Recently I was chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Natural and Organic Awards. It was a huge privilege and for that I am grateful.
John Donne’s poem ‘No Man is an Island’ springs to mind. I have never been a solo pilot. My achievements were the result of the hard work, effort, commitment and shared vision of all the people that I have worked with over the years. Foremost among these is my brother Gregory, who moved on from the natural foods industry in the late 1980s but whose influence and impact was equal to my own.
Our little business started in 1966 with my importing and marketing books about macrobiotics and supplying macrobiotic food at the UFO Club, where the Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and Arthur Brown played to dancing hippies every Friday night. That created the core customer base of what was originally called Yin Yang Ltd. Gregory had an accident at university in Berkeley California and came back to the UK on a stretcher at the beginning of 1967. A month later I had opened a small restaurant/study centre that was the haunt of the likes of Yoko Ono and Graham Bond. The restaurant closed and I found larger premises in Westbourne Grove. However as an American with no permission to work in the UK I had problems that necessitated my return to the USA in late 1967. During this time Gregory rose heroically to the challenge and opened the planned restaurant, called “Seed” - which became an instant success. John Lennon was a personal friend of his and the alternative society regarded Seed as its own. Our mother Margaret oversaw the food preparation, bringing her Midwestern values of hard work and competence to the scene. By 1969 I was back in the UK with full residential rights and the freedom to work . Gregory had by then opened Ceres Grain Shop in All Saints Road, the first natural food store, (as opposed to health shop – there was a much bigger difference in those days).
In 1970 we created Harmony Foods. Gregory learned graphic design and created labels that were clean, informative and distinctive. They set the pattern for the natural foods design style of the 1970s. Gregory also sat on the committee that drafted the first organic food standards at the Soil Association – 2 pages long, it seemed enough at the time.
Harmony Foods took brown rice and lentils and macrobiotic specialities from the pioneer natural food stores to the health food shop mainstream. Gregory hooked up with organic growers all over the country in order to get UK-produced organic food. He bought most of Britain’s organic grain and milled flour at Harmony Foods that I would bake into bread at Ceres Bakery and then distribute around London. This led to making flakes and Harmony cereal flakes went in truckloads to Germany, where organic production was still finding its feet. Harmony peanut butter became a leading national brand after we were seen on the 6 pm BBC news packing it into jars at the first Mind and Body exhibition, a huge show at Olympia
By the late 1970s Harmony Foods had to specialise. We focussed on peanut butter, jam and ginseng, hiving off the other products. But the business was too small for us both. But by then Gregory had created the Vegeburger’
The Realeat Vegeburger created a whole new category of foods – vegetarian equivalents of dishes normally seen in a meat format. It was a runaway success. Gregory’s annual Realeat Gallup poll measured the growth in vegetarianism and brought it in from the margins to be a recognised category in the grocery market. Catering packs of Vegeburger mix and vegetarian ready meals enabled pubs and restaurants to be ready and willing when a veggie customer turned up.
Gregory sold the Vegeburger to British Arkady in the late 1980s and went on to carve out a career as a fractal artist and is now in demand as a speaker, drawing on his thought provoking books Uncommon Sense and Sun of God. He continues to amaze and inspire – our partnership helped lay the foundations of the organic and natural movement and I will always be grateful for the important part he played.
