Paying the price for carbon dioxide

Would you pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Putting a price on carbon makes people pay for carbon dioxide that they add to the atmosphere (ouch!) and rewards behaviour that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide (yes, please).

So why not just make people who emit carbon pay for that carbon dioxide and give the same amount of money, the ‘carbon price’, to people who take it out of the atmosphere?

A lot of people make money out of carbon emissions. Oil companies are the main subjects of hatred, but it is the rest of us who actually burn the fossil fuels that keep our homes warm, our cars on the road and planes in the air. The biggest beneficiary is the Government, which gets 53p per litre of petrol, plus another 10p of VAT. It’s like the situation with cigarettes: the Government knew for decades that fags were killing people but the tax per packet was a vitally important source of income, so it was challenging for the powers-that-be to crack down on smoking. Even palm oil, most of which gets mixed with diesel fuel, gets taxed at 53p per litre, but the food industry takes the flak when it’s in a biscuit. Palm oil has replaced hydrogenated fat, which is why heart disease rates are falling.

Organic versus non-organic

Organic farmers increase soil carbon every year: they compost green waste and crop residues; they add manure to the soils instead of chemical fertilizer; they do crop rotations that naturally boost soil nitrogen; they encourage a resilient soil microbiome that also increases soil carbon; they let the land go fallow so natural fertility is rebuilt, which means more soil carbon. An organic farm can capture and store about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Non-organic farmers use chemical fertilizers that wipe out the soil micobiome and cause nitrous oxide pollution that is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Intensive animal rearing of cattle and pigs leads to higher methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas. Herbicides and pesticides are made from fossil fuels and end up as more global warming. Farming is responsible for one third of our annual increase in greenhouse gas levels. Organic farming could cancel out that increase and bring greenhouse gas levels down by a similar amount and we could stop stressing about climate change.

Powerful stuff

So how can we encourage organic farming? How do you encourage anything? Money. Powerful stuff. Farmers love it.

The EU carbon price is just over £90 per tonne of CO2. An organic farmer can capture at least seven tonnes. If they got paid for it, that would be an extra income of £630 per hectare.

A non-organic farmer emits at least two tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year from fertilizer and soil organic matter breakdown. If they had to pay for that (a tax on fertilizers and pesticides) it would cost them at least £180 per hectare.

Every crop is different, but let’s take a look at barley. Let’s say that a barley farmer - whether organic or not - wants to make £1630 per hectare.

An organic farmer gets four tonnes of barley per hectare and can sell it at £250 per tonne; that’s £1000 per hectare. With a CO2 payment of £700 per hectare that adds up to £1700 per hectare gross income. Bingo!

A non-organic farmer gets a higher yield (thanks to chemicals) of six tonnes per hectare. At £250 per tonne that generates £1500 per hectare gross income. But the farmer must pay for two tonnes of CO2 emissions - £180 - so that brings it down to £1320. So to make as much as the organic farmer, the non-organic farmer would have to charge £305 per tonne for barley, an extra £55 per tonne. What brewer will pay a £55 a tonne premium for non-organic barley?

Much barley ends up in beer. If you’re down the pub and a pint of organic bitter is £3.30 and a pint of non-organic is £3.90 would you be prepared to pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Social prescribing comes of age

Social prescribing represents a steep learning curve for many doctors says Craig Sams, but it’s rocketing up the agenda

The setting: a GP surgery. Receptionist: “The doctor will see you now.” Doctor: “Hi, how are you getting on with your low-carb diet? Are you getting the regular exercise we agreed? Can we de-prescribe the Metformin? Let’s do a few tests to see whether you’re ready to come off the drugs. By the way, how are you getting on with your cookery classes? Let’s see if we can finally wave type 2 diabetes goodbye.”

Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry but ‘social prescribing’ is on a roll and there will be a lot more of it in the future. Professor Tony Avery, the NHS National Clinical Prescribing director has said the aim is to bring about a ‘culture change’. He sees social prescribing as transforming modern healthcare, saving money and improving people’s lives. Not only that, but adverse reactions to medication are estimated to cost NHS England over £2 billion a year (not to mention the impact on people’s lives and health). The number of disability claimants doubled from 2021 to 2022. 8.3 million Britons are now on antidepressants.

The College of Medicine’s Beyond Pills Campaign is pushing hard to stop the overprescribing of medicines. The college says that 1.1 billion medicines are prescribed unnecessarily. Its chair Michael Dixon (medical advisor to King Charles), has said ‘Medicine…is no longer affordable or sustainable. A new medical mindset is needed which goes to the heart of true healthcare.”

Back in the 1930s an experiment in social prescribing called the Peckham Experiment engaged with 950 local families to get them on the track to health. They had a gym, a swimming pool, cookery classes, a vegetable garden and workshops about health. Members would have a medical health check once a year and were monitored on a regular basis. The kids did better at school, marriages were more stable and women were empowered (knitting groups helped with this). Social and community activities were organised by the members and helped reduce isolation, loneliness and alienation, illness levels fell dramatically. William Beveridge who drafted the plan for the NHS, was impressed and envisaged similar health centres up and down the country. When the Government put his plan to the British Medical Association in 1948 they were not impressed and the Government was forced to back down and agree that all ‘health services’ would solely be via the GP’s surgery. The Peckham Experiment closed down two years later.

But social prescribing is finally rocketing up the agenda. There are now 15 Pain Cafes in Cornwall helping people manage pain without painkillers, relying instead on exercise and psychological support. Dependency on antidepressants has been shown to cause more harm than good (as anyone who watches Happy Valley already knows). Time to kick the diazepam.

Increasing awareness of the benefits of phytonutrients (the kind of stuff the health food industry has been emphasising for decades) is filtering through to the medical industry and impacting on social prescribing. It was the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus who famously said 500 years ago: “Prevention is better than cure.” With life expectancy rates going backwards, increasing rates of alcohol and drug-related deaths and hospitalisations, along with record levels of obesity, social prescribing is happening just in time. Will people be taking their prescriptions into the health food store? Or will the pharmacies try to capture this newly lucrative business?

The Bromley by Bow Centre in East London is pioneering the ‘new’ approach to health and wellbeing, and it is a model that is being emulated in more and more places.

Yes, the first reaction is ‘I told you so’ - but the fact is that these people are serious. At least so far.

How long will it be before doctors prescribe yoga and pilates classes or give out free prescriptions for herbal medicines and supplements? Will you get free cookery classes on the NHS?

There’s still a long way to go, but at least the direction of travel has finally changed. The Government has just allocated £50 million to support 42 Integrated Care Boards across the country to help doctors to ‘de-prescribe’ their patients and get them on the path to wellness without drugs. There will need to be proper support for the medical profession - they know it makes sense but it’s a steep learning curve for many doctors. They didn’t teach this kind of stuff at medical school.

Food and agriculture centre stage at COP28

Craig Sams journeys from the wealthy ancient Kingdom of Saba to modern-day Dubai as the UAE prepares to host the COP28 climate conference

About 1,500 years ago the descendants of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon lived very well indeed. Their kingdom of Saba was insanely rich because they were the suppliers of frankincense and of spices from the Orient. Caravans of camels plodded northwards to the Mediterranean markets with incense that perfumed churches and synagogues all over Europe and spices that enhanced European cuisine. The camel caravans would stock up with food and water before their journey and the Sabaeans had plenty of that too, they had built a huge dam that captured the water of the monsoon rains and used it all summer long to irrigate the fertile plains around the capital city of Marib. At that time it was the wonder of the ancient world. The Sabaeans and their neighbours all worshipped the sun, a ‘god’ that rose into the heavens every morning.

