Letter: Why the best ice-cream is organic

Best is a dangerous word when applied to food ("Tried and Tested", Review, 6 July). Unlike Haagen-Daz, voted "best" by your panel, Rocombe Farm organic vanilla, which sells at about the same price, is made from organic ingredients and like all organic products comes with a full audit trail of who supplied the ingredients and how they were grown. Organic ice-cream is probably better for you, made as it is from ingredients grown without synthetic pesticides, artificial fertilisers and so on. For example, unrefined cane sugar contains vitamins and minerals, refined white sugar does not; the persistent organochlorine, Lindane, implicated in many studies in breast cancer, collects in fat and is frequently detected in dairy produce; conventional sugar plantations are intensively sprayed with pesticides, including organophospates and present a health hazard to workers. Yum Yum.

Incidentally, Rocombe Farm Luxury Devonshire ice-cream, which came second in the test, is not organic though it is made with organic milk.

Lynda Brown

Henley-on-Thames, Oxon