Artisan Food

You could be forgiven for thinking I was sometimes a bit of a grump grumbling about salt fascism, obesity, subsidies, GM, industrialised food, chemical farming, global warming and the rest.  But I'm really an optimist - with a vision of how things could be if only they weren't the way they are.  If I didn't have that vision I wouldn't see all the crap that spoils the vision.

So when I went to the School of Artisan Food near Nottingham I saw my dream of a better world of food and farming coming closer.  It was the venue for the Slow Food AGM (I now chair this wonderful organisation - please join as a corporate supporter or as a member).  The School of Artisan Food just opened last year.  It teaches aspiring food producers how to bake great bread, make brilliant cheeses, brew beer, pickle, preserve and be a butcher.   Traditional skills have a reason - they make food taste better and bring out the best in ingredients that have been produced by farmers and growers who also care about quality. This school is where the people who put values before 'value' can learn how to make small incremental changes in the way food is produced and consumed.

Nearby is the Stichelton creamery - where Joe Snyder, formerly of Daylesford makes a Stilton-style cheese from unpasteurised organic milk and is now struggling to keep up with demand.  Head of the baking department is Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, formerly of Daylesford and more recently head of production at our own Judges Bakery in Hastings.  His first crop of graduates went out into the world this summer, armed with the ability to make yeasted and sourdough breads using the finest organic ingredients.   Emmanuel's new book How To Make Bread is, quite frankly, the best book on baking that I have ever seen, a must-have for any kitchen bookshelf.   I've read them all over the years: from Sunday Times Book of Real Bread (featuring me and Ceres Bakery way back in 1976) to Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery. None of them combine the clarity of method, the detailed illustrations and great recipes in the way the Emmanuel's book does. After a one year course his students are already working in artisan bakeries or opening their own.

Tesco announced its worst year in 20 years with like for like sales flat.   Aldi and Lidl are scooping the bottom feeders of the food market while independents are providing a haven of quality for people who appreciate good food, freshly made, using the finest natural ingredients.   Our own Judges Bakery is up year on year, like for like, after a couple of years in the doldrums.

More and more producers want to hang their own beef, sell their chickens and turkeys direct to customers, make their own cheese and mill and bake their own grain.  This is a deep trend that has been gathering momentum for decades and is now gaining tidal wave proportions (exaggerate? Moi?). The diehards who have protected food quality traditions are finally being vindicated.  Dear Henrietta Green, whose Food Lovers Guide to Britain back in 1989 helped to save the last of the dying breed of small producers, now has an army of 60 or more members of her Food Lovers Approved scheme who form a phalanx of quality offerings in their own dedicated section at the BBC Good Food Show and other events. 

"Who'd a thunk it?"  as my old friend Gary Hirshberg once said about his amazing success at Stonyfield Farm and our luck at being in the right place at the right time with Green & Black's.   This is the kind of stuff that could never have happened before. The experts predicted that all food would be produced on a massive industrial scale.  Now artisan production is almost commonplace and there is a school that teaches you how to turn back the enveloping tide of monotony and nutritional emptiness that once swept all before it from its path. 

Legal, decent, truthful and honest? Oh, come off it!

Major airlines and detergent brands runs rings round the ASA while the small guys get hauled up on pedantic points of detail, writes Craig Sams.

Which ads do you think would upset the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)?  Their brief is to crack down on advertising that is not ‘legal, decent, truthful and honest.’  They do it by putting pressure on the media not to accept offending ads.

1 .“New Improved Organic Wildcat shower gel – the cleaner you are, the dirtier you get.”

2.  Fly Murphyair to Nice for £2

3. “Avoid unhealthy Transfats – Eat Whole Earth non-hydrogenated margarine”

4. “Organic means fewer drugs or antibiotics, it also means better conditions for animals so they get to thrive and grow more naturally.

It’s 3 and 4, of course

From 1997 until the ASA finally took action last year you could call a completely non-organic shower product ‘organic’ or ‘Organics.‘  Despite frequent complaints they refused to act. That the ads defied any reasonable definition of organic was neither here nor there.   The EU lawmakers had not yet roped in bodycare or textiles to their legal definition of ‘organic.’ So shower products and shampoos misleadingly benefited from being described as ‘organic’ for a decade due to a fine legalistic point.

But what if an ad indecently suggests, in adverts seen at bus stops by 7 year-olds, that gorgeous girls will be queueing up to get down and dirty with you if you smear some concoction of synthetic perfumes and detergents all over it? That’s OK as it is ‘decent’ and ‘truthful’, as far as the ASA is concerned. I look at ads like that and feel sorry for the losers who believe it, but we live in a world where a lot of guys are so desperate for some nookie that they’ll believe anything. But I also feel sorry for the parents who have to explain this ad to their kids.

You can advertise the cost of a flight without any of the add-ons that most people will end up paying (online check-in fees, credit card fees, airport charges etc). Airlines complain to the ASA about each other and the ASA steps in but they have been doing it for 10 years and the ASA can’t really stop them.  They have huge advertising budgets so the media run the ads and then the ads are out of date anyway and a new, more imaginatively untruthful ad appears. It’s makes a mockery of the ASA.

But the ASA can flex its muscles when it faces up to the little guys.

When Whole Earth advertised Superspread in 1993 it had a rather longwinded educational advertisement explaining the latest research on hydrogenated fats and urging people to choose a non-hydrogenated alternative. The folks who make Flora complained to the ASA – (their product was 21% hydrogenated fat in those days).  We gave all the information to the ASA but they still refused to let us advertise. We appealed. They said it wasn’t about truthfulness, they didn’t like us appealing to fear. Flora had been appealing to fear for a decade, with pictures of pretty housewives resolving to keep their hubby healthy and heart attack-free by cutting out butter and making his sandwiches with hydrogenated margarine. That’s when I realised the ASA had integrity issues. Recently I asked to see the records of our case and they said they hadn’t kept records from before 1994!

The Organic Trade Board invested in advertising that stated ‘Organic means fewer drugs or antibiotics, it also means better conditions for animals so they get to thrive and grow more naturally.’ The ASA stopped this (see p ??) because somewhere there might be a lucky cow or chicken that enjoys conditions as good as on an organic farm.  Replace ‘also’ with ‘generally’ and you have an ad with the same powerful message. But what a pedantic and trivial distinction. What a pain!

I have steered clear of complementary medicine in this rant, but just think about this.  Every year 720,000 Americans are killed by adverse reactions to prescription drugs. This means ‘death by doctor’ beats heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death.  The NHS doesn’t publish similar statistics, but works hand in hand with the same drug companies. Perhaps it’s time for the ASA to take a look at the advertising of drugs.

Conford Book Review

Imagine you were writing a history of radio and television.  You cover the main actors, the writers, the producers, the programmes and the critics. You cover the impact on competing media such as newspapers and movies.  But, very carefully, your book avoids any mention of BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, Discovery Channel.  You don’t mention the broadcasters

Some years ago I gift aided £10k for the Soil Association to be able to help Philip Conford write a history of the organic network.  It was high time the deeds of the organic pioneers of the 60s and 70s were memorialised.  He thanks me in his introduction for never  seeking to influence his writing.   I wish now I had shackled him hand and foot.

His new book “The Development of the Organic Network, Linking People and Themes 1945-1995” sets out to be a history of the development of the organic network from its earliest philosophical beginnings.  But it ignores the broadcasters completely.  No mention of Harmony Foods, Community Foods, Infinity Foods, Green City Wholefoods, Edinburgh Real Foods, Essential, Harvest,  Marigold Foods.  No mention of the Natural Products Shows, no mention of Robin Bines, Peter Deadman, John Law or any of the many other founding fathers of the organic food phenomenon.  These people and companies were true revolutionaries but, as if in some Stalinist rewrite, they have been airbrushed out of the story in which they were the main activists.

Here’s what Conford’s book left out.  My brother Gregory and I started the Harmony organic brand in 1970 and introduced the first organic brown rice. Ivan Seruya and Herbie Girardet visited organic growers in the Home Counties sourcing organic vegetables and fruit in season that they delivered to the new generation of whole food shops popping up all over. We bought all Organic Farmers & Growers organic barley, rye wheat and oats and turned it into flakes for organic muesli.  Farmers could plant crops with confidence they'd be sold as organic. Community Foods and European counterparts developed organic dried fruit from Turkey.  Infinity Foods introduced Ecover and a wide range of European organic products, seeding the market for UK processors.  You could buy a full range of organic products, so people took organic food seriously.  The conversion of farm output to consumer products and the retailing and distribution of those products, was the work of these early pioneers, of whom I am proud to be one.   I told all of this to Philip Conford, he made notes, but none of this story made it into his book.

Even more irritatingly Conford decries the lack of spiritual values compared to the early Christian organic philosophers of the 1930s. What about Goodness Foods and Community, where Christian values were paramount?  The organic movement was also driven by the Buddhism and Taoism of macrobiotics, the Hindu influences on vegetarianism and veganism, the Jewish Vegetarian Society and the humanist animal rights movement. These are ignored completely.  Then he mentions a few cooperatives but only ones that failed.  What about successful cooperatives like Essential. Infinity, Suma, Harvest and Green City?.