Solomon convinced Sheba to become Jewish and abandon sun worship and she persuaded her sun-worshipping neighbours to be Jewish too. Then the Sabaeans ditched Judaism and converted to Christianity. Other sun worshippers stuck with being Jewish and the different tribes fell out over whose invisible god was the real invisible god. While they squabbled, nobody performed routine maintenance on the Marib Dam. It collapsed, and suddenly agriculture was impossible. Different tribes headed off in different directions - some to Syria, some to the Gulf. The ones who went to Syria, called Ghassanids, did rather well growing wheat and working with Rome to protect its eastern borders. The ones who went to the Gulf resorted to herding sheep and goats and moving from oasis to oasis. In the 1840s, as part of their aim to conquer Egypt and Suez, the British armed Druze who massacred 10,000 Ghassanid Christians and the survivors fled to northern Lebanon and then many to America (including my grandparents). The Sabaean tribes herding sheep in the Gulf allied with the British and then discovered rich stocks of oil and gas. They built new cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi on the profits and did rather well. Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi used some of that money to rebuild the Marib Dam that had sustained his ancestors and it now irrigates the soils of the area. He also built the Abrahamic Family House where a mosque, a church and a synagogue are all in one grand building, bringing the argumentative religions of the Bible and the Koran under one friendly roof (Israeli tourism to the UAE has boomed in the last two years).

Dubai is hosting COP28 this November, the climate conference that is making halting progress towards getting the world’s climate under control. Dr Al-Jaber, the UAE minister for industry, has stated that food and agriculture will take centre stage in COP28’s carbon reduction programmes. Why not? The Earth’s soils are ten billion hectares. Each hectare, if managed with carbon in mind, can capture and retain about seven tonnes of CO2 every year, whether it’s farmland, pasture or forest. That’s 70 billion tonnes - twice the annual increase in CO2 emissions. Duh!

All we have to do is charge the way we farm, the way we graze animals and the way we manage forests. In other words, go organic, graze ‘regeneratively’ and manage woodland sustainably.

Dubai gets things done. Solar power converts sea water into drinking water. Buildings have car-charging points and low-energy construction to minimise their carbon footprint. Just this year they are spending $40 billion to get to net zero well before 2050. Their Sabaean ancestors goofed big time and had an environmental disaster that ruined their wealthy original homeland. They don’t want to make the same dumb mistakes again.

When we infected the Amazonian tribes with our diseases most of them died and the Amazon rain forest grew up. At the same time, the Plague killed off vast numbers of farmers in Europe and Asia, the trees moved in and sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere. We had the Little Ice Age as a result of those blasted trees taking over. Then we discovered steam engines and coal and oil and that saved us from freezing to death. We are humans. We have the brains and the power. The UAE and Dubai can get us on track at COP28. They learned their lesson the hard way 1,500 years ago. Now they can help us get back into balance.

COP26: The deal of the century for organic farming

COP 26 was, in my humble opinion, a resounding success.  2021 will go down in history alongside dates like 1066 and 1776 as years when the fate of the world was dramatically changed.

In 2008 I went with Dan Morrell (who traded the first ever carbon offset back in 1989) to the COP14 in Poznan, Poland.  Our mission was to ensure that soil sequestration of carbon was on the negotiating document that went to the next climate summit: COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009.   We succeeded! It was high fives all around. When locking up carbon in soil is rewarded in the race to net zero, farmers have another ‘crop’ that they can sell.  Instead of farming being 1/3 of our annual emissions it can (if it goes organic) stop its own emissions and capture enough carbon to easily outweigh emissions from energy, industry and transportation.  The Copenhagen COP13 was a failure and it wasn’t until the Paris COP 21 in 2015 that the importance of agriculture in saving us from climate disaster was recognised.  Article 6 of the Paris agreement set out the case for using forestry and farming to save the planet. The ‘4 per 1000’ part of that agreement declared that if farmers could increase soil carbon by 4 parts per 1000 that would be enough to offset ALL our other greenhouse gas emissions.  Organic farmers can do better: La Vialla, a 1500-hectare farm in Italy, has been measured by the University of Siena for more than 10 years.  They lock up 7 parts per 1000 on their farm of cereals, vines, pastures and woodland.  Organic farming is the answer to climate change.

People blame capitalism for the mess we’re in.  That’s not fair.  It is socialist policies like biofuel subsidies and subsidised chemical inputs that are a big part of the problem.  Our government subsidises the burning of trees (pelletised and imported from Arkansas and Latvia) at Drax power station in Yorkshire to the tune of £2.1 million a day and then we rant at Brazil for clearing forest in the Amazon.   We endure increased levels of lung disease from burning wood, too - wood smoke is dirtier than coal. The EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation requires member states to burn 10% of all motor fuel from renewable sources such as rapeseed, palm and soybean oil for biodiesel. Then people moan at the food industry for using palm oil (which replaces deadly hydrogenated fat).  Petrol is blended with ethanol from barley, wheat and sugar beet.  What a colossal waste of land while we lament the plight of the millions who go to bed hungry.  This is socialistic government policy, engineered by agribusiness lobbyists to subsidise industrial farming.  The deluded comparison of ‘renewable’ with ‘sustainable’ is used to cover up this deceit.  If ‘renewable’ fuel was really good for the environment then we’d be investing in whaling. Whale oil is renewable and it doesn’t compete with farmland for food production. But this is the thinking that you get when politicians pretend to be businessmen.

So can capitalism do it any better? There are more than 10 billion hectares of farmland, forest and pasture globally.  If it was all farmed to maximise carbon capture it could sequester at least 7 tonnes per hectare overall, for a total of 70 billion tonnes a year.  That would very quickly reverse the annual increase in greenhouse gas levels, currently running at 20 billion tonnes a year.

What’s in it for capitalism?  Well, somebody has to buy and sell the carbon crop. 70 billion tonnes a year at $50 per tonne is $ 3.5 trillion.  That’s the kind of money that gets Goldman Sachs and Cargill and hedge funds and other wheeler-dealers out of bed each morning.

Getting to net zero will make a lot of other people money: organic farmers, sustainable foresters, regenerative grazers.  In fact, when industrial farmers and intensive dairy and beef farmers have to pay for their emissions, there isn’t likely to be a farmer on the planet who won’t go organic. Organic food will be cheaper than high-carbon industrial food.

The whole carbon offset market has been beset by cases of fraud, cashing in carbon credits more than once and some dodgy calculations of carbon capture.  The Soil Association, the Sustainable Soils Alliance and similar bodies around the world are now agreeing strict protocols to validate carbon capture to ensure that investors and traders are getting what they’ve paid for.

COP 26 has achieved a major result.  With global agreement that ‘net zero’ is a universal target, there is hope for reversing climate change.  Thank you, Great Britain, for pulling off the deal of the century 

Oestrogens, xenoestrogens and the future of humanity

Wildly Deliciously Organic

“Hey Craig - we’re going to Belize to make a movie about the Crystal Skull of the Maya.  Want to come?”  My cousin Anthony Conforti was a film maker and I couldn’t refuse.  It was 1987. We filmed the Maya doing the Deer Dance and a local farmer took me to see a cocoa grove.  I was blown away, I had never seen cocoa trees, with yellow and red pods growing out of the stems of the trees.  That evening I wrote in my diary a plan for a chocolate spread called Whole Earth ‘Maya Maya’ – a Nutella-like concoction of peanuts, cohune oil and date juice.  It didn’t happen, but the dream wouldn’t go away. 

