IF your reckon all the stuff you read about pesticide and fertiliser use vegetables no good and all that organic talk is pie in the sky nonsense, just try this simple test.

The next time you are in your local supermarket, don't just pick up a bag of spuds, but choose a bag labelled Wilson's Country Potatoes. Wilson's is a company with bases in both Portadown and Tipperary. Bring the potatoes home and cook them, and then see if that taste isn't purer, more balanced and much more enjoyable to eat.

The reason why they are better is simple: they are grown without chemical fertilisers. They are not of organic standard, but they are spuds which taste the way spuds used to taste, before farmers believed it necessary to dump buckets of nitrogen off to every tuber.

They are also extremely consistent in size and quality - it really is? - rare to find a bad spud in a bag. Large scale producers and packers of other vegetables should take a long hard look at the way Wilson's does its work, for here is a clever company which has seen a problem and set out to circumvent it. It even won a Ballygowan food award recently.