Conford's book covers every detail of the writers and producers, but it completely ignores the vital mechanism that helped transform their ideals into a reality. Deeds speak louder than words.

The true history remains to be written.  It should be written while the memories of the pioneers are still fresh.  It will be the people's history of the organic movement, the real story of how we got where we are.

The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In June I was invited to give the keynote speech at the Sustainable Foods Summit in Amsterdam. The conference programme was so advanced it made me blink in disbelief - here were a bunch of corporate executives and sustainability managers from the world's leading corporations all working to create real standards of sustainable growth and methods of measurement in order to comply with their corporate statements of principle. Stalwarts like Clearspring and Whole Foods were there, but the general tone was very mainstream. I spoke about taking an ethical brand mainstream later in the day but for my keynote I thought I'd give it to them with both barrels. Here’s my speech:

"Today I would like to take for my text the New Testament, Chapter 6: 1-8, the Book of Revelation of St. John the Evangelist (I'd give anything for a picture of the audience's horrified faces as they prepared for the worst). You may recall it: it's where Jesus opens the sealed scrolls and summons forth the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - War, Plague, Famine and their faithful follower, Death.To understand sustainability we must recognise that the world's economy is still governed by legacy industries who have a massive vested interest in those 4 horsemen. Without them, or the fear of them, their shareholder value would collapse.War enjoys annual capital expenditure of $1.5 trillion. with the US leading the field, devoting 5% of GDP to military spending. As you'd expect with any capital expenditure, the return on investment is many times the value of the outlay - the cost of death and destruction of property in target nations is massive. Of course the at-home social damage is pretty high too as soldiers return home with attitudes to violence that lead to high domestic cost due to healthcare, suicides, crime and psychological problems.Plague enjoys good returns, too. The Avian Flu and Swine Flu panics exposed Big Pharma’s desperate quest for new disease threats. The side effects of medical intervention create a huge subsidiary industry and new diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and high cholesterol create an opportunities for profit. Death from medical errors in the US run at 200,000 a year, while correct intervention claims many more.Famine is perhaps most relevant to this conference. By destroying the natural fertility of the Earth with chemical fertilisers and killing off biodiversity with pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, GMOs and antibiotics agribusiness has created a global dependency on their chemicals to produce our food. 'Feed the world' is their mantra as they progressively starve the world. Now, except for organic farming, we are hooked on the drugs they sell to keep degraded land in production.We have to kick these bad habits but they are entrenched in our socioeconomic system and their proprietors will not give up without a fightSo how can sustainability triumph? It must be in all arenas, we must bring peace and prosperity, to all. It can be done, because things have changed.How have things changed?Debt - Wars, drugs and agribusiness have bankrupted our economies. First rule of a parasite is: don't kill the host. If American taxpayers had to pay for war, medicine and farm subsidies they would never have happened. Instead the Chinese, and Arabs loaned the US the money so they could continue to buy cheap consumer goods and oil. Now that the debt is dragging down our economy we wrongly blame the bankers. The rot started because our governments subsidised war/drug/ag with borrowed money because they were too cowardly to pay for it out of increased taxation.Transparency - the days of the smoke-filled room where a handful of powerful men decide the fate of the rest of us is ending. We know what’s going on.There is no future if there is not a sustainable future. A handful of companies worldwide thrive on war, sickness and a famine. Our governments bow to them. Monsanto's control of the USDA is the most obvious but it's the same everywhere, from the EU to India to Africa and Latin America.It is undeniable that peace brings more prosperity than war and avoids the burden of debtThat the creation of health is better value than the treatment of diseaseThat organic and sustainable farming gives better and more reliable yields than unsustainable petrochemical dependencyWe're right - we know we're right - they know we're right.But they won't give up without a fightIn Britain our new prime minister speaks about The Big Society - people doing it for themselves. The top down model is disintegrating everywhere. When people start doing it for themselves then different choices will be made. Companies that are ready for this seismic change will prosper. There can only be on future and by definition it must be sustainable.

Treated like Animals

What is it about the meat industry? Vegans say meat is murder, what’s clear is that its production often defies morality.

A recently published inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (http://bit.ly/aKqz2U) has been pretty horrifying: women working in meat and poultry processing factories barred from going to the lavatory because it would slow down the production line. Result: urine and blood (if they’re menstruating) dripping down their legs. Angry managers pelt workers with frozen hamburgers and call them ‘you f***ing’ shit Polish.’

Press reports use terms like “Treated Like Animals.” I guess we take brutal and uncaring animal treatment for granted: cattle in Colorado feedlots up to their knees in their own shit, sick with e.Coli infections and salmonella. US poultry meat has to be washed with chlorine before it can safely be put on sale. I visited a chicken farm in West Virginia 18 months ago: the ammonia from fermenting chicken poop burned your eyes so badly that we could only stand in the shed full of 100,000 birds for a minute before we had to retreat to the fresh air outside. The country girl who assisted the manager commented that she had got used to the smell: her job entailed removing the dead birds every day. The corpses were then burned to generate heat that was helped heat the chicken barn – as recycling efforts go, probably a cut above grinding them up and feeding them to the survivors.

In the 19th Century a report from a Royal Navy vessel that intercepted a slave ship summarised conditions on that most horrendous of transatlantic voyages. “The sick, the dead and they dying were pulled up onto deck, shackled together, and thrown overboard.” The slaves were tethered in cubicles about 2 feet wide and 3 feet high for the entire voyage, which could last 4-12 weeks. The longer the trip the higher the death rate. Slave ships were ‘tight pack’ or ‘loose pack.’ ‘Tight pack’ profitably fitted more slaves into a ship, but the death rate was much higher: 10-20%. Modern pig and chicken factory farms go for ‘tight pack,’ raising the death rate to 5-14%, even with routine antibiotic use. Disease spreads in conditions where faeces cannot be cleared – even slaves above deck were chained in place for the entire voyage – otherwise they would jump overboard to escape the conditions.

I suppose when we consider the cruelty that surrounded the slave trade we shouldn’t be surprised that similar evils infest the meat industry. The trust of an animal is a wonderful thing. As pets they have a therapeutic effect that defies medical explanation. Yet if someone were to take a puppy or a kitten, smother it in its own excrement for a month or so, torture it, starve it and throw it into a furnace while it was still alive they’s be excoriated on the cover of the Daily Mail.

A new dairy ‘farm’ in Lincolnshire is planned to house 8100 dairy cows in darkened stalls, modelled on American dairy production. It is estimated that half of US dairy cows suffer from mastitis and they also suffer leukaemia, milk fever and a bovine form of AIDS. ‘Downers’ – cows that collapse - are turned into ground beef before they can die and become unsuitable for consumption.

It’s not often that Human Rights Watch take up cudgels on behalf of American workers, but they have pointed out that meat industry workers have 3 times the injury rate of other industries, with workers being asphyxiated by fumes and having their legs cut off and their hands crushed.

When you look at the cruelty we inflict on animals is it any wonder that we treat abattoir workers so badly? When you look at the kindness that typifies organic animal rearing, is it any wonder that places like the exemplary biodynamic Laverstoke Farm build their own meat processing facilities, carefully designed to keep the animals calm right up to the final moment, rather than send them off to a slaughterhouse where the people, let alone the animals are treated like…well, slaves.

People somehow manage to get over their concerns about animal welfare when they buy non-organic meat in a shop or restaurant, but how easy is it to be a participant in the human degradation as well?

From Green & Black's to Blackened Greens

Here's the story of how I moved from dark chocolate to even darker materials - biochar

Back in 1995 the Prince of Wales delivered the Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture on the theme of ‘Counting the Cost of Industrial Agriculture.’ He argued that if you incorporate the externalised costs of non-organic farming, such as nitrate pollution, gender-bending herbicides in the water supply, biodiversity loss and the climate change cost of greenhouse gases (from nitrous oxides and soil carbon emissions) the real cost of non-organic food would nearly double.

A year later Dan Morrell of Future Forests (later to become the Carbon Neutral Company) encouraged me to go carbon neutral with Whole Earth’s organic wholegrain cornflakes. The whole life cycle carbon footprint of the cornflakes was calculated by independent experts who found that it was surprisingly low: because organic farmers increase rather than reduce the stored carbon in soil, this offset much of the other carbon cost of the cornflakes.

By now it was pretty obvious to me that the sooner we could get policymakers to force us to include the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the cost of food the sooner we would all be eating organic food, because it would usually be cheaper.

Roll on 14 years to 2009 – the climate negotiations in Copenhagen have soil carbon and forest carbon on the agenda. Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the Bank of England and author of the Stern Review that put the cost of every tonne of carbon we emit today at £140 for future generations (currently carbon markets value a tonne of carbon at £11) has said that any future climate agreement has to be ‘universal and equitable.’ In other words, no cheating, no get-outs, no let-outs, no sacred cows. That means that all countries and all activities, including agriculture, forestry and transportation must be included in the new climate regime that begins in 2012. Hitherto only Europe has complied and then only for the heavy industries that emit half of our greenhouse gases – farming and transport have been excluded. But no longer.