A few years later André Deberdt, a French organic consultant in Togo offered me organic peanuts.  They were delicious but failed our aflatoxin test. I called him up with the bad news.  “They grow organic cacao, too’ he commented.  I had read that 70% chocolate had a tiny glycemic index: 21 compared to 60 of brown rice, so we got a sample made.  It was mind blowing.  My girl friend Jo Fairley fell in love with it and came up with the name ‘Green’ for organic and ‘Black’ for being the darkest chocolate on the market.  We launched 30 years ago, in 1991.  It was the first chocolate that talked openly about its provenance – farmers in Togo who were regenerating their farmland by going organic.  It was a hit. 

In 1993 I got in touch with some friends in Belize and found that the cacao farmers were in big trouble:  they had borrowed money to plant cacao trees on assurances from the US Peace Corps and Hershey that they would be getting $1.75 lb a few years later.  By the time they were cropping, the price was $0.55.  Farmers abandoned the cacao but now had bank debt.  Sainsbury’s said they’d stock our idea of ‘Maya Gold’ if we would give them a 6 month exclusive.  So I offered the Maya farmers $1.25 and a 5 year rolling contract and put $20,000 prepayment in their bank to keep  their bank manager on side. The Fairtrade Foundation suggested it could be a product to launch their Mark and flew out to Belize to validate what we were doing and said ‘It’s all we are looking for…and more.’

So in March 1994 the Fairtrade Mark was launched to the world on Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate.  All the supporters of Fairtrade now had something to sink their teeth into, both literally and campaigning-wise.  Tesco, Safeway and Waitrose were all asking for it and Sainsbury’s nobly let us off the exclusive deal in the shared interest of seeing Fairtrade take off.   Within a year the Fairtrade Mark was on coffee, tea, bananas, and sugar and became a must stock category for natural food stores and supermarkets.

Green & Black’s grew and grew. We made milk chocolate and cocoa and hot chocolate, working with the finest artisan chocolate makers in the world. (I’ve never made a bar of chocolate myself)

In 1999 we sold some shares to a group of people led by William Kendall, who wanted to invest.   With a humungous marketing budget we grew the brand in a way that had never been possible before.

By 2005 we had gone from £1.5 million turnover to £26 million turnover.  Cadbury’s bought the business.  Then they got gobbled up by Kraft.  In November 2012 Tim Cofer, the CEO of Kraft, called me up to say that tomorrow he was announcing in Abidjan a $400 million plan called Cocoa Life that would build on what we had done in Belize with Fairtrade.  They appointed women to run the programme in Ghana and Ivory Coast and it has been hugely successful, with farmers queuing up to be part of it.  Now it is going to the Dominican Republic, where most of the organic cacao is grown.  Green & Black’s has just enjoyed a massive advertising push, with a stunning video that simply says “Wildly, Deliciously, Organic.”  The entire organic market benefits when a brand like Green & Black’s or Yeo Valley establishes the organic version in a product category as a leader.

Jo and I still work with the team at Green & Black’s, having a moan when we think they are going off piste and patting them on the backs when they get it right.  We’ve had nothing to moan about for quite a while, in fact we are very proud of how well our erstwhile baby is growing

Wuhan – a blessing in disguise?

Some people will allege that Covid 19 is the result of ‘gain of function’ research at China’s germ warfare laboratory in Wuhan and point to the involvement of America’s EcoHealth Alliance in financing research there after Obama’s government put a stop to it in the US.  Others will point to plucky little bats - living in caves 800 miles from Wuhan.

What is sure, though, is that people worldwide now really get it about the immune system.  Sales of organic food and vitamins and supplements that strengthen immunity are booming.   Awareness of the fact that most people who are symptomatic or die of Covid have ‘comorbidities’ has sparked a wider understanding of how to stay healthy and shrug off this horrible mutation of the coronavirus, a virus we’ve known for centuries as the ‘common cold.’  People have always been getting colds, some get them worse than others and some rarely get colds at all.  Now many more people understand why.

The comorbidities that land you in hospital with Covid include obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and cancer.  If you don’t have one of those then the likelihood of Covid exposure giving you any symptoms is pretty low. You are certainly very unlikely to die of it.

What causes comorbidities?  The main factors are diet, exercise and environmental pollutants.  (plus booze and fags)

Sugar and refined cereals drive obesity and diabetes.  Now more people are reducing sugar and eating whole grains.

Hydrogenated fat and overeating cause heart disease.  Cardiovascular disease has dropped 60% in Denmark since 2002, when they led the world in banning hydrogenated fat, or trans fats, in food.  Denmark ranks 45 on the global list of Covid deaths per capita.  The USA and India were the last to ban hydrogenated fat, the US last year and India planning cuts next year.

A diversity of gut flora microorganisms helps resist the virus.  Overuse of antibiotics devastates the gut flora.  The NHS is now urging doctors to stop prescribing antibiotics for colds and flu. The mystery is why doctors ever did - they’re doctors, not pharmacists.

In 1948 the NHS envisioned centres all over the country educating people about healthy diet, exercise and preventive medicine.   The British Medical Association insisted that the first point of contact was with a General Practitioner, not some poncy ‘health centre.’  This was a victory for doctors and the pharmaceutical industry.   The ‘prevention versus cure’ debate has been going on ever since.

In the 1950s every Briton could get free cod liver oil and free concentrated orange juice.  This was because 70 years ago doctors still understood that if people had a high level of Vitamin D and Vitamin C they would be able to better resist colds and flu. This was probably the last official support of prevention as an alternative to medication.  Since the coronavirus pandemic numerous doctors and clinicians have started urging that getting people’s D and C levels up is a key preventive measure.  In January 2021 the NHS finally announced that free Vitamin D was available and urged people to get their D levels up,  This was 11 months after the pandemic hit and after the Government had wasted tens of billions on track and trace and lockdowns. In 2020 in the sunniest April and May in memory people were told not to go out in the Vitamin D-rich sunshine. 

The authorities are talking about ‘health passports’ to allow people who have been vaccinated to travel and go to the theatre.  How about health passports for people who have a robust immune system and are unlikely to get colds or flu?  It could be easy to do: just measure indicators of immune strength such as T Cells and Vitamin C, D and zinc levels.  Doctors and nurses should have that kind of health passport before they go to work in hospitals, to protect them and patients. If your immunity is good, skip the vaccination. If not, get the jab.

And maybe it’s time to stop all germ warfare research everywhere?  Just in case something could possibly go wrong?

Could we also please have ‘eco’ and ‘bio’ back?  The EcoHealth Alliance researches deadly viruses. ‘Biowarfare’ puts them to work. Not our thing at all.

Pity Poor Pharma

Mexico has just passed a law that bans American agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration from acting freely in the country.  This was a response to the US arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos, former Defense Minister of the Mexican Government, on charges of drug trafficking. 

What’s going on in Mexico? The drugs gangs are all at each others’ throats, fighting over an ever-diminishing pie.  There are now only 6 American states left where marijuana is illegal - in all the rest it is legal or allowed for medical purposes. The impact on Mexico’s drug gangs has been horrendous.  Almost at a stroke the lucrative American market has collapsed. 

With the marijuana market gone the Mexican drug gangs had to start pushing Fentanyl even though it meant competing with American legal pharmaceutical companies, but boy is it profitable.  A kilo of heroin costs $6000 and can be sold for $80,000, a mere 13 times profit.  A kilo of Fentanyl costs $4150 per kilo and sells for $1,600,000 as it is 100 times stronger than heroin. That’s a stonking 385 times profit.  As a mere organic grocer like me, who’d go out of business if I aimed for a 2 times profit those figures are pretty impressive.  Just think if vitamins were that profitable.

