What is organic food?

Thank for your email, Jenna. It's exciting that you are asking all the right questions about your dinner. It sounds to me as if your mother knows what she's doing.

Things like chicken nuggets are just so much better when they're organic.

For starters, non-organic chicken nuggets taste disgusting compared to organic ones. But then there's the question of what's hidden in all those little breadcrumbs. I'm afraid to say that non-organic chicken nuggets contain the bits of chickens that might otherwise be thrown away. I personally don't want to eat chicken bottoms.

Also, non-organic chickens are given lots of drugs to keep them well under the often terrible ways that they are kept. When you keep hundreds of chickens cooped up together in too small a barn, they'll get sick unless you give them drugs. The problems with this is firstly it's not fair on the birds, and secondly, we get to eat these drugs when we eat the nuggets.

There's also the breadcrumbs on the outside. Organic chicken nuggets are just made with things like flour and eggs and margarine that you can find in your kitchen. Non-organic chicken nuggets contain all sorts of stuff with long chemical names like hydrogenated fats and hydrolysed vegetable protein.

These kinds of ingredients and made in laboratories to make life easier and cheaper for the people who make chicken nuggets. But they're not at all good for you in terms of taste and, most importantly, health.

So please read more about organic food in general on this site, and keep thinking about what you're eating while you enjoy your dinners!

Best wishes

Ysanne