2 years ago I invited Dan Morrell to join me in a new venture: Carbon Gold. What do we do? For a start, we believe biofuels are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Every bit of biomass carbon is too precious to waste by burning it. At Carbon Gold we aim to capture woody material such as waste biomass, forestry co-products and tree prunings and convert it into charcoal. But we call it ‘biochar.’ Why? Because we don’t burn it, thereby putting the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. Once we’ve made the biochar we blend it with fertility-building clays and composts and add it to the soil. Biochar is a wonderful soil conditioner: it improves drainage but also prevents soil drying out; it reduces the leaching of nutrients from soil by rainfall; it provides 5-Star accommodation for beneficial soil fungi and bacteria, increasing their populations; it improves soil structure and aggregation; it helps suppress soil-borne diseases that are harmful to plants and biochar helps raise the pH of acid soils. Universities around the world are gearing up to do biochar research that will more precisely quantify its benefits. These vary depending on soil, climate and the amount of biochar applied to soil.

Meanwhile at Carbon Gold we are busily making biochar and selling the carbon credits from avoided emissions as well as selling the biochar as a soil improver. In Belize cacao farmers produce biochar that is blended with compost and used by banana growers to reduce their dependence on fungicides and irrigation. In East Sussex we are regenerating ancient chestnut coppice woodland and producing organic biochar which we use to produce “Gro-Char” peat-free compost which will be sold through garden centres. Garden Organic members will be trialling it in various applications during the 2010 season. In Mozambique we are partnering with a conservation organisation to help small farmers produce biochar, encouraging them to protect their forests and improve their soil fertility. On my own smallholding near Hastings there is a magnificent peach tree dripping with perfect fruit that had its base covered with biochar last February. The ones that didn’t get biochar haven’t done so well, peach leaf curl was worse for them. My biochar potatoes still show no signs of blight, while everyone else’s have suffered.

I feel like I’m still in the food business (and I have made a delicious risotto nero charbonara that delighted dinner guests recently), I’ve just moved my focus towards food security.

John Michell – a head of our times

My first meeting with John Michell was on October 19 1967 after Mark Palmer phoned me from Glastonbury, where he, John Michell and a few other people were camped in a gypsy caravan in a field along the Wells Road or, like Brian Jones, staying in the nearby farmhouse. “You’ve got to come down, Craig” Mark said, “The UFOs are coming out every night, lots of them, over the Tor.” It wasn’t an invitation to be turned down lightly so I piled into my Thames van and headed down the A4 to Somerset. We got there in the late afternoon and John Michell was busy cooking up some curried vegetables with rice. He showed me how to add the spices to the oil before anything else, to diffuse the flavours so that they evenly coated and infused all the ingredients, an attention to the detail of form and function that was typical of his penetrative insight. As we sat outside enjoying the autumnal evening Mark shouted ‘There they are!’, pointing directly to the south. We looked skywards and saw lights moving across the sky. Any doubt about their being of military or aviation origin was dissipated when what was clearly an RAF jet fighter flew up towards the lights, at which point they disappeared beyond Glastonbury Tor and entered what seemed to be a cigar shaped vessel. There was a brief repeat appearance and it was over. John strained his eyes skywards but his vision was already deteriorating and he could barely make out the shapes. His first book: the Flying Saucer Vision, was being published at the beginning of the following week and he had a radio interview lined up. He would be able to say, if asked if he had seen flying saucers himself that he was in a field near Glastonbury only last week as they lifted over the Tor.

During the 1970s our family venture was the seminal magazine Seed – The Journal of Organic Living, which was variously published by my father Ken, my brother Gregory and myself. John was a frequent contributor and would drop into our All Saints Road office to share ideas and a cup of green tea. As macrobiotic health food nuts our yin-yang fanaticism was comfortably engaged by his willingness to both accept and question an idea at the same time. He accepted our philosophy but always retained a detachment that never veered into aloofness, he was genuinely interested and understanding but didn’t get passionate about the ideas we espoused. He was a warm personality but also the epitome of a particularly English type of ‘cool.’ Riding with him in his stylish old Sunbeam Talbot drophead coupe along the Westbourne Park Road could be unnerving as he peered squinting across the long bonnet when trying to traverse a tricky intersection.

He introduced me to the idea of ley lines, freely acknowledging the pioneering work of Alfred Watkins in this respect and his View over Atlantis brought the idea to a whole generation who learned to love the map of the English landscape for its natural energies, not for the roads and motorways that obscured its reality.

One of his greatest gifts, through one of his contributions to Seed Magazine, was to introduce me to the work of William Cobbett. In it he quoted Cobbett’s criticism of young people who ‘mope at the heels of some crafty, sleek-headed pretended saint, who, while he extracts the last penny from their pockets, bids them be contented with their misery and promises them, in exchange for their pence, everlasting glory in the world to come.’ He specifically targeted this quote at the tired young radicals of the 1970s who had the fire in their bellies extinguished by various yogis, Christian tribalists and other mercenary and mystic pacifiers. He also lighted on Cobbett’s “Paper against Gold” where Cobbett ‘exposed in simple language the trick by which the country had been persuaded to barter its real wealth, in labour and produce, for the illusory wealth of bankers’ promises and government paper.’ He must have smiled in his final year as the same recurring fraud was perpetrated again. John’s support for organic farming was in the lamentation: “Today less than half what is eaten in Britain is native produce and that proportion would be decimated were it not for the amounts of chemical fertiliser that must now be imported and applied to obtain any sort of harvest at all.’ In the same article: “ Cobbett conceived an ideal image of medieval England, a fair landscape, prosperous and populous, with its feasts, fairs and holidays, its profitable labour and refined craftsmanship, its equitable society giving health, happiness, security and plenty to all who wanted such things. This was the land he promised the people and he did more than any ten others would have done to keep his word and he could not/ and his failure has been the heritage of all subsequent generations.” John Michell made Cobbett’s vision the inspiration to a generation who believed that a New Jerusalem in England’s pleasant land could be achieved not by revolution, but by going out and creating an alternative society that would eventually replace the corrupt and rotten edifice of government fraud and bankers false promises. They headed for the hills of Wales and the West Country and grew organic vegetables, dreaming of Albion and founding the natural and organic foods industry and the environment movement.

This emerging change was seen to be evolutionary, but not in Darwin’s sense. In his Seed article “Towards Cosmogonic Sanity – The Demolition of Darwin” John envisaged that evolution was not a one way track, that human nature ‘has descended, not risen’ and that prophecy is about regeneration and reversion to type, not to apes but to ‘embodied spirits in union with the spirit of the Universe, citizens of the New Jerusalem.’

John was also a fierce defender of traditional measures and opposed the Napoleonic metres and grams. In Just Measure, which we published in 1976, he wrote: “The inch is the length of the first joint of the thumb, the foot stands up for itself, the yard is a stride or an outstretched arm, a furlong is the furthest distance a man is prepared to run to the pub, and a mile is the distance he is most likely to traverse on his way back. Man is the literal measure of his universe and, using such a system, he can relate naturally to it.’ He was not afraid to have a laugh while making a serious point and to illustrate the article he loaned us a beautiful etching which we captioned ‘Winchester Cathedral was built before architects adopted metrication.’

The constant theme running through John’s work was that the abolition of traditional ways sapped the independence of local society and the individual. He rejected the epithet ‘reactionary’ saying that such phrases are ‘born out of the assumption that the good of the centre takes precedence over the good of the individual…we look forward to the old criterion whereby the wealth of a nation is reckoned by the contentment, prosperity and independent spirit of its members rather than by the amount in labour and taxes that can be squeezed out of them to fuel the development of elite science, technology and culture, directed by and for the benefit of centralised authority.’ The greed of the State, exposed in the MPs expenses revelations, is insatiable. He believed ‘The Thing’ must somehow be starved.

Some commentators have slyly noted John’s frequent inhalation of cannabis as if that somehow diminished his intellect or the validity of his thinking. He would have argued the contrary, referring to the famous hand-written and illustrated manifesto of Dr. Bart Hughes, a Dutchman who wrote in 1962 that cannabis increased brain blood volume by about 40 ml above its normal 1700 ml and that LSD would increase it by 70-120 ml. Trepanation would bring a permanent relief of cranial pressure and allow brain blood volume to find an optimal level. John’s view was that the extra 1½ fluid oz (45 ml) that a good toke delivered was enough to elevate his already heightened intellect and eschewed any further resort to volumetric stimulation. Bart’s theory was based on the evolutionary assumption that our brain blood volume was restricted because, as apes, our heads and hearts were at the same level and that standing erect reduced the ability of the heart to fill the brain. John argued that we had always been erect and the lowered blood brain levels reflected our decline. Thus, pot was an instrument of regeneration that helped us rise back to our original pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. Who can argue with that without seeming frumpish and a boor?

Getting the Lead Out

Why were the Sixties so much fun? Could it be that we were all high on lead? Sure there was acid and grass and purple hearts, but what really got everyone loose as a goose was the lead. There is no level below which lead doesn’t have an effect. A little goes a long way. And it rots your brain, makes you prone to take risks and forgetful, while eating away at your kidneys and your liver. Kids get it worst: adults store it in their bones, but kids have it circulating in their bloodstream.