But to a legal pharmaceutical company those figures are pathetic.  Xanax costs 2p to make 1 mg and sells for £100 per mg.  That’s 5000 times profit for Pfizer.  Prozac costs 9p to make 20mg and sells for £185 per 20g. That’s 2000 times profit for Eli Lilly. 

Bear in mind, however, that the manufacturing cost doesn’t include all the research on the drug and then ‘educating’ doctors in how to prescribe it and the endless fines for illegal marketing and health care fraud.  Pfizer holds the record for the largest criminal fine - $2.3 billion in 2009.

The great thing about being a pharmaceutical company is that you can take the occasional billion-dollar fine in your stride.  Even better, you never go to jail.  Mexican pharma-dealers are always at risk of a prison sentence for their wrongdoings, something corporate pharma executives never have to worry about.  They just pass the cost of fines on to their shareholders.

But legalised marijuana has had a damaging effect on the sales of opioids and alcohol and antidepressants.  Potheads drink less booze and actively avoid opioids like Fentanyl or oxycontin and would rather take CBD than take an antidepressant. 

Marijuana legalisation’s been bad enough for the drug business but worse challenges are on the horizon.  In November 2020 Oregon decriminalised all drugs.  Instead of spending $375 million a year arresting and prosecuting drug users, Oregon is now going to open a dozen drug treatment centres to help addicts get well.  With $100 million a year coming in from the tax on legal marijuana sales they can afford it.  For blacks this is particularly good news as, even though drug use is no higher among black people, a heck of a lot more of them are stopped, searched and arrested for possession - drugs are the leading cause of jail time for people of colour.

So who else is making money out of illegal drugs?  You and me. ‘Our’ UK Government-backed Angel CoFund has shares in Small Pharma, who are raising £12 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange to research DMT, the most powerful psychedelic of all.  If they did the research here they’d go to jail,  so they will do it legally in Canada.  The Canadians are already spearheading the use of psilocybin from magic mushrooms - a couple of doses and depression is alleviated that would otherwise require a lifetime of antidepressant use.  More bad news for the makers of Prozac and Xanax - and doctors and pharmacists.

Luckily the pharmaceutical companies have harvested £6 billion from governments for their coronavirus vaccine research.  Making vaccines is usually bad business - you give someone a shot and they don’t need another one.  But lavish subsidies make it worthwhile.

Just think if the cash that has been spent on vaccine research had gone to protect people in care homes and making sure everyone’s vitamin C and D and zinc levels were adequate.  Prevention sounds nice, but profitable?  Forget it.

The Midwestern Farm Boy who invented Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative farming is the buzz word now.  Biodynamic and organic describe farming that treats the entire farm as an organism and adopts practices that think about the farm holistically. Regenerative embraces organic and biodynamic and looks at how we can regenerate the entire planet through agriculture. 

The American War of Independence is often characterised as a revolution based on ‘no taxation without representation’ and the iconic Boston Tea Party.  There is another, darker motive for the revolt against British rule.  With Iroquois support, the British successfully drove the French out of Canada in 1770. The Iroquois were motivated by the promise that, if they helped Britain prevail against the French, King George guaranteed there would be no further settlement by farmers of the lands west of Pennsylvania.  

But by that time the fragile soils of Pennsylvania had been deforested and eroded and become ‘farmed out’ - no longer fertile.  Desperate farmers wanted the rich lands further West and Britain’s commitment stood in their way. The Revolutionary War was a disaster for Britain and for the Native Americans, who were pushed further and further west by land-hungry farmers. 

The farmlands of Ohio were the first to feel this onslaught and by the early 20th Century were almost totally ‘farmed out.’ 

It was a party animal and widely-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Louis Bromfield, who decided to try to reverse that situation.  In the 1930s he had a groovy house in Senlis just outside of Paris, where luminaries of the Paris creative scene would gather for his legendary weekend parties. Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Elsa Schiaparelli, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Douglas Fairbanks and Edith Wharton were all friends and regular visitors. He learned traditional gardening techniques from his French peasant neighbours. He embarked on a voyage to India, where he visited Sir Albert Howard’s soil institute at Indore and learned the Indore composting technique that was to become the bedrock of British organic farming. He wrote a best-selling novel set in India called “The Rains Came” that became a wildly successful movie. That set him up financially for life.  He despaired at Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and wrote “England, the Dying Oligarchy” a bitter critique of British policy.  After the Munich Agreement he’d had enough and headed back to the US.  He bought a 600-acre farm in Ohio where he could raise his family in safety and apply the techniques he had learned in France and India. The land was in dire condition, but he knew what had to be done.

In 1942 he set up the Friends of the Land and allied it with the US Soil Conservation Service with the goal of turning around the ruinous impact of the ‘Dirty Thirties’ where the Dust Bowl had led to the abandonment of vast acreages of farmland that had become useless. He introduced what he called ‘trash farming’ which we now call ‘no till agriculture’ where you didn’t plough the land, you let the crop residues sit on the soil and then planted into the residue in the Spring. He introduced green manures, mulching and strip cropping to stop erosion and rebuild soil fertility.  The Friends of the Land journal ‘The Land’ included contributions from Rachel Carson, whose 1962 best seller “Silent Spring” kickstarted the environmental movement. He was best man when Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall at his organic farm. If his Senlis residence was the hippest place outside of Paris, his Ohio farm drew groovers from all over the USA.

A poem in the New Yorker captured the vibe:

‘Strangers arriving by every train, Bromfield terracing against the rain,

Catamounts* crying, mowers mowing, Guest rooms full to overflowing,

Boxers in every room of the house, Cows being milked to Brahms and Strauss,

Kids arriving by van and pung**, Bromfield up to his eyes in dung,

Sailors, trumpeters, mystics, actors, all of them wanting to drive the tractors,

All of them eager to husk the corn, some of them sipping their drinks till morn’

But while all the partying was going on there was serious business - the soil of his Ohio farm steadily became more fertile year after year. It regenerated.  He proved that degeneration could be reversed and laid the foundations for the organic farming movement in the USA.

*wild cat **sleigh

Vegeburgers allowed, but plant-based dairy under cloud

Great news!  In October the European Parliament rejected the meat industry’s attempt to ban the use of words like ‘sausage’  or ‘burger’ to describe plant-based sausages and burgers.  But it was a darned close-run thing - just 55% of MEPs voted against insanity. Not really surprising as the EU Parliament has form when it comes to these things. 

But before you congratulate them on their common sense: they also voted to ban any reference to dairy products unless they come from cows, sheep, goats or Italian water buffalo.  So no soy milk, no almond milk, no sunflower cheese.  What is the EU going to do about coconut milk? Or coconut cream?  Or peanut butter?  Should we just give the EU Parliament control over our dictionaries.  These words are part of the English language.  No doubt ‘Milk of Magnesia’ is heading for the chop, too. 

In 1981 my brother Gregory created the world’s first vegeburger.  We got the trademark as the word had not previously appeared in print.  So it was Vegeburger™.  The problem with that was the word went generic.  Hoover had the same problem when ‘hoovering the carpet’ became a verb for sucking out dust.  A descriptor may be generic but that won’t stop the valiant guardians of the consumer, sorry, producers in Brussels. 

If someone buys coconut milk it’s frightfully confusing for those poor souls who are unaware that coconuts don’t have udders bursting with milk and don’t say ‘moo.’.  As for peanut butter, it’s called ‘burro di arachidi’ (peanut butter) in Italian, ‘mantequilla de mani’ (peanut butter) in Spanish, ‘beurre d’arachide’ (peanut butter) in French and ‘Erdnussbutter’ (peanut butter) in German.  I think maybe that particular train may have left the station but don’t be surprised if the EU vote initiates a process of suppression of the way people actually speak and starts to rewrite dictionaries. 

