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.

Lord Northbourne - the first ‘organic’ farmer

80 years of ‘Organic’ food and farming

While since earliest times farmers have understood the importance of giving back to the land in return for the food that it provides us, the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming was first used by Lord Northbourne in his book ‘Look to the Land’ published in 1940.  It came out at a time when industrial farming had relentlessly destroyed the accumulated fertility of millennia and sparked a debate for sustainable farming that continues to this day.  But where did the inspiration come for Northbourne’s ideas?  The trail leads back to the late 18th C and to the ideas of the poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1790 book, An Attempt to Interpret the Metamorphosis of Plants, laid the foundations for modern plant biology.

Two hundred years ago Goethe propounded the idea that there was a life force in plants. He saw that plants were driven by an ongoing intensification and that a ‘cycle of expansions and contractions’ shaped the plant, making either leaf, flower or seed depending on the degree of the ‘dynamic and creative interplay of opposites’. This is what underpins the harmony of the universe and the harmony of life on earth down to the tiniest life forms.

Rudolf Steiner wrote extensively on Goethe and developed Anthroposophy on the foundation of what he called Goethe’s ‘spiritual-scientific basis’ of thinking.

Goethe’s doctor was Christoph Hufeland, author of  Makrobiotik oder Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796),  (Macrobiotics: the Art of Living Long). He was a naturopath who was also doctor to the King of Prussia Frederick Wilhelm lll, Schiller and Goethe, all part of the Weimar set. His ideas on human health and vitality mirrored Goethe’s observations on plant health and vitality and he was a close friend of Samuel Hahnemann, creator of homeopathy. Goethe hosted a Freitagsgesellschaft (‘Friday Society’) at which Hufeland would read from his drafts of Makrobiotik.  Hufeland’s medicine envisaged a life force that should be nourished - the Hufelandist movement was largely vegetarian and inspired the Lebensreform (“Life Reform”) movement in the rest of Germany over the next century. 

Steiner was an active proponent of this Lebensreform movement which sought a ‘back to nature’ way of living, with an emphasis on healthy diet and alternative medicine. In 1924 Steiner gave an agriculture course that was organised by biodynamic farming researcher Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer then went on to found the 800-acre biodynamic research farm at Loverendale In the Netherlands that provided the practical proof of Steiner’s theory. So in 1939 when Lord Northbourne decided to set up Britain’s first biodynamics conference he invited Pfeiffer to run it. The resulting Betteshanger Summer School and Conference brought together a wide range of proponents of biodynamic farming. It was a seminal event in the history of the organic farming movement. A few months later Germany invaded Poland, World War ll broke out, making further collaboration difficult. A year later, in 1940, inspired by the visionary 9 days of the Betteshanger Summer School, Lord Northbourne’s book ‘Look to the Land’ was published.   

It was a best seller. In it Northbourne identifies debt and ‘exhaustive’ farming as having the potential to lead to ‘the extermination of much of the earth’s population by war or pestilence.’  He points out that if the land is sick, then farming is sick and that people will be sick. That Nature ‘is imbued above all with the power of love; by love she can after all be conquered but in no other way.”  In ‘Look to the Land’ Northbourne coins the term ‘organic’ to describe farming that sees the farm as an organism. “The mechanism of life is a continuous flow of matter through the architectural forms we know as organisms. The form alone has any life or any organic identity.” In this he mirrors Goethe’s writing on botany.

He wrote that to quarrel with nature makes no more sense than a ‘quarrel between a man’s head and his feet.’  He described ‘organic’ farming as “having a complex but necessary interrelationship of parts, similar to that in living things”. Although nobody had previously used the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming, ‘Organic’ became, in English,  the accepted descriptor.

In 1943 Eve Balfour’s ‘The Living Soil’ began by quoting across several pages in her first chapter directly from ‘Look to the Land’  She founded the Soil Association 3 years later in 1946, with support from Northbourne. Her book and Northbourne’s informed the debate about the future of farming in Britain, a debate that was closed off by the Agriculture Act of 1947 where ‘exhaustive’ agriculture to maximise production prevailed. Subsidies were given to farmers who used ICI’s chemical fertilisers and farmers who refused to ‘modernise’ were threatened with land confiscation. Farming was nationalised and the organic movement was marginalised. 

