” Yesterday, that was a day, Mr Boyes! I had a fantastic(tolle) Super-model in the car. A real Augenschmaus.” The taxi driver was excited. I was sitting up front, ausnahmsweise demokratisch, and so I could see how the vein throbbed on his forehead. Nothing stirs the red-blooded Berlin taxi driver quite as much as Fashion Week; the hint of perfume on the back seat.

“Lange Beene bis hierhin. You could see everything. Absolutely everything !” He shook his head in disbelief. There followed a hypocritical diatribe about how young women nowadays should dress more modestly, put on warm clothes lest they damage their ovaries. I stared out of the window. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to take the S-Bahn again, give it a second chance.

The driver glanced  at me.

“I can see Mr Boyes, you are more of a Gruene Woche Mensch. Else der Kuh und so.”

And wenn a taxi driver Recht hat, dann hat er Recht. Not that there is a clear disinction anymore between Fashion weekers and Green weekers, not with Bio-Mode making it big, natural fibres being this season’s dernier cri. But the only long legs at Grune Woche are attatched to the body of Horst Seehofer or prize cows, nothing to raise the temperature of a driver on the night shift.

Obviously I go there for the Schlemmermeile and if you are an alert reporter the whole excursion can be charged to expenses(Spesen). What better way to understand Afghanistan than to stuff oneself with the country’s saffron flavoured Milchreis, pick out the raisins with your plastic spoon and ponder  the Iranian culinary influence on the Hindu kusch.. Tunisian lamb will be a hit this year even if the President won’t be attending; so too will Belarussian vodka delivered by the crateload from Europe’s last dictatorship. If your job involves geopolitics, you just have to be there, not at the Soho House catwalk. What would you rather do– sit jammed between Jette Joop and Eva Padberg studying the Herbst-Winter collecftion for 2011-2012– or eating Afghan Milchreis ? For me, the answer is obvious. In Cold War times, East European and Central Asian states used the Gruene Woche to demonstrate that in terms of food at least they were not at all Russified. Some years there were defections, delegates creeping off to claim asylum ; mostly though there were wild after-hours parties with plenty of vodka. I can’t believe that the Fashion Week delegates have a better time of it.

Naturally this year the pungent odour of poisoned eggs will be hanging over the Messe. But every food crisis presents a great opportunity for politicians to grandstand. Renate Kuenast and Klaus Wowereit will be there underlining the need to protect Berlin’s egg-eaters and hoping that they cast their uncontaminated votes in September. Both Seehofer and the Baron zu Guttenberg will be there underlining the need to protect food producers and reminding them that the CSU should be led by a strong man. No doubt the Baroness Barbie zu Guttenberg will attend in a dirndl.

Yes, Gruene Woche is a political carnival. It used to be about innovation: a new tractor, a machine that kept eggs fresh for a year, a new chainshaw, the brown-buzz of the giant hive of the Reichsausschuss for Bienenzucht. Nowadays it is about controlling risk because this is the issue that most affects the modern German voter. For the past decade or so each Messe has been drowned out by the high-pitched hum of media hysteria–about BSE (remind me again, how many people actually died of Mad Cow disease?), swine fever, Asian bird flu.

This year Erlebnis Bauernhof will show visitors the complete food cycle in Germany– and reassure them that the poisoning of animal fodder affects only the smallest link in the chain.

After a while– and this is why a visit to Gruene Woche is so politically valuable–you realise that the food lobbyists and the politicians are trying to shove responsibility on to you and me. The logic is quite simple: consumers( that’s you and me, again) demand cheaper food. So producers have to take short cuts. Our fault; we are in effect poisoning ourselves through our own greed. And actually we are pretty much to blame for everything. We demand cheaper holidays, forcing, yes forcing, bargain airlines to clog up the skies, destroying the climate and therefore flooding Pakistan and Sachsen-Anhalt, robbing Knut of a future and cheating our children out of their inheritance.

Bad, bad, we are bad people. Why do we have a financial crisis ? Because we want cheap loans, thus putting pressure on banks to invent crazy financing solutions.

Green Week used to be a feel good experience. Now though it  makes you feel a bit queasy and not just because too much Afghan pudding can play tricks with your gastric system. At a certain point in the Messe rundgang you realise that the whole thing is a propaganda operation designed to make us feel so guilty that we pay more for our food and embrace a spurious Bio-revoluion. In the end, the only people to profit from this hoodwinking are the bio-farmers and Freudian analysts.

There is one positive note this year though. My favourite project, the so-called BuecherboXX, which encourages people to pass on their unwanted books to others for free. You simply take them to an old converted telephone box–there is currently one in Ruedersheimer platz–leave your old books and take others. It is a great idea and through a global tracking system you will eventually be able to follow your discarded book on the internet as it passes from reader to reader. The shelves are being made by Azubis in Grunewald ; people are being encouraged to read, talk to each other and save a few more trees from being chopped down. At last, a bio-project that has captured my imagination. I have already lined up my next book donation– Klaus Wowereit’s  autobiography “und das ist auch gut so–Mein Leben fuer die Politik.”  I wonder if anyone will pick it up.