This Whac-a-Mole game with vegans and vegetarians and coconut milk and peanut butter lovers still has a long way to run. 

Meanwhile the EU Green Deal takes shape and the EU Parliament is quite happy to ignore the scandalous waste of food and land it represents.  There are 22 million hectares of EU farmland devoted to growing rapeseed for biodiesel.  That’s enough land to feed 30 million people a year.  10 million people die of hunger globally every year, but the EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation mandates that we feed cars and trucks and aeroplanes, which take priority over starving human beings.  And that’s before you count the 2 million hectares of palm oil that ends up as biodiesel or power station fuel in Europe.  If we had carbon pricing instead of EU laws that require the burning of food there would be a lot more happy orangutans in Indonesia.  It always vexes me that orangutan lovers are more concerned about a tiny amount of non-hydrogenated palm oil in a jar of peanut butter (sorry, ‘peanut-based bread surfacing material’) than they are about the fact that their hybrid car is running on a palm oil/diesel blend.

Then there are those poor French farmers who are still producing relatively ropey wine that nobody particularly cares to drink. Wines from England, New Zealand and other areas are organic and more palatable. Understandably the French wine growers are very pro biofuels. You take the wine, turn it into brandy but instead of leaving it in burnt oak barrels to develop some flavour you just mix it with petrol at 15%. The E85 petrol blend of grape wine ethanol and petrol is subsidised to make it a lot cheaper than regular petrol and that helps the French to quietly burn (with subsidies) all that wine that nobody wants to drink.  That wine ethanol also makes good hand sanitiser - coronavirus saves the day!

While the EU continues to squabble about what is a burger or milk or butter or a sausage, Britain is launching the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme.   Britain will lead the world in having a farming policy that will deliver ‘public money for public goods.’  So much more grown up than a farm policy that just makes global warming worse while trying to change the language people use to describe their food. 

The Road to Wellness

“There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy.  They say he wandered far, very far, over land and sea.  A little shy and sad of eye, but very wise was he.  And then one day, a magic day he passed my way and we spoke of many things, fools and kings, this he said to me: ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.’”  These lyrics from the song ‘Nature Boy,’ were a major hit for  singer Nat King Cole and became a jazz standard.

The author of the song was eden ahbez, one of the 1940s “Nature Boys” who lived in the as-yet-undeveloped canyons and backwaters of Los Angeles.  They were vegan, ate raw food, practised deep breathing, cold water bathing and meditation.  One of their members was ‘Gypsy Boots’ who opened the Health Hut in Hollywood selling organic food and was inventor of the ‘smoothie.’  In the ‘90s Gypsy Boots was a regular at the Natural Foods Expo in Anaheim, where natural foods folk queued up to enhance their credibility by being photographed with him.

In 1939 Lord Northbourne hosted the Betteshanger School and Conference on Bio-Dynamic Farming on his Kent estate.  Leading lights of biodynamics attended and a major outcome was Northbourne’s seminal 1940 book Look to the Land.  This is where non-chemical farming was first described as ‘organic’ - this is the 80th anniversary of the coinage of the term.  Northbourne saw the real war of the future as being between organic farming and the industrial model. Eve Balfour’s seminal book ‘The Living Soil,’ which led to the foundation of the Soil Association, devoted 7 pages of the first chapter to a long direct quotation from Look to the Land.  Her core message was “The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.”  In other words, people couldn’t be healthy if the land was sick. Or, as George Harrison, quoting the Maharishi put it ‘for the forest to be green, every tree must be green.’

 G Scott Williamson, who ran the health-supporting Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham described the neighbourhood as having a profile of all communities, ‘from the dregs at the bottom to the scum at the top.’  His wife Dr. Innes Pearce, co-founded the Soil Association.

So was the confluence of thinking between the pioneering proto-hippie Nature Boys of California and the upper class English engagement with an example of a shared perspective by the nobs and the yobs?  Mary Langman, Balfour’s personal secretary, confided in me that in the ‘70s the Soil Association was alarmed by the emergence of the hippie-ish natural food stores with their macrobiotic notions and long-haired approach to organic living.  It took more than a decade for the Soil Association to accept the natural foods movement as allies.

 A new book “Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness” traces the origins of the wellness movement and its roots.  From the spiritual lead of the Maharishi and Rajneesh, from the Beats such as Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the liberating psychology of  Jung and Wilhelm Reich, the author Matthew Ingram diligently explores the multifarious threads that came together to create the counterculture.  The hippies didn’t just spring from nowhere, the idea of living in harmony with the planet had deep and multifarious origins.  Plato had a thing or two to say on the subject.  Ingram covers Timothy Leary and LSD - one wonder if the counterculture would have made the strides it has without it.  Communes, retreats and ashrams were where the ideas were tested in practice.  Even Charles Manson gets a mention.

 For anyone who is interested in how we got here, “Retreat”  is essential reading.  It is a pity that the discovery of wellness on a global scale needed Covid-19 to galvanise awareness that comorbidities such as diabetes and obesity are what make us so vulnerable to what is, for many, a harmless virus.  Lord Northbourne and Gypsy Boots may seem odd bedfellows, but they both saw the war that lay ahead, if not how prolonged it would be.  Now more than ever, we need to understand and develop the connection between the planet’s health and our health.

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There's a fungus among us

When their owners are coming home - even when they are miles away, their dog is at the window barking a welcome. This was all in a book called “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home” by Rupert Sheldrake. He coined the concept of ‘morphic resonance’ to try to explain how this apparent telepathy may have some kind of energetic basis. His work was, perhaps inevitably, scorned by mainstream science and a senior editor of Nature magazine said the book should be burned. Rupert’s wife is Jill Purce, who teaches Mongolian overtone chanting, a way of creating deep resonance from your vocal chords that cures digestive disorders.

Their son is Merlin Sheldrake, whose recently-published book “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures” investigates the way that fungi play a pivotal role in all life on the planet.

It’s a gripping book and completely upsets one’s conventional perspective on life. Life began with algae in the sea - the algae could use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugary carbohydrate, but they couldn’t survive on land. Enter fungi, which attached themselves to algae and brought up water from the earth so algae could live on land. Then the algae created their own filaments (roots) which are inhabited by fungi and plant life on Earth began.  When you look at an oak tree, you are looking at the food-gathering ‘mouth’ and ‘stomach’ that delivers carbohydrates to the fungi in the soil. An oak’s roots are full of mycorrhizal fungi, milking the tree for sugar. The fungi use that sugar to ‘pay’ for minerals and medicines from the 10,000 or so bacteria like actinomycetes that need that sugar to live and reproduce.  The fungal network can stretch over miles, the fungi transferring sugar from trees that are producing a lot to other trees that need a sugar fix.

Then the fungi moved beyond plants - they created moving ‘plants’ (worms and other soil creatures).  A worm eats soil that contains fungal spores and bacteria.  The worm’s gut is a safe place in which soil microbes reproduce, thriving on the food that comes in the worm’s mouth, reproducing and then coming out the other end of the worm in huge numbers to build fertility.

Where does it end?  Are we humans also just food gathering organisms for microbes?  Is our real ‘soul’ a group of microbes that use us to feed and increase their populations?  If it’s true of trees and plants and worms, why not us? 