In the 60s A Day In The Life would start with a pot of tea made from water that had been sitting in lead pipes all night long. All the time you’re inhaling house dust that contains particles of lead that have flaked off the walls, painted with lead-based paints. Then the paper hits the doormat and you read it, the lead in the print coming off as a greyish smudge on your fingers that is absorbed directly through the skin into the bloodstream. Then breakfast of baked beans on toast, from a tin that was soldered together at the seam with a lead/tin compound. Out on the street, take a deep breath of fresh air, nicely spiced with airborne lead from the tetraethyl lead that was in all petrol until the mid ‘90s. Then roast pheasant for lunch, with atomised lead particles from the shotgun that brought it down. Now lead’s been phased out – you can only get unleaded petrol, lead pipes have mostly been replaced with plastic or copper, newspapers no longer use lead-based ink, house paints are all lead-free and tinned foods now no longer use solder – all the cans are welded seams. When I first went to pack Whole Earth baked beans back in 1983 the canners were appalled that I was appalled at the lead solder on the cans. They warned me that having welded seam cans would cost me an extra 10p per dozen, expecting me to drop my resistance. We were the first baked beans to use lead-free cans but Heinz and the rest followed suit over the next decade. Or so. And swan populations are recovering as hunters and fishermen switch over to lead-free shot.

Of course there is still lead residue in the world’s soils in which we grow our food. Green & Black’s test every batch of cocoa beans to make sure there is no residue. Dagoba, in the US, had to recall all their chocolate 2 years ago when it was found to have high levels of lead residue. It broke the company and they sold to Hershey a few months later.

When General Motors and Standard Oil developed tetraethyl lead as a petrol additive in the 1920s there was an outcry. It was banned. Everyone knew it was a poison and the opposition was led by top professors from Harvard and Yale. But Standard Oil likened lead to a ‘Gift from God’ as it would make such a difference to automobile performance. They acted in cahoots with DuPont (“Better Living Through Chemistry”) and General Motors to put pressure on the politicians. The ban on leaded gasoline was lifted and the world got a lot more toxic. Then it was banned again in the 1980s. Rick Nevin, of the National Center for Healthy Housing, has shown that crime levels fall when unleaded petrol is introduced. All the claims of tough guy mayors and police chiefs to have cut crime rates are so much fluff, the real culprit was lead all along. Has lead been phased out around the world? No. In Mexico City cars pump 32 tons of lead into the atmosphere every day. The crime rate went up by 69 % from 2005 to 2009. Researchers said maybe it was criminals acting under the influence of drugs. I blame the lead

But all is not doom and gloom – it only took 60 years for common sense to prevail, so there’s hope for us all that it might do so again with our modern poisons.

Epigenetics - We control our future, not genes

Your Kids Are What You Eat - (and your Grandkids)

If I had a penny for every Daily Mail headline that screams ‘New Hope for Cancer Cure’ and then goes on to say that some scientist discovered a gene that causes cancer, I’d be a very rich man. Little ever comes of this - all scientists did was discover a gene that they found in someone with cancer. When I hear people say diabetes is hereditary I want to scream. Even if every British diabetic in 1900 and their descendants had been confined to breeding farms and forced to produce a baby a year their hereditary diabetic offspring would represent a miniscule fraction of the 2.5 million diabetics, and rising, in the UK. Diabetes, like heart disease and cancer, largely comes from environmental causes like overeating, underexercising, eating denatured food and being surrounded by a sea of manmade chemicals. There may be some genetic history that delays disease onset in some people, but genes are not the cause of diseases of affluence.Billions were spent mapping the human genome so that we could find cures for all our so-called hereditary diseases and in the end they found 25,000 genes, a humbling 5000 less than the 30,000 you’ll find in a mosquito. The genetic bonanza has failed to materialise but something useful did come of all that research - epigeneticsEpigenomes are the software that runs genes. Think of your genes as a computer, you never use the whole thing, but you activate different bits at different times. Epigenomes are the software that runs those bits - and you only use a few programmes at a time and then only a few bits of those programmes. They’ve just begun to count epigenomes and estimate they run into the millions. And they change all the time, depending on circumstances.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that acquired characteristics could be inherited. But this Lamarckianism was replaced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the scientific world for 150 years accepted that genes were the be-all and end-all of our makeup. But epigenetics has brought Lamarck back to centre stage.

He argued that if a giraffe stretched its neck to reach leaves higher up the tree, its kids would inherit longer-necks. Harvard research studied rats in mazes that took 165 attempts to run it perfectly. After a few generations, their grandkids could get it right after 20 attempts. Just think, if you did the Times crossword every day for 10 years and then had babies your kids would inherit a heightened verbal ability (or maybe just talk in riddles and anagrams). If you overeat then your kids will be predisposed to obesity. If you smoke... don’t get me started.

If we eat a moderate diet of organic food, live in an unpolluted environment and in decent conditions and take plenty of exercise we have the potential to gift our children and grandchildren with unimaginable levels of health, happiness and longevity. Coué’s mantra: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” could apply to all of mankind and, indeed, the whole planet, plants, animals and microorganisms.

Instead of the disease-obsessed fatalism of traditional genetics, we can have free-will optimism. Instead of passively accepting that we are locked in a DNA-driven destiny we can improve our genes and create the future that we want.

The healthy living movement has always been driven by an intuitive acceptance of this. There is a responsibility here, too - we owe it to future generations to do right by them. We may have bankrupted their financial future, but we shouldn’t plunder their piggybank of health as well. Epigenetics has proved that we can be masters of our own fates.

What’s stopping us?

Chocolate Wars (Financial Times book review)

CHOCOLATE WARS by Deborah Cadbury

It wasn’t easy being Quaker. Banned from careers in government, the church or law and with their pacifism barring a military career, they were forced into commerce. Their high ethical standards meant they couldn't be involved with alcohol, gambling or making armaments. The grocery trade became a natural outlet for their energies.All the great English chocolate dynasties: Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree, were Quakers. Their belief in the brotherhood of man led to paternalistic employment practices. They build garden towns for their employees with creches, sporting facilities and healthcare. Cameron's 'Big Society’ was second nature - they believed that cooperation and social provision were a necessary and natural adjunct to making money. They encouraged cooperation, volunteering and debt avoidance as fundamentals of behaviour - until competition from the State made their efforts redundant. Deborah Cadbury approvingly quotes Andrew Carnegie: "I can conceive of no greater mistake...than of trying to make charity do the work of justice." If the welfare state encourages dependency, the socially inclusive world of the chocolate industry encouraged self-reliance, hard work and abstemiousness. No pubs in Bournville and no tolerance for slackers in a tight-knit community, but generous provision for those who repaid the firm's confidence.

These straitlaced kindhearted pioneers built great chocolate empires and successfully fended off 100 years of assaults on the British market from Van Houten in Holland and Nestle, Suchard and Peter from Switzerland, while building market domination wherever the globe was coloured pink. Chocolate Wars is much more than a story of a few family businesses - it covers the worldwide growth of the now near-universal addiction to chocolate from the rather unappealing greasy chocolate drinks that prevailed at the beginning of the Victorian age. The role of innovation, war and new technology on business development are all clearly and cleverly interleaved to make this book a gripping overview of the evolution from tiny beginnings to what is now a $500 billion industry.

The book dwells in detail on the ethical dilemma faced by the early Quaker chocolatiers when they discovered that their cocoa bean supply came from plantations that relied on slave labour and tells how the Ghana cocoa industry was fostered to provide a smallholder-owned alternative. Yes there is just a fleeting mention of Fairtrade and not a word about Green & Black’s, the pioneer brand in both the organic and Fairtrade categories and a Cadbury acquisition in 2005.

One question that is unanswered in the book was "Why Switzerland?" The chocolate making season is longer at cooler heights and latitudes - chocolate doesn't set at high temperatures. Swiss watchmakers are good at precision technology. Switzerland had the first structural dairy surpluses in Europe, providing cheap milk for processors. But the fact that non-Swiss companies house their European HQ in Switzerland points to another factor: taxation. The lamentation about job losses in Bristol (which Cadbury's had already irreversibly exported to Poland) overlooked the real loss; Cadbury's annual contribution from its global activities to HM Treasury.

What triggered Cadbury's loss of independence? Selling Hershey the US rights to the Cadbury brand in 1988 meant Cadbury could never become a truly global chocolate company. When Cadbury sought to take over Rowntree and become the world's largest chocolate company the Thatcher government blocked it with a referral to the Monopolies Commission, then allowed a Nestle takeover that handed the Swiss firm global dominion. The disposal of Schweppes soft drinks in 2007 reduced debt but made the company smaller, making it just about affordable for Kraft - they still had to make a $3 billion asset disposal to fund the purchase. It may be presumptuous to disagree with my fellow Omahan, Warren Buffett, but Kraft CEO Irene Rosenfeld saw a window of opportunity and seized the moment before it could close. For that Kraft’s shareholders can be eternally grateful - she got a great deal that will amplify their fortunes going forward. The hedge funds dealt the final hand, but the vulnerability was already there and she went straight for it.

