today, Europeans, surrounded by plentiful food, fear not nature, but science. Our obsession with the ethics and safety of what we eat with antibiotics in animals, additives, genetically modified foods, and so on – are symptomatic of a highly technological society that has lost faith in its ability to put technology to a positive end. In this context, the less touched by human hand something is, the more virtue we see in it.

A dominant contemporary fear is that we are wrecking nature. This is the real significance of the survey. It is not a vote of positive support for “traditional” or organic farming – about which most of us are blissfully ignorant – but rather a vote against human intervention in the countryside.

(Adapted from: Solutions, Upper-Intermediate, Oxford, 2009, p. 80)

Which of the following is closest in meaning to the author´s opinion?