In 1952, Sir Jack Drummond, a pioneering food scientist, was shot dead while on holiday in France. A local farmer was convicted of the killings. But was he really guilty - or was a more sinister plot at work, involving agribusiness? Read extract below and The Guardian article here.

Extract:

One of the most troubling consequences of the agrochemical revolution was the nutritive difference between the intensively grown fruit and vegetables of today and their equivalents 60 years ago. According to the government's own data, between 1940 and 1991 the typical British potato "lost" 47% of its copper and 45% of its iron. Carrots lost 75% of their magnesium, and broccoli 75% of its calcium. The pattern was repeated for vitamins. A study in Canada showed that between 1951 and 1999, potatoes lost all of their vitamin A and 57% of their vitamin C, while today's consumers would have to eat as many as eight oranges to obtain the same amount of vitamin A their grandparents did from a single fruit.

Organic food still accounts for only 1.2% of the total British retail food market. In 2004, Britons spent £1.2bn a year on organic produce: about three-quarters of what we spent on bottled water. Despite all the warnings and an explosion of food scares, the vast majority of people carry on as before.

I began to amass health statistics from the media, cutting out snippets from the papers, jotting down things I heard on the radio or television.

Some scientists blamed chemical changes in the west's diet for a dramatic increase in a range of maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome, hormone-related imbalances, mental illness, even asthma and eczema in children. Some also blamed chemicals for the extraordinary decline in western male fertility in the last 20 years. In Denmark, a country particularly badly affected, 40% of men now have subnormal sperm counts.

In the 1940s the average westerner contained no man-made chemicals for the simple reason that those chemicals did not yet exist. In a recent survey conducted by the environmental organisation WWF, volunteers in 13 British cities had their blood tested for the presence of 77 man-made chemicals, including organochlorine pesticides. Every one of the volunteers was found to be multiply contaminated.

The individual amounts of the chemicals the WWF tested for were mostly tiny and, by themselves, probably harmless. The snag, as Drummond himself pointed out more than half a century ago, was that no one was able to say what might happen to those chemicals once they accumulated and combined over time with others in the body - the "cocktail effect".

The new industrial era in agriculture began after the war. A National Agricultural Advisory Service was inaugurated in 1946. Some 1,400 technical officers were employed to roam the countryside, offering farmers free advice on how to translate the latest scientific advances into useful reality. Overall, and certainly compared with the 1930s, there had never been a better time to be in farming. It was not until 1950 that Attlee's administration began to have misgivings about the agrochemical revolution it had done so much to encourage. A Ministry of Agriculture committee was convened in that year to examine whether the chemicals the public was increasingly exposed to might be bad for their health.

The evidence heard by the committee was conflicting and inconclusive. The human health effects even of DDT were still unknown. The final result was a terrible cop-out. The committee's main recommendation was the setting up of another committee whose task would be to "advise generally" on problems relating to consumer health. That committee - chaired by Sir Solly Zuckerman, a zoologist by training - in the end decided a voluntary arrangement with the industries concerned was a better option than statutory controls. With that decision, ultimate responsibility for assessing the human health risk of agrochemicals was left up to the manufacturers for the next 30 years. The voice of reason represented by the likes of Drummond might not have prevailed, even without his untimely murder in 1952. Much of the chemical experimentation of the period was sponsored by the military.

In the 1950s it would have been hard even for a willing government to regulate an industry that sometimes worked for agriculture, sometimes for the military, or (in the case of ICI) for both at once.

The food expert Professor Michael Crawford of London Metropolitan University has headed the university's Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition for the past 15 years. I was there to ask him about chicken - in particular battery-reared chicken versus organic birds (he had reservations about both). He argued that modern food in general was not nearly as healthy as the public thought it was, a state of affairs he blamed squarely on the food manufacturers. It was at this point that I discovered he was a lifelong admirer of Jack Drummond.