Just Gimme the Drugs,Man - a critique of Big Pharma

Every now and then I clear my spam filter of missives from American lawyers offering me the opportunity to cash in on a bonanza from a class action lawsuit against one of the big drug companies. Huge amounts of money are being made by suing Big Pharma for peddling drugs that don't work, that they knew didn't work and that have awful life-destroying side effects. Respected scientists and medical researchers are shown to have conspired to distort the results so that patented drugs with few beneficial effects were prescribed to millions of gullible patients who wrongly assumed that they could trust their doctor. Just go to www.legaltube.com/breaking-news-hot-list.aspx for all the latest opportunities to get redress.

I'd love to cash in but I haven't taken a prescription drug in more than 45 years, apart from a handful of aspirin and whatever local anaesthetic my dentist uses to numb my gums. I suppose knowing that the life expectancy of doctors is just 58 years and that they are the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA (225,000 deaths a year) is enough to make me wary. But you can’t blame them for dishing out drugs that are backed by peer-reviewed research and articles in prestigious medical journals.

The EU authorities have approved drugs that are submitted on the basis of obfuscation (not mentioning negative outcomes in trials) and on pure fabrication of data. Research data and methodology are distorted to achieve the desired result or you can just make a false assertion and hope to get away with it. All the evidence, in the EU and the US, is that a lot of drugs get approved that are worthless or dangerous.

There is a show at the Wellcome Museum called High Society. It shows a great 1895 ad in which Bayer heroin and aspirin are advertised side by side - heroin being their ‘heroic’ non-addictive replacement for morphine. Selling drugs can be a nasty business, whether they’re legal or illegal.

WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer paid $75 million to settle claims in Nigeria over killing 11 children and leaving dozens disabled by trialling Trovan on kids with meningitis. Hernia sufferers who had the Kugel mesh patch ended up with all sorts of horrible bowel injuries. Denture creams can cause zinc poisoning. Drugs for diabetes and acne are linked with worsening rather than restoring health. GlaxoSmithKline paid out £475 million last October including £60 million to the whistleblower who alerted authorities to problems with their antidepressant manufacture. More than 13000 lawsuits have been filed against them over their anti-diabetic drug, Avandia, amid claims that at least 83000 heart attacks by 2007 arose from a drug that was known to cause heart attacks as long ago as 1999.

So what does the EU do to improve its control over these scandalous risks? It collaborates with drug companies to crack down on herbal medicines, Ayurvedic and Chinese Traditional Medicines that have been used with remarkably few if any negative side effects for hundreds of years.

Why not crack down on the drug company CEOs? Fines are not enough. They make a fortune out of selling drugs to state-controlled health services. They can easily take the occasional fine in their stride. If a customer of a dope dealer dies it’s front page news and the evildoer has his money confiscated and goes down for a 5 stretch. Why not chief execs?

The Alliance for Natural Health is doing its best to stop this nonsense. Give them money. Sadly, our own Government has no power in this arena - drugs, like agriculture, are controlled in Brussels by unelected Commissioners (in Russia they used to call them Commissars) who collude with drug companies to make sure that your health is under their control, not yours. Read Big Pharma by Jacky Law for an insider’s view into how the drugs business works.

From time to time I take home-grown drugs: comfrey, nettles, viola, hawthorn, wormwood, fennel, melissa lemon balm, to name just a few illicit or potentially illicit medications that help support my generally reliable good health. I grow them myself in my garden, organically. Soon I may face prison if I don’t cease and desist from what could become criminal activity. To the barricades, comrades!

Roll on $200 a barrel oil prices

Much as I hate what Gaddafi is up to and much as I dread any threat to the stability of the Saudi regime, I can’t help hoping that the oil price goes up and stays up.

There are a lot of reasons for this.

Cheap oil is what drives industrial farming. 7 years ago in The Little Food Book I calculated that when the oil price hit $70 a barrel organic food would be cheaper than non-organic. That’s because it take twice as much fossil fuel for an industrial farmer to produce a calorie of food as it does for an organic farmer. Broadly speaking, an industrial farmer uses 12 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food. Then it takes more fossil fuel to convey the food to the supermarket distribution depot, then to the store, including refrigeration costs. An organic farmer uses 6 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food and is more likely to sell it at a farmer’s market or to local outlets.

Industrial farming replaces jobs with chemicals. Instead of people planting, weeding and composting chemicals do the job. Nitrate fertilisers are made using natural gas. Gas prices follow oil prices upwards – energy is energy. So nitrates are getting a lot more expensive, but still not expensive enough. They’re killing us by releasing nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas 310 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in causing global warming. Nitrates are responsible for the equivalent of 1 billion tonnes of CO2 every year, about 1/6 of the total excess emissions that are turning up the heat on dear old Planet Earth. And farmers need to use more and more as underlying soil fertility dies out, making a bad problem worse. At $200 barrel, even with the current extravagant level of subsidies, farmers would switch to organic in droves. If you can grow your own fertiliser by leaving fields fallow, composting and growing green manures, why pay for a bunch of horrendously expensive chemicals? The price of food will go up as the price of oil goes up, but the impact per calorie on organic food will be half that on industrial.

A lacto-ovo vegetarian consumes half the energy resources for the same nutrition as a non-vegetarian meat-eater. A vegan consumes just one quarter. An organic vegan will consume just 1/8 the fossil fuel inputs of a non-organic non-vegetarian.

The price of carbon offsets goes up with rising oil prices. Companies have to pay for EU carbon emission allowances. They are currently priced at around £12 per tonne. Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the last government’s report on climate change and of the book Blueprint for a Safer Planet, said the real price should be £70 per tonne. (Then he said “I was wrong – the real figure is £140 per tonne”). The higher the price of oil, the higher the price of carbon offsets and the more attractive it is to invest in energy-saving and renewables. A tonne of oil produces more than 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide, so just to offset the cost to the future of this planet, it should cost £140 times 3 or £420. A barrel is 1/5 tonne, so the carbon cost of a barrel should be priced in at about £80, or $120 per barrel. Then the producers need to make a small profit, too, after all it costs anything from $3 (Kuwait) to $9 (Texas) to extract a barrel of oil from the ground. They’ve got used to making $90/barrel profit, add that to the $120 carbon cost and you’re over $200.

When you see the taxis with their engines running queuing up outside railway stations, vans parked with their engines running and people whizzing along at inefficient speeds you can’t help wondering if they would be so wasteful if petrol cost 3 times as much.

Think of the jobs that high oil prices would bring, too. Every time an out of town supermarket opens local employment suffers. Yeah, yeah, I know they claim they are creating jobs but James Lowman of the Association of Convenience Stores did a check last year. Supermarkets created an extra 2.75 million extra square feet of store space and cut their staff levels by 426. So we are gutting the high streets of our towns and putting more people on the unemployment register and forcing people to drive to the supermarket to buy a week’s worth of food, 1/3 of which goes off and ends up being wasted.

When oil prices go up people will shop locally, on an ‘as needed’ basis. They’ll eat organic. They’ll eat less meat. They’ll walk more and drive less. They’ll pay lower insurance premiums as adverse climate events reduce the impact on insurers. They’ll breathe cleaner air as people switch to less polluting transportation. They’ll drink cleaner water as pesticides and

Belize - the birthplace of Fairtrade

November 2008, Belize. I am with a small group of journalists, taking them to meet the growers of organic cocoa beans. We go back 15 years - I first bought their cacao when Green & Black’s chocolate was just a baby.

When I first made contact with the Toledo Cacao Growers Association, the Maya Indians faced abject poverty after throwing in their lot with US chocolate giant Hershey. A classic old-development paradigm: the aid workers had encouraged the growers to sign up to intensive farming and the break-up of their communal reservation land. The private land deeds were used as collateral for bank loans to buy hybrid seeds and agrichemicals. Then the aid workers left, Hershey pulled out and prices dropped from $1.75 a pound of beans to a catastrophic 55¢ a pound. The bank was readying to foreclose and confiscate farmers’ land. That’s when Josephine and I turned up, prepared to pay decently, with a five-year rolling contract and cash up-front for organic cocoa beans. I blame the ‘kukuh’. That’s what turned me and Josephine on to the beauty of Belize Maya cocoa and led to Maya Gold, the first product in the UK to be certified Fairtrade. Now I am sitting with Eladio Pop and his wife after a dinner of tortilla, spicy stew and pumpkin, and it’s kukuh time again. It’s all home-grown and homemade. After harvesting his cacao, Eladio ferments it, dries it, roasts it, winnows the husks and grinds them, then shapes the resulting paste into balls. He grates some, blending it with warm water, vanilla, ground allspice and honey or sugar to make kukuh. After several delicious calabash cups-full, we are bouncing off the walls. Later I bump into an old friend, Cirila Cho when she is picking up a cheque for her home-made chocolate bars. A new grandmother, she’s now a businesswoman in her own right, with a small-scale grinding and conching set-up. Organic cocoa is good for women. After the men bring back the pods to the village, the women ferment the beans in boxes for five days. Then they sun-dry them, turn them as needed, and bring them in if it starts to rain. Controlling these operations gives women a share in the wealth, conferring domestic and community power. The Maya-run cacao cooperative is doing well. I attend its AGM, where everyone gets a bar of ‘their’ chocolate, and hears the accountant report another profitable year. Asset-rich, the coop now has enough reserves in the bank for a disaster reserve fund (hurricanes and fire) and high school scholarships. The number of kids at secondary school has grown from 10% to over 70%, thanks to our paying fair-trade and organic prices. The Minister of Foreign Affairs is speaking now, praising the farmers. Thanks to their vision, he says, Belize, the birthplace of fair trade, is a beacon to the world. It sounds grand but it wasn’t all plain sailing. Back in 1993, British and UN aid workers strongly advised the cacao growers against signing-up to produce for Green & Black’s Maya Gold. They especially counselled against going organic, predicting disease and crop failure. However, since we were offering three times the price and a return to traditional Maya farming practices without expensive chemicals, it was a no-brainer. Nevertheless I will always be grateful to Justino Peck, the then - and just re-elected - Chairman of the association, for listening to my scheme and trusting me to deliver. I visit a three-generation farm, the Bols, Grandad Reyes, son Justiniano and grandson Justiniano Junior, where we eat ripe cacao fruit, with just the right au point balance of sweetness and acidity. We eat greedily, our sticky fingers pulling out the seeds, sucking off the pulp and spitting out the beans. This is a rare treat, a fruit that can never be commercialised – take an eco-cacao holiday in Belize and this pleasure can be yours! You can’t produce organic cocoa beans on a big plantation paying slave wages. The only way is on small family farms paying a decent price to get the commitment and care required for a high-quality product. Shoppers often agonise: organic or fair-trade? Support organic farmers and you get both.