Plants have roots that go outward into the soil, we have intestinal villi, tiny roots that absorb nutrients, via our gut flora, from the food we eat.  Plants and animals use probiotics and prebiotics to maintain health. There is lateral gene transfer among our gut flora and among soil flora - so we are constantly evolving along with our microbial partners (or masters)

Merlin Sheldrake also points out how fungi can influence our brains. Psilocybin comes from ‘magic’ mushrooms, LSD comes from ergot, a fungus that infects rye grains.  These are medicines that researcher envisage will replace addictive tranquilisers in years to come.

So why do dogs know when their owner is coming home?  Dogs are pack animals, They share a pack microbiome so that, when they’re hunting, they act with one brain. When you are close to a dog, you share its microbiome. Is that the same telepathy that Merlin Sheldrake describes as the “Wood Wide Web’ - that instantaneous shared awareness that can stretch between trees that are miles apart in a forest.  Does it apply to animals and humans too?

Why does overtone chanting cure digestive problems?  Could it be that the vibrations of the chanting are like a lullaby to your gut flora, helping them to settle down and live in harmony?

Could it be that Merlin’s book contains the explanations for what his parents saw and recognised as real but didn’t have the insight that their son brought to the table? 

What it also confirms is that organic farming and healthy eating is the best way to benefit from the multiplicity of life-enhancing benefits that arise from having a vibrant and dense fungal community in our bodies and environment.

Prevention over cure

Read more about boosting your immune system here.

Offset the climate mess ...or stop complaining

In September 1993 at Whole Earth Foods we ran a retail promotion called “Eat Organic - Save the Planet.’   This highlighted our increasingly organic range - organic ingredients were becoming widely available.   I recorded a rap. We sent the cassette out to all participating shops. One verse ran: 

 “The weather round the world is getting mighty strange,

As the Amazon rain forest turns into a cattle range

But still you keep on buyin’ all those products that they sell

Eatin’ burgers, drinking coffee, let the Indians go to hell.

Eat organic, save the planet.’

 26 years later everyone’s got their knickers in an almighty twist about the same thing and blame Brazil’s President Bolsonaro for the fires in the Amazon.  Bolsonaro snaps back that he blames the green NGOs.  He’s deluded if he thinks that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF are secretly lighting fires.  But if you asked me who was responsible for this tragedy I would blame the same culprits.

 The idea of carbon offsets has been anathema to these NGOs.  My inbox is full of their urgent requests for funding, promising to campaign against Amazon fires.  None have a credible strategy.  The only viable strategy is one they oppose: clean up the mess!

Back in 1854 Soho in London had a severe cholera outbreak.  A doctor called John Snow cured it by removing the pump handle from the pump at the public well.  People stopped dying.  After that London invested heavily in sewers to separate the liquids (and solids) that come out of your body from the liquids that go into your body.  It became a model for the world.  Otherwise we’d all be dying of cholera.  Nobody minded having to pay to remove the crap that was killing people.  If it was today, you’d have NGOs screaming at people to reduce the number and volume of their bowel movements. 

 Excrement is visible and smellable.  Our carbon dioxide excrement is invisible and odourless. But it is far more threatening to society than a cholera epidemic.  So why do we baulk at the cost of cleaning it up?  We have marvellous tools like trees, soils, pastures, the use of wood in buildings, biochar, peat bogs and salt marshes that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and very quickly and cheaply reduce greenhouse gas levels.  So why do the NGOs oppose it?  Here’s their policy, mostly set out around 2008. 

Greenpeace: “allowing forests to become a get out of jail free card for polluters would be extremely bad news for the fight against climate change.’

 Friends of the Earth: “Allowing rich countries to offset their carbon dioxide by buying up huge tracts of forest is riddled with problems and will do little to tackle climate change.”

WWF “We committed to only purchasing offsets from projects which have been certified by the Gold Standard.  The Gold Standard excludes forestry.  Buying forestry offsets does nothing to lessen society’s dependence on fossil fuels to generate its energy, something that is ultimately needed to address climate change”

We have wasted 10 years.  The rain forests burn and we lose 30 football fields of farmland every minute.

 We have to pay farmers and foresters to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  If the global carbon price was $50 tonne CO2 the cost to society would be minimal, about $10 per barrel of oil.   A  hectare of rain forest would be worth $500 a year.  That’s a heck of a lot more than anyone makes grazing cattle or growing soybeans.  Brazil has been cleaning up our shit for several decades now and we’ve never paid them a penny for it.  We make the CO2, they clean it up.  We refuse to pay them because a few worthy NGOs play right into the hands of the climate change deniers by opposing the market for offsets.  If we did pay for carbon removal we’d all be  eating organic food and have more trees.   We’d stop using peat.  We could still make progress on wind and solar but meantime we would have more biodiversity, purer water, healthier soils and cleaner air.  Would that be so terrible?  If you don’t want to pay to clean it up then don’t complain about the mess.

The Elephant in the Obesity Room

Antibiotics can double the weight gain of a chicken, what are they doing to us?

For peat's sake

2500 years ago Plato wrote about ancient Greece many years before: “... the earth has fallen away all round and sunk out of sight. The consequence is, that in comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.”

At a remarkable mid-June gathering at Morvern in the West Highlands I read the above excerpt from Plato, who was describing Greece before farmers totally screwed it up.  The theme of the conference was ‘Soil Matters’ and it brought together leading soil scientists, artists, musicians, government and NFU officials, land managers and others with an interest in soil and sustainability. It was hosted by the Andrew Raven Trust, a trust established in memory of his profound influence on Scottish land management and environmental issues.  Because we were in the Highlands the role of peat in climate change and sustainability was a topic.  Peat has a deep resonance with the spirit of Scotland - I’m not talking about whisky here but about peat bogs. 

The Scottish landscape has seen some hard times - the Clearances led to populated areas seeing the longstanding human residents sent off to Glasgow or America or Australia, to be replaced by deer and sheep.  Now the Scots are recreating the marvellous environment that reflects the levels of rainfall that typify the region and rebuilding rural populations living in harmony with this unique environment.  A surprising number of the new migrants are from England.

Misguided post-war policy gave indiscriminate tax incentives to forestry. Trees were inappropriately planted on peatlands, the bogs dried out, the ecosystem collapsed.  Now there are active peat bog restoration projects all over Scotland and the benefits to environment and climate are inestimable.  A peat bog can compete with a woodland in the amount of carbon dioxide it takes out of the air and stores permanently in the depths of the earth.  Scotland’s peat bogs are making a huge contribution to mitigating climate change and we still don’t pay them a penny for doing it.  With carbon pricing on the horizon that could change.  If the carbon price is £50/tonne CO2 then an undisturbed peat bog could earn its owner £2-300 per hectare per year.  That’s more than you could make by cutting the peat for fuel or compost.

Peter Melchett, the late Policy Director of the Soil Association, dreamed of the day when peat use was phased out completely from organic farming.  A 2010 Government deadline for removing peat from horticulture was quietly extended to 2020 and now neither Defra nor the EU have any concrete plans to phase out peat use - the pressure from horticulture is too strong - tomato and vegetable growers are a powerful lobby.

So, while the Scots are diligently restoring peat bogs the rest of the world is still digging it up to save microscopic amounts of money.  We deserve to die if we can’t do anything about this insanity.  Vast peat bog areas of Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania and Canada are being mined on an industrial scale to supply vegetable growers. There have been attempts to phase peat out of organic and conventional production. ‘Peatless peat’: compost blends of coir, composted shredded bark, biochar and green waste perform just as effectively but cost a tiny bit more. They have a vastly lower carbon footprint.  The organic movement sees itself as superior to other growers and farmers but the use of peat is one area where we must hang our heads in shame.  Every principle of sustainability is contradicted by the use of peat;: it takes tens of centuries to replace; it turns into carbon dioxide within a year or two of being used; and it destroys biodiverse habitats. Growers feel under tremendous pressure from supermarkets to cut costs in any way possible and peat is cheap.