In Japan, Sagen Ishizuka, doctor to the Japanese imperial family, followed up on Hufeland’s macrobiotic ideas and developed “shokuiku” (“Food Study”) and in 1907 created the Shokuyo (Food for Health) movement.   A shokuiku follower, George Ohsawa, subsequently published a book in 1960 setting out the principles of healthy living and called it ‘Zen Macrobiotics’.

Ohsawa knew of Christophe Hufeland and freely adopted Hufeland’s term ‘Macrobiotik’ to describe his diet based on similar principles, embodying a yin and yang approach to food. He sought out and met a descendant of Hufeland in 1958. Ohsawa’s seminal book was adopted by the emerging alternative society and inspired the natural foods movement of the 1960s that supported whole food and organic farming. The natural foods stores adhered to macrobiotic principles, selling only whole grains, eschewing sugar and artificial ingredients and supporting organic food.

So it was that Goethe’s doctor Christophe Hufeland coined the term “Makrobiotik” that drove the Lebensreform movement and inspired Rudolf Steiner to develop the anthroposophical farming principles known as ‘biodynamic, which were proven in practice by Steiner’s follower Pfeiffer. Lord Northbourne’s book gave the movement momentum and the name ‘organic.’ A Zen version of the same principles emerged in the 1960s and helped drive the natural and organic transformation of farming, diet and medicine that will ultimately restore our soils and thereby underpin the health and vitality of us all.

"Who knows himself and others well / No longer may ignore: / Orient and Occident dwell / Separately no more”  Goethe

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. 

Beijing leads the way on one environmental policy

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.

.

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.

Low price of oil is yet another problem for the Saudi Aramco IPO

Auto-Biography

A large part of my life has been spent riding around in automobiles. Each had its own motor personality and embodies memories of periods of my life. This little ‘auto-biography’ reminisces through the lens of the vehicles in which I rode.

1946 Plymouth coupe, when we lived in Venice (California). This car had no first gear so when we visited my aunt Thelma in Topanga Canyon my Dad would get up a good run so that we could make it up to their house.

Because we were moving from California to the UK in 1951 my Dad bought a Nash Rambler, a ‘compact’ car by American standards but still a bit of a hog in the UK. Ours was green with the fake wood look around the windows.

Here’s my Dad’s friend Emil in front of our Nash Rambler, parked outside our flat at 5 Lancaster Gate, now a hotel.

The Nash was sold when we lived in Wiesbaden and we had a VW Microbus which we took back to the US when we moved to Omaha, Nebraska. When we passed another one we’d stop and they’d stop and we’d exchange notes on being members of what was then a very rare breed

My best friend Jimmy Wickencamp in Omaha had a ’49 Pontiac Chieftain convertible. We were the ‘Condors’ so it was the gang car and we all chipped in for gas money. One cold winter’s night we were macho posing in 25°F weather with the top down at Shada’s Drive-in. The car wouldn’t start. We were shamed as we got out and pushed it down to the adjoining highway to get a bump start. We were the talk of Omaha Central High School the next day.

Jimmy then bought an Oldsmobile Super 98, the ‘muscle car’ of its era. Aged 14 I did my first 100 mph in it, with Condors aboard, in driving rain on Route 6 west of Omaha. An oncoming truck splashed water over the windscreen so I was driving blind for several seconds. They cheered me (with relief) for holding firm. Jimmy dropped out of school and ran away with Carol Corbley, who painted her fingernails different colours (radical - this was Omaha, 1958). He had painted all the chrome with gold paint.

In 1959 we moved to Chateauroux France where our first car was a Renault 4 CV - it was the first manual I ever drove.

My mother and I went up to Paris in 1959 and collected a brand new Renault Dauphine from the Billancourt factory on Sequin Island on the Seine. It was quite revolutionary for its time. Soon after, in 1959, we drove it to Valencia via Pamplona and then took the ferry to Ibiza.