Bio-Fools

Biofuels are causing environmental disaster. Let’s not be biofools...

Last year the average price of a food basket rose by 12%. There are legitimate reasons for this including rising oil prices and more demand for meat. Another cause, which concerns me here, is biofuels - the so-called ‘green’ saviour. The rush into biofuels is a scam to get rid of food surpluses by burning them. Instead of downsizing our cars, we are burning food for oil. Ethanol plants are taking one third of the entire US corn crop and turning it into alcohol for mixing with gasoline. It’s terribly inefficient, but the government gives ethanol plants a $1 gallon subsidy and charges less tax on biofuels at the service station. Many US states now require 15% ethanol to be added to gasoline at service station pumps. It’s another scam to waste taxpayers’ money on inefficient GM and industrial farming, this time under the guise of doing something to fight climate change. The US and the EU are both promoting biofuels as an eco-solution. Don’t be fooled. Two recently published groups of US research found that farming biofuels actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. Clearing carbon-rich peatland and rainforests to plant fuel crops releases even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The industrial manufacturing process only adds to biofuels’ carbon footprint. Grown on an industrial scale, biofuels end up accelerating climate change, not reducing it. Worst of all, the fundamental principle is flawed. If you put £1 million in the bank in July and then withdrew it in August and burned it, would you say you were £1 million better off? Of course not, but the crazy economics of biofuels do just that. When biofuels are burnt, carbon that has just been taken out of the atmosphere in the summer goes right back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, later in the autumn. How on earth is that doing something good for the planet? If we really want to reduce greenhouse gases, then we need to put carbon into the soil and keep it there by farming organically. Carbon does far more good in the soil then it does harm in the air (as carbon dioxide). The soil on organic farms contains up to 6 times as much carbon (as humus) as on non-organic farms. Humus fertilises the soil naturally, retaining moisture and nutrients. But instead of turning land into carbon-rich stores, the EU Commission is calling for energy-intensive, greenhouse gas-forming biofuels. It has recently made new targets: 10% biofuels by 2010 at a pump near you. This will exhaust what little carbon remains in our once humus-rich fertiles soils, all to keep agribusiness going.If the US and EU paid farmers to turn their farms into carbon-capturing meadows and forests, we could add billions of tonnes of carbon to the soil carbon bank annually. But agribusiness doesn’t make money out of set-aside land – no market for chemicals, equipment or fertilisers - it makes money out of land relentlessly farmed to destruction. So we pay more for food as well as, through our taxes, for biofuels. And global warming gets worse.This has terrible social consequences as well as environmental ones. Most of Europe’s palm oil bio-diesel is imported from Indonesia, destroying the orangutan’s habitat and precious rain forest and its human inhabitants. Ethanol from Brazil comes from sugar cane that replaces Brazilian rainforest. We are converting other people’s land and food into fuel for us. EU policies subsidise the theft of land from forest-dwelling people. Nobody, not even Parliament, ever asked for or voted for this.Not in my name, please.

Subsidies - who really needs them?

Every year the governments of the world back winners in Big War, Big Ag, Big Energy and Big Pharma. The total bill to taxpayers? A stonking $3500 billion! Yes, $3.5 trillion. How much of this do you get? Nothing. You just get to pay for it. Unless you’re Big.

You can't blame the poor despised bankers for this one, this is our elected representatives doing what they are told by unelected powers and their well-connected lobbyists.

How does it break down? Big Agriculture gets $350bn a year to degrade our soils with chemical fertilisers, kill off our wildlife and living soil with pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Big War uses up $1500 bn a year on wars of aggression. Direct and indirect subsidies to Big Pharma cost $1000 bn. And Big Energy gets $550 bn - mostly subsidies to help struggling oil companies discover more oil.

See the pattern? Tax the little guys and subsidise the big and powerful. Then they 'optimise' taxation to make sure they pay as little tax as possible in a place like Britain.

How does it feel to know that the tax on the money you've diligently earned without any help from the government is being spent to help powerful competitors drive you out of business?

Then there's the non-governmental subsidies, harder to measure but with the same effect. Supermarkets subsidise industrialised bread to lure customers to their stores. This is ruinous for small bakers who have to make their profit from baked goods.

Ocado - a direct competitor of many readers, has managed to lose £300,000,000 over the past 10 years and managed to lose £25 million last year, but in so doing it undermines retailers that have to make a profit or go under. This is a subsidy from private equity to gain future profit but its impact is to drive honest traders out of business and clear the field for another monster. Their investors probably include your pension fund.

Every £1 of subsidy from the EU costs us £2. How so? The administration, policing, storage and fraud inherent in running the CAP swallows half the money that goes to farmers. It would be cheaper to give every food shopper a 'CAP tax back’ at the checkout and dismantle this unwieldy system. They claim subsidies help small farmers but the fact is that smallholdings and small farms began to disappear as soon as we joined the CAP.

The Common Agricultural Policy is up for reform in 2013. They've been ‘reforming’ it ever since the 1970s. Because of our subsidies, farmers in other countries can only compete by exploiting slave labour, degrading soil, destroying rain forests and poisoning themselves and the environment with nasty chemicals. Activists campaign to support the forests and indigenous people and to ban slavery, but would freak out if we had to pay the real cost of food at the supermarket. The average dairy cow in Europe gets over £600 a year in subsidy - no wonder milk is cheaper than bottled water! (And there’s still surplus cheap milk to dump to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria)

Will the CAP be reformed? What happened last time, ten years ago? While negotiators from the UK attempted to inject some sanity into the discussions the heads of state of Germany and France excused themselves and stepped out of the room for half an hour. They returned and announced that there would be no reform of the CAP until 2013. And that was that. Since then they’ve instituted a 10% Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation that keeps the countryside full of rapeseed and pays for deforestation of the last habitats of orangutans to grow palm oil to burn in buses.

These people couldn’t reform a piece of plasticine.

Meat Free Mondays

In mid June 2009 I went to the launch of Meat Free Mondays. Frontman Paul McCartney gave a straightforward and inspiring speech stating the obvious – meat eating is responsible for about one quarter of the world’s increase in greenhouse gas levels each year. If we all gave up meat just one day a week, this could make a significant difference to our headlong rush towards extinction on an overheated planet. Not particularly challenging you might think – one day a week without meat isn’t going to have anyone in the developed world turning up at the doctor’s with kwashiorkor or some other protein deficiency disease, is it? In fact, a little less protein might help with the obesity boom – could be win – win: we end up healthier and our grandchildren inherit a planet that is still habitable.

But the press took it badly. Even the Guardian, which I doggedly continue to read despite the increasingly snide and snotty articles against organic food, environment campaigners and alternative medicine they publish nowadays, couldn’t play it straight.The Telegraph’s Liz Hunt said the idea made her want to ‘club a seal’ and vowed to eat bacon for breakfast, chicken for lunch and hamburger for dinner in order to express her revulsion at the concept.Worst of all was the Grocer, quoting 2 anonymous ‘sources’ and one named one. One ‘source’ described the initiative as ‘crass’ and said ‘I think it’s bonkers.’ Then the Chairman of the NFU’s livestock board, Alistair MacKintosh pointed out that farmers were waiting for innovation and science to sort out the cow farts and burps, concluding ‘I’d rather listen to science than some hippified vegetarian.’Errr... the science of global warming is pretty clear on this one:- Cows emit methane, methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times worse than CO2. - Sir David King, the former Government Chief Scientist says: ‘easting less meat will help the environment’ citing beef’s carbon footprint as 20 times higher than that of whole grains. - The Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges a meat-free day to help reduce emissions.These hippies are everywhere!With Hilary Benn, a vegetarian, the new Secretary of State at Defra and Jim Fitzpatrick, another veggie, the Minister for Food, Farming and Environment, let’s hope that the NFU’s legendary control over this important Ministry is balanced by rationality and that science, not subsidy, dictates future policy.Meanwhile it’s all happening on the film front. ‘End of the Line’ documents the corruption of governments by big fish interests and shows how this is leading to the end of abundant fish in the oceans.‘Food Inc’ shows how a handful of multinationals have seized control of our food supply and driven down safety standards for both workers and consumer health.Former Soil Association trustee Tracy Worcester’s film ‘Pig Business’ will be screened on More4 on June 30 2009 at 10 p.m – giving an insight into how the same practices that brought you Swine Flu are now being replicated in Poland.The industrial meat industry is killing us and liquidating any decent future for the planet. If Meat Free Mondays can mark the start of a reversal of this awful situation then it deserves everyone’s support.Recently Greenpeace researched the double whammy source of greenhouse gas in the Amazon forest. Forest is cleared and burned – lots of CO2 into the atmosphere -then it’s stocked with methane-emitting cows that end up being sneaked past the controls that buyers like Tesco, Asda and M&S have established to prevent just this sort of thing. If reputable companies can’t control this what can a person do?Well, cutting out meat one day of the week seems a reasonable start.

