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

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.

Organic Integrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harmony in food and farming

The groundbreaking Harmony in Food and Farming Conference explained why a sustainable food culture sits naturally at the heart of an inspiring philosophy for harmonious living, says Craig Sams

In 2010 a book called ‘Harmony – A New Way of Looking at Our World