In London in 1966 I bought an Austin 12 from a Kiwi friend for £12. Painted the front wings white and the chrome gold. (Wickencamp’s influence?). Got stopped and searched every time I parked outside the Head Shop on Kensington Park Road.

The Austin gave up the ghost and I then drove a Thames van with a mattress in the back and a little camping stove. Drove it to Glastonbury where we camped with Mark Palmer and John Michell and believe we saw flying saucers over the Tor in October 1967.

In 1968 drove nights for Yellow Cab in Philadelphia. The suspension on some of the cars was so bad I could barely stand after an evening of driving. I stuck to North Philadelphia which many drivers avoided as it was a black area, but there were lots of profitable short rides as supply was limited and demand was good.

I had a Ford Fairlane in Philadelphia but the transmission was on its last legs and I got rid of it and bought a Studebaker Commander from one of our commune members - we shared a big house in Philly and then all moved to farm near Doylestown.

The 1955 Studebaker Commander was a dream. It had been resprayed gold. I did have to put in a gallon of oil every time I filled up the tank but it got me from Philly to Los Angeles on Route 66 and the clouds of blue smoke disappeared once it was running smoothly in third gear.

Some drunken guys in Venice (California) driving a 1956 Studebaker Commander at 60 mph through a red light smashed into my 1955 Studebaker Commander. They were members of ‘The Organisers’ - a group who were working with the police to keep tabs on the more radical Black Power activists. So the police were disturbed when 2 Organiser guys jumped out of their car after the crash and were seen running up the street with automatic rifles. Double agents.

After the crash I bought a car that had seat belts and a more substantial chassis - a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible

Back in London in 1969 I had a 1961 Vauxhall Cresta. Nice fast car. Painted it black and yellow so it looked like a wasp.

In 1974 I got a Hillman Minx convertible for £15, worth the drive across to Walthamstow. But a lot of the front wing was a plasticky repair substance and it started falling off, no MOT possible, goodbye

Then I got a Rover 105, a great car and utterly reliable. A bit stodgy for a hip young groover, but I had a family and I had heard all the urban legends about how Rovers emerged intact from accidents that would have crumpled any other car.

My first Citroen, a DS 19. Lovely ride, the suspension lifted the whole car up when you turned on the ignition.

A used Ford Executive was a poor man’s luxury car - their secondhand value was low as they were such gas guzzlers. However, I owned it at the time that we had monthly board meetings in Coventry with Wilson King, our investors in Whole Earth. It was a great motorway cruiser

My Peugeot 604 was OK, but not the love of my life. I had bought it at auction and was glad to be rid of it.

The Rover 2000 was rock solid, perfect for drives to see the MacLagans, London friends who’d moved to Wales.

The Citroen XM was a superb car. I sold mine to my wife Josephine and bought a stretch version, resprayed emerald green. It was actually inconveniently long and made parking difficult, even with a Kensington and Chelsea residents parking permit.

I only ever bought a new car once. It was a Land Rover Discovery and it cost me £39000 in 2005. I bought it because my brother Gregory and I had been stranded on a track in our woodland and had to be towed out. So I wanted a robust 4 wheel drive to avoid a repeat. 3 weeks after buying it I got bogged down in a field in not very challenging terrain and had to be towed out by a farmer neighbour. It was also too big to easily get in and out of our garage. I sold it 13 weeks after I bought it and was lucky to get £26,000. I lost £13000, £1000 a week, also probably not far from the total that I’ve spent on buying all the other cars I’ve ever owned.

After that I then got a Land Rover Freelander, which was lighter and smaller and easier to navigate across fields and through the woods. I loved it. But it had the notorious Ford V6 engine and eventually the head gaskets blew, the metal warped and it went to the scrapyard.

I wanted another Freelander and this time I bought one over the phone from a dealer in Rye for £1750. It has the 4 cylinder BMW diesel engine. I’ve been driving it for nearly a decade and apart from brake repairs, has served me faithfully and costlessly.

Brazil's price to protect Amazon is worth paying

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.

Scotland's carbon offset can't be counted twice

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.

Simplify the admin: let China collect the subsidy

Cut out the middlemen and let companies reward us directly for our data

If the Russians leave and the Assad regime collapses, what then?