Nuclear Power Option? Get rid of it.

Had a chat with a Belarussian cabbie while in Tallinn Estonia to give a speech at a marketing conference. He had lived in Estonia for 25 years.

“Why'd you move to Estonia?” "I worked in the MInistry of Commerce and so had access to confidential government papers. When I saw how bad the radiation contamination from Chernobyl really was I took my family and got the hell out." "Are your kids healthy?" "Yes, thank you, no thyroid cancer or other problems."

The nuclear industry will never tell you the truth. There were frozen Welsh lambs that were condemned for being too radioactive that had been frozen before Chernobyl blew up. It came from the Windscale (Sellafield) fire in 1957. We'd been eating radionucleides since the 50s in lamb and dairy products and nobody told us. It’s still there. Welsh hill sheep have to come down to less radioactive valley pastures for their final months of grazing to get their radioactivity below the maximum limit.

Imagine if you had some disease where you continuously excreted a toxic substance that would kill any living being. You then collected it and injected it into your Mum. That’s what we’re doing to our mother – Earth – so that we can advertise chewing gum all night in Piccadilly Circus.

The electricity that was billed as 'too cheap to meter' has turned out to be costing us the Earth. Fukushima isn’t over yet - a huge area of Japan will be uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. If it had been Dungeness then all of Kent and Sussex would have had to be evacuated. The French have already banned eating or selling fish from the river Rhone because of radioactivity from a nuclear power station near Lyons. Now it’s leaking into the Mediterranean.

Sellafield disposed of 250 tonnes of Plutonium-239 onto the floor of the Irish Sea. Now it’s moving its way up the food chain through microorganisms to shellfish to fish. It’s turning up in farmed salmon. It has a ‘half life’ of 24,000 years. That means in 24,000 years it will ‘only’ be equivalent to 125 tonnes. In other words, it’s there forever.

Every year we create another 12,000 tonnes of HLW – High Level Waste – stuff that is toxic forever.

What can we do? If I ruled the world (not such a bad idea) I'd:

• Earmark 5% of global GDP to energy security. Real energy security

• Tax fossil fuels at their real cost of £140 tonne of CO2 emitted – starting with the US, where 6% of the world's population use 30% of the world’s energy

• Insulate, insulate, insulate - it saves in air conditioning as well as heating

• Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal – just spend the money

• Never burn wood - turn it into biochar and sequester it in the soil

• Close every nuclear power station and ship the waste to Russia

Then pay the Russians to build 20,000 of their 25 tonne payload rockets – it costs $4000 a Kilogram to chuck this deadly crap into space. So the 500,000 tonnes of High Level Waste we now have on the planet would cost a mere $2 trillion to get rid of permanently. What a bargain! The IMF estimates the financial crash cost us $12 trillion and we’re still alive. Let’s do it now, before the waste is irretrievably buried in underground storage. Sorry if there's life out there in space, but it's us or them.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as evil as nuclear power. Nothing else threatens everything that all living plants and creatures have struggled for since the miracle of life began on this planet. It was always just an excuse to build atom bombs.

If you had the choice: double your electricity bill or die a horrible lingering death watching the skin peel off the faces of your children? What would you choose?

Let's Have a Nation of Shopkeepers

The other day I was thumbing through Pigot’s 1839 Directory of Sussex (as one does) when I found that in Hastings Old Town there were once 5 operating bakeries on High Street and 8 on neighbouring All Saints Street. Now only Judges Bakery our new enterprise, survives. The rest of the bread comes from factories and supermarkets. While I don’t lament the absence of competition it does seem sad that where there were once a baker’s dozen of jolly bakers, there is now just one. Those bakers were jolly because they were part of what Adam Smith and later Napoleon described as a ‘nation of shopkeepers.’ Why England in particular? Is it something to do with the individualistic and freedom-loving temperament of this culture? Or is it a natural human instinct to favour things local, fresh, privately-owned and directly answerable? Shumacher argued eloquently in ‘Small is Beautiful’ that this was so.

In early February I went to Syria to accompany a Soil Association inspector on a visit to an olive oil supplier. On the way back I did a bit of tourism and wandered for a day through the vast labyrinthine souks of Damascus. I found a bakery every few hundred yards, bakers and ovens in full view, churning out freshly-baked large flat breads seemingly endlessly. There were no supermarkets to be seen, anywhere. Thanks to the fertile oasis in which it sits and the mild climate, most of the produce is local and fresh. Specialist shops selling pickled vegetables, fish, meat, wooden utensils, household utensils, hardware, clothes, spices, sweets, pastries, preserved fruit, carpets, and all your other needs thrived amidst a total absence of department stores.

How did this small shopkeepers’ paradise survive in Syria when it the once-proud high street has suffered so much in Britain from centralised production, distribution and retailing? What difference does it make, anyway?

Jeffersonian democracy asserts that government should be small, military spending and taxes low and that small landowner or tradesperson should rule supreme. “40 acres and a mule” was given to liberated slaves in South Carolina to ensure they had the economic basis for a truly free future; Margaret Thatcher sought to create a ‘property-owning democracy’ by privatising state-owned industries and encouraging home ownership; the US Homestead Act of 1862 tempted people like my great grandparents with the offer of land ownership free to those who would work the land.

People with an economic stake in society such as the owners of a business are empowered, they can think what they like and say what they like and do what they like without fear of losing their income. They are answerable to nobody except their customers and as long as they provide what their customers want they can prosper. They are, in a word, free.

As corporations merge and acquire, as giant retailers systematically destroy the independent retail sector and as government’s share of the economy relentlessly increases, what are the implications for our freedom? A lot of people blame Tony Blair for being arrogant, taking a reluctant nation to war on false pretexts and running this country like a private fiefdom. But why not? If you could get away with it, you’d do it, too, if you were Prime Minister. The weakness of Parliament reflects the disempowerment of the people that is the result of the loss of individual freedom that comes from losing ownership and control of one’s own life.

But the appetite for freedom is there. Private equity capital encourages more and more managers to borrow and buy their businesses and there is a trend towards breaking up unwieldy corporations that is far more sophisticated than the ‘asset-stripping’ of yesteryear. The natural foods retail sector shows that it is possible for a small retailer of food to enjoy vibrant growth. The big stores face a challenge as rising oil prices make their whole business model look increasingly shaky, dependent as they are on car travel and long distance distribution. Big farmers are terminally dependent on subsidies already - with agrichemical prices and distribution costs soaring, fragmentation of big holdings is inevitable. Cheap oil enabled the pendulum to swing too far to the remote, unanswerable and huge. The pendulum is swinging back and gathering momentum. Can we anticipate that the erosion of human rights and democratic freedoms will also start to go the other way?

Brussels

Just came from a meeting in Brussels July 19 2009

The reason? A jury of 4 people from the organic sector and 4 people who are designers foregathered to consider 1000 or so submissions for the new EU logo for organic food. (The 9th juror was Miguel Indurain the winner for the Tour de France 5 years running from 1991 to 1995)

The old logo was not widely adopted. Most countries and regions already had a national logo so didn't change to it. However, the EU Commission, during the negotiations for the revised organic regulations, decided to make it mandatory, displayed as well as existing marks of organic certification. From 2010 all organic packaging will be required to have it added on the label somewhere as a second reassurance that the product complies with the EU standard for organic food.

So we foregather, we 9 jurors, to consider designs submitted by art students for a logo to encompass all the products of this €22 billion industry. The brief was challenging: no words such as 'bio' or 'organic' - should show Europe in some way (most likely an artistic letter 'e' or a circlet of stars) - should be memorable. We turn a long list into a short list and then rank the logos. There are a lot of very clever designs, some rather trite, many that were not a logo - more a brand or a 'storyboard.' In the end we jurors settled on a ranked top 10.

Next step? Fix them up with refinements of the designs, then post them on the internet and let the public vote for them.

The organic movement and market has gotten so big that Directorate General Agri, the EU Commission's agriculture executive, seem to need to move from a bystander role to more central control. Requiring food products to bear the new mark will help imprint its authority on the rapidly growing organic market.