Alternatives that don’t devastate the environment can do the job just as well, they just cost 1/2 a penny more than peat for a seedling plant.  A tomato plant can produce 50 tomatoes, so that’s 1/100 of a penny that is saved by using peat to grow tomatoes.  Screw the planet, let’s save a penny per 100 organic tomatoes.

It is time for the organic movement to revisit its founding principles, look to the Scottish example and drive a worldwide movement to restore peat wetlands and make peat use extinct before peat use makes us extinct.

Good health begins with food

Craig Sams invites us to reflect on the achievements of Dr Scott Williamson and Dr Innes Pearce, who set up the Pioneer Health Centre in an effort to steer both individuals, and society as a whole, towards better health.

Back in the 1930s Dr Scott Williamson and his wife Dr Innes Pearce decided to do something about the dire health of the British public. They found a location in Peckham, which was one of the poorest districts of London, where they could put into practice their ideas about how a healthy society could be founded on healthy individuals. They believed that individuals who were empowered could take control of their diet and their environment and help build a better world.

They set up the Pioneer Health Centre and soon built a modern building with a swim- ming pool and facilities for education. It was immensely successful. Local people had to pay a shilling a week (5p) to be members, and it was worth every penny. People who attended the centre experienced a multiplicity of benefits including: robust good health; kids doing better at school; more stable marriages; empowered women; gainfully employed men; and less alcohol consumption.

Beating the five evils

The Pioneer Health Centre was well known and admired. In 1943 William Beveridge issued a Government report that mapped out the post-war plans to create a welfare state and a National Health Service. The health of the nation had never been better than during the war, when bakers could only make brown bread, and homegrown vegetables were widely eaten. Beveridge predicted in his budgets for the NHS that the cost through the 1950s would steadily decline as there would be hundreds of health centres based on the example of the Pioneer Health Centre. These would impact on what he called the ‘five evils’: squalor; ignorance; want; idleness; and disease. These evils would be beaten with: better sanitation and indoor plumb- ing; better education; a fair social system; jobs for all; and a positive attitude to health.

Let us always remember Scott Williamson and Innes Pearce who proved, almost a century ago, that good health begins with food, and that you can be your own best doctor

There was huge resistance from the medical establishment to the idea of ‘health centres’ where people organized things themselves. At the Pioneer, members organized their own sporting, cultural and social activities, and engaged in physical exercise, health workshops and periodic medical examinations. This bot- tom-up approach was anathema to the British Medical Association. To get doctors’ support for the NHS, the Government had to go top-down and set up a state-run Ministry of Health. The National Health Service concept was upended to become a ‘National Disease Service’, with doctors, pharmaceuticals and surgery in charge. Beveridge was furious, but powerless.

A mirror of society

Scott Williamson was a bit too radical for his time. He wrote that Peckham was an ideal mirror of British society, with all classes of people as well as ‘the scum at the top and the dregs at the bottom’. His secretary was Mary Langman, who went on to work with Eve Balfour. His wife, Dr Innes Pearce, co-founded the Soil Association with Eve to fight for a similar whole- some bottom-up approach to food production. But the Government owed a huge debt to ICI, who had made the nitroglycerin explosives that helped win WW2. ICI had factories that could easily be switched to nitrate fertilizer production. The Ministry of Agriculture began to subsidize chemical fertilizer and threatened to nationalize any farms that stuck to the old ways. So the war for human health and soil health was won by vested interests who profited most when people were sickly and soils were degraded. The Pioneer Health Centre closed down in 1950 due to a lack of funding, despite its success. The first Wimpy Bar opened in 1954.

The Soil Association continued to fight on behalf of our soils and human health. On 4 October 2002 it held a conference entitled Education Education Education. I gave the keynote speech and used the Peckham project as an example. The Soil Association set up Food For Life and concentrated on raising the quality of school dinners. It’s been an incredibly successful programme and has no problem attracting funding, though not from Government sources. Now, organic freshly prepared wholesome food is not just widely available in schools, but also in hospitals and retirement homes. Better food is now everywhere.

Let us always remember Scott Williamson and Innes Pearce who proved, almost a century ago, that good health begins with food, and that you can be your own best doctor.

Longevity Pensions

In 1970, when we at Harmony Foods were importing miso, tamari, seaweed and soba from Japan, we had a problem.  Every shipment was blocked by the port health authorities in the UK because they came from Japan.  Samples were taken away for analysis to see what prohibited colourings, preservatives and flavourings were present that would bar them from entry. Our products never failed these tests as they were from traditional Japanese producers who were the last holdouts against the industrialisation and chemicalisation of the Japanese food supply.

In 1971 a group of obstetricians and dietitians called for an urgent meeting with the Japanese health ministry. They expressed the concern, if something wasn’t done about the dreadful food the Japanese were eating, that by the year 2000 there wouldn’t be a single baby born in Japan that didn’t have some birth defect caused by the stuff their mothers had been eating.  The reaction was swift and firm: dodgy ingredients were phased out overnight and Japan moved to the world’s cleanest standards of food processing.  In the 1980s, when we were exporting Whole Earth jams to Japan the boot was on the other foot: every shipment from the UK was delayed by zealous Japanese port health authorities checking every product to make sure it didn’t contain additives that were banned in Japan.  It’s not racism to value your heritage and to do whatever is necessary to ensure that DNA that has evolved and been refined by your ancestors over generations isn’t screwed up by food processors trying to add a penny or two to their margins.

In the US, which has been the slowest to remove additives and hydrogenated fat from the food supply, there has been an unexpected bonus for pension funds:  people aren’t living as long as the actuaries expected which means there is a lot of money that is budgeted for paying out pensions that will never be spent.  It is going back to shareholders as increased dividends.  The same thing is happening in the UK. Life expectancy increase has stalled here, too.  

What’s going on?  There are 2 separate trends: there is the fitness and healthy eating trend - these people have dramatically increased their longevity expectations.  Then there is the junk food/sugar/diabetes/heart disease trend, these people are dying sooner.  Medical advances are helping keep people alive who would have died of those conditions a few decades ago, but this masks a real decline in quality of life for those who survive.  The proliferation of mobility scooters tells a story: people who have simply eaten far too much food and probably drunk too much booze are finding it impossible to carry their weight on knees and ankles that were designed to carry far lighter loads.   It doesn’t help that phosphoric acid, the preservative used in almost every cola drink, also reduces bone calcium, making it even harder for increasingly brittle bones to support all that excess weight.

The danger is that we will become victims of our own success.  The natural products industry is the main driver of this movement towards healthier eating, more exercise and better available food choices.   The actuaries at those pension funds are in danger of making the same mistake again, but the other way around.  Instead of over providing for pension payments and finding themselves with too much dosh in the kitty, they could end up following the statistics and assuming that life expectancy has stalled or is in decline.  They’ll pay the money out to their shareholders, then discover to their horror that those pesky healthy pensioners are living much longer and becoming a drain on the pension fund’s resources.   

Healthy people are paying too much for life insurance and unhealthy people are paying too much for their pensions.  Time for a 2-tier system?

One insurer, Vitality, are now offering lower rates for life and health insurance for policyholders who share the information from their fitness devices.  If they walk 12,500 steps a day, follow a healthy diet or work out at the gym they get discounts.   All they have to do is connect their Fitbit or their Apple Health monitor to the insurer’s link and they get paid for looking after their health.  Prevention pays.

Cannabis

Cannabis is popping up everywhere.  Former Prime Minister William Hague says the War on Drugs has been lost and they should be legalised.  The respected IEA Institute of Economic Affairs has published a report called “Joint Venture” that estimates that legalising cannabis would raise more than £700 million tax revenues for the government and cut NHS costs by £300 million. The same report concludes that over 60s consume 34 tonnes of cannabis a year.  Jeremy Corbyn said “Cannabis oil use is clearly beneficial to people and should be made readily available as quickly as possible.’  7-11 has just launched a CBD range in 4500 US stores. Holland & Barrett power through sales of cannabidiol oil (CBD ), as do other retailers.  The stuff works.  It’s not just the CBD part of cannabis that is therapeutic. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the part that gets you high, also has beneficial effects, not least with multiple sclerosis and epilepsy.  The New Scientist July 28 issue profiles GW Pharmaceuticals in Kent, the leading producers worldwide of a 50:50 blend of CBD and THC branded as Sativex.  It has been widely used for more than a decade to benefit sufferers from multiple sclerosis. CBD and THC are complementary, yin and yang.  Some proportions might work better than others, depending on the disease and the customer/patient.  It is, as the Victorians well understood, a remarkable and versatile medicine.

The psychotherapy and medical professions are demanding wider availability for therapeutic applications of psilocybin, the LSD- like substance extracted from magic mushrooms. The experiences of end of life users raise the question: ‘why do I have to wait until I have terminal cancer before I can legally take psychedelics and become happy with life, death and existence?’  Unlike other antidepressants, just a couple of sessions with psilocybin can provide a lifetime of cure.  Not very clever from a Big Pharma point of view, but wonderful for the person who wants to live a full and satisfying life.

Cannabis is now fully legal in Canada, California, Washington, Colorado, Uruguay, Portugal and Holland. The legalisation pathway goes like this: first allow the use of CBD; then allow the use of medicinal cannabis; then allow full recreational use. Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and many other countries with a history of cannabis use are quietly relaxing their controls. The only reason they made it illegal was US lobbying at the UN and threats of sanctions back in 1961. This is hard to sustain now so many US States have legalised.

It very much looks like widespread access to cannabis and psychedelic drugs will be commonplace in the next 5 years.  We will then look back on it as we once looked back on Prohibition and wonder why on earth we ever banned the stuff, crammed our prisons with innocent users and created global murderous criminal networks to fulfil demand.

The natural products business needs to consider is the coming impact on the way we live, the way we eat, what we buy and the way we interact with one another.  There was already a large scale experiment with widespread use in society of cannabis and psilocybin-like materials in the 60s.  What happened?

-       People formed communes and collectives (like Infinity, Suma and Essential) and shopped local and organic

-       Diet moved towards vegan/vegetarian/macrobiotic.

-       Alcohol consumption reduced - you can’t be high and drunk at the same time

-       People became actively opposed to war and pushed their leaders for peaceful solutions. 

-       People became mindful, adopting yoga, zen and meditation

 Healthy living and psychoactive drugs are better medicine than pharmaceuticals and alcohol. Cannabis and psilocybin use will induce major changes in society as legalisation makes usage much more widespread. The NHS will help people transition from opioids and antidepressants to the responsible use of cannabinoids and psychedelics.  There will be a negative impact on the pharmaceutical industry and reduced militarism and chemical agriculture.  Pension funds will have to provide for the increase in longevity.

It could have the potential to be social medicine as well. As we become more connected and supportive of one another economics, society and politics will change to reflect that thinking.

These changes are coming. They will dramatically increase demand for the offerings of the natural health industry. 

Are we ready for it?

Organic Integrity

One of the early ‘miracles’ of genetic engineering was the Flavr-Savr tomato.  The edited gene enabled the tomatoes to be picked at peak ripeness and then the ripening process would be stopped and the tomato would be yummy. As always with genetic engineering, there were unforeseen complications. When the first year Flavr-Savr tomato crop in 1994 was shipped to supermarkets across the USA they arrived in terrible condition.  Nobody had tested them on a road journey. The slightest vibration on the truck journey and the tomatoes became inedible mush.  What to do?

The entire tomato crop was harvested, pureed and canned in an attempt to cut the horrendous losses.  Now who would buy the cans?  No American supermarket would touch the stuff, but Safeway and Sainsbury’s bought the lot.  The cans were proudly labelled ‘Made with Genetically Engineered Tomatoes’ and sold at 2/3 of the price of Italian non-GMO tomato puree.  It was great PR for GMOs: ‘Wowser! thought the consumer - these GMO tomatoes are going to knock loadsamoney off my grocery bill, so I’ll have more to spend on necessities like beer, fags and cheap disposable clothing!’  

Calgene, who launched the Flavr Savr, went bust and taken over by Monsanto.   Around the same time the introduction of GMOs into Europe was a done deal.  Directorate General Agri, or ‘DG Agri,’ the EU Commission department (who really decide what the rules are in the rotten and corrupt Common Agricultural Policy) had already promised the biotech barons they needn’t worry. 

When we realised what was happening Richard Austin of Rainbow Wholefoods organised the wholefood wholesalers and retailers to dig in their heels against GMOs.   With the Soil Association we lobbied to require that GMO ingredients be labelled.  As Safeway and Sainsbury’s had already proudly done it on front of pack, this was a relatively easy win and DG Agri let it pass, not realising it was a fatal strategic mistake until too late.  GMOs were dead in the water.  If a consumer saw ‘Genetically Engineered’ on the label they would put it back on shelf, no matter how cheap.

In September 1999 Patrick Holden and I met with the top people of Monsanto under the auspices of the Environment Council. Monsanto wanted to understand how everything had gone so horribly wrong with their planned GMO blitzkrieg into Europe. 

Patrick and I explained organic principles and how they were at total variance with the ideas of genetic modification.  I kept a note of the meeting that included this line:

This opening exchange was the first and most fundamental revelatory experience for them.  They had never really understood these most basic organic principles.

It was appalling how little they understood about organics.  Once they realised what an obstacle to the rollout the organic world represented they took us seriously.

Subsequently there has been an extended campaign of disinformation about organic food running with various fallacious arguments: we would have to cut down rain forests to get the extra land to grow organically; e.coli O157:H7 in lettuces is higher in organic food; organic farmers use terrible pesticides; GMOs are safer than organic; you can’t trust organic certification.

Forbes Magazine was a good vehicle for this kind of crap.  Dr. Henry I. Miller has written about how organic food is a ‘deceitful, expensive scam’ and ‘the colossal hoax of organic agriculture.’  Forbes finally fired him when they found out one of Miller’s articles was written by Monsanto.  Miller helped Philip Morris organise a global campaign against tobacco regulations and wrote that nuclear radiation is good for your health.  He wrote a blistering attack on the World Health Organisation when they pronounced Roundup a ‘probable carcinogen.’

Burson Marsteller are the PR company that Monsanto use whenever they have an environmental disaster - they are expert at making bad stuff look ok.  And at making good stuff look bad.   When there was an anti-GMO demo in Washington they hired, for a $25 honorarium, counter-protestors with signs saying: ‘Biotech Saves Children’s Lives.’  

There’s a well organised misinformation campaign out there about how you can’t trust organic certification.  Meanwhile the Soil Association has been asked by China to certify organic producers there because of its globally-respected integrity.  A leading oats supplier sued the Soil Association, backed by Defra and another certification body, because the Soil Association refused to accept documentation on oats that tested for pesticide residues at levels well above ‘spray drift.’  Now all certification bodies must sample for pesticides and have the right to reject products that fail the test.  Belt and Braces. Food You Can Trust.