I met Elisabeth Mercier, the head of L'Agence Bio, the French multisector quango that is now promoting organic food and farming in France. Her organisation has brought order out of organised chaos in the French organic movement and marketplace. L'Agence Bio's profile has strong resonances with the Soil Association's role in the world of UK organic food and farming. France is showing rapid growth in organic farmiong, , helped by the way L'Agence Bio has brought together all the stakeholders for gatherings of mutual interest and benefit. We talked about the FFL Partnership, how independent schools will give it extra weight, how effective it is at creating the infrastructure that can underpin local food economies.

Poznan prattle

Arrived Saturday 5th to be in the midst of a mad runaround

Dan and Debbie are rushing around to get the submission in by 6 p.m. We find out who the key player is and head for his office and meet a guard with a pistol on his hip. We blag and beg to get through security to the high temple: the UNFCCC office and found Martin ??? who is the controller/gatekeeper on this and he gave us the precise wording which Debbie then emailed to the UNFCCC but also printed out a copy and put it through the door of UNCCD, who are the official sponsors of the submission. They need to stamp it with their seal and then, as long as it gets to the UNFCCC by close of play on Monday, it's on the main agenda, not the NGO 'tail' agenda that future negotiations can look at but don't have to properly consider. Whew! But needs chasing on Monday as the UNCCD (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNFCCC=United Nations Framework Committee on Climate Change - do keep up!)

We went for a cup of tea and met Margaret Leinen from Climos, who are working on seeding the sea in expanded trials for carbon sequestration. They put 20 Kgs of iron sulfite (via propwash of boad) per square Km of sea surface and say this sequesters 25 Tonnes of C which falls to the ocean bottom (not CO2, but definitely C)

I leave her talking to Jim Fournier while we go off to the press room and collar odd journalists. One is from a group of environmental journalists and we give him the story and a press release.

Then we restock the press release stand, which is a messy table, with more of our releases.

Then we visit Reuters to thank them for the article (not that good) they sent out on their wires and clarified that we are not looking for funding but are funded and on the way. He was more interested and we gave him 5 minutes of quality information.

Then we passed around the various displays, picking up literature on REDD

Then back to the restaurant where Jim, Lopa and Debbie are still talking to the Climos ocean seeding folks.

They head off to a party and Dan and I go to the REDD meeting at 1930 in the White Tailed Eagle room where a NZ researcher is setting out the economics of different approaches: free approach, restrictions on supply, restrictions on demand. Very technical but gives an insight into how the ‘market’ economics of climate change are influenced by how much people think governments are willing to pay. What’s clear is that everyone is committed in principle but nobody wants to pay the true cost of carbon (£70 a tonne, at least, according to Nick Stern, who since said it’s probably double that.)

After the lecture we talk to Linda Krueger, Director of Global Conservation Policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (formerly known as Bronx Zoo) She knows about Golden Stream Corridor Reserve, her predecessor, Al Rabinowitz, is a jaguar expert, has written several books about them and other big cats. We invite her to dinner but she is going to the party at Tuba and says she might catch up with us later.

Then we go to the market square where we have arranged to meet the others for dinner. Dan has booked a table for 10 at the Baizanteicie, which means, the Pheasant. Nobody’s there so we stroll around the square, which is very Christmassy with ice sculptures, amber sellers, pretty gifty stuff. Geoffrey Lean calls me to say the article is in tomorrow’s Independent on Sunday. A huge ice sculpture collapses in front of us, I thank Geoffrey for slowing my pace with his call as otherwise I’d have had huge chunks of ice on my foot. He also thanks us for the invite to Poznan but says he’d be compromised if he accepted. We wait at the restaurant and down a couple of ice cold vodkas. Then everyone arrives and we have a full table of 10. Traditional but well presented Polish food, I have Poznan duck with red cabbage, dumplings and gravy. The borshe they serve is a clear, rich beet extract with cumin and dill spicing, very delicious and clean on the palate.

There are 2 journalists from a newsletter ready by environmentalists on the Hill, Debbie’s husband who is a political worker, former aide to a Delaware senator, a gy from NRDC and then Lopa, Jim, Dan, me and Debbie. I can’t really speak to the Wash DC guys as they are at the other end of the table and there’s a lot of background noise, much of it from us.

I leave them carousing and head back for some healing sleep.

In the morning I meet Lydia Olander of the Nicholas Institute at Duke University, one of the main links between academia and Washington policy and Brian Murray, who is their Director of Economic Analysis. I’ve been talking to Francisco Ascui who is at the U of Edinburgh, knows Richard Tipper, did some analysis work for Birdlife International that probably is why Richard set up independently with support from Stephen Rumsey (Birdlife’s treasurer). We are meeting Richard in January at his request so it’s good to get a bit of background, though the report is confidential, but touches on REDD etc. Francisco is the Principal Consultant at EcoSecurities, who are the world leaders in bringing home CDM projects through the methodology process and he feels we need help at IBI if we are to get there. He would like a meeting with Debbie and me (he met Debbie a few days ago) and would like to bring along his forestry expert. It’s nearly 1 pm so I have emailed Debbie and am going to head into town to take some pictures as there’s nothing happening at the conference today, Sunday and nobody’s quite sure how the rescheduling around the muslim holiday is going to work tomorrow.

I ride into town on the tram with Bryan Murray and then wander round the square, buy some Christmas decorations for Jo that are very Polish rococo and then have Kleb, a slice of bread with lashings of fried onions and sliced dill pickles. They serve it with Kybasie too, but I pass on the sausage. A woman next to me is speaking to her husband in English and then to the server in Polish so I ask her to establish the origin of the Schmalzen (Yiddish: Schmaltz) and she says it should be goose but it’s probably pork. It’s lard. Flavoured with salt and fried onions. Too late, I down it, alienating myself from the world's Judaic, Muslim, Hindu, vegan and vegetarian populations at a stroke. When in Poland…

Then I stroll up the hill to the Poznan museum of Applied Arts – lots of ornate swords, arquebuses, blunderbusses, armour, armoires, tapestries, inlaid furniture, old leather and wood thrones, Polish chinoiserie, a range of cocktail dresses from the 1900s to the 1990’s including some 50’s ones ‘a la mode Chanel.’ I knew that East European cars were scaled down copies of Detroit's 50s monsters but hadn't realised before that the same was true of fashion, too.

Then I meet up with Debbie and Francisco at the Merkure Hotel. Francisco has brought along Till his forestry associate who also works at EcoSecurities. They explain the process to develop modules for approval by the Voluntary Carbon Standard VCS that comply with the CCB Climate Communities and Biodiversity standards that is the best you can get. They estimate a cost of $60,000 to $130,000 plus the cost of our auditor, who is a VCS approved one, the proposal goes to the VCS, who give it to another auditor, then it gets approved if it’s OK, which it will be if they do it, they say. The key is that it needs little funding as they know all the people from UN and government bodies and private foundations, who fund this sort of thing, and can help us to fast track to full funding - they want the work, need us as the hook but know where the money is, so it's potentially not much cost at all. Debbie takes copious notes and I realise that if we do this right, getting the rewards for abandoning bad practice (slash n burn, wood fire cooking, deforestation) and the rewards for good practice (Slash n char, biochar stoves, sustainable forest management) we could get a real lump of money for every tonne of C that we sequester, getting up to me dreamed-of double credits.

A very good and instructive meeting with a couple of real insiders, Debbie and I stay behind to digest, then I go off to the Sheraton to meet Tom Spencer and Icarus Moussitis, from the European Council, he’s their climate change guy. We have a beer and talk about the forthcoming events tomorrow that they’re doing, Durwood Zaelke will be doing an afternoon event with Tom and he is organising a group of 3 groups who wanted to do events and have been told they have to all squeeze into one 1 ½ hour slot, but they are compatible so it’s possibly a good thing. We’ll see, the speaking slots are very tight, 9 speakers in 60 minutes. Then we head off to dinner in the old town, with the group from tomorrow. There’s room for me and Icarus so we join them and I chat to Michiko Kainuma from the Climate Policy Assessment Research Section Center for Global Environmental Research (CGER)

Then Cornie from the Clear Air Initiative for Asian Cities tells me about the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air and their stoves, also about the Colorado State group, Bryan Wilson, who are working on this issue. These people may be able to give us an overview of what is happening with stoves. Everyone is a bit contrite because the 'clean air' stoves make for healthier households but actually are the main cause of the Himalayan snow melt and increased Asian soot - so a biochar stove could be a way that they can redeem themselves from the unintended consequences of the last big stove roll-out.

Then we leave and in the square a lovely tall brunette is singing arias. Her voice is trained, crystal clear, very relaxed and natural, standing a few feet away it vibrates every bone in your body. It turns out Icarus is also a singer, baritone, trained and used to sing in opera. We chat and it turns out that she’s from Belgium, he’s Cypriot but works at the Council offices in Brussels. “What brings you to Poznan?” he asks. “I’m a Greenpeace activist” she replies. “Were you at the demonstration outside the Council offices in Brussels in May? Did you get arrested?” Her face lights up, as do those of her three girlfriends. “Yes, they arrested us.” Icarus explained his job, said it took him several hours before he could get into his office, but assured them he supported their work and that it was a good demo.

They arrange to meet up tomorrow and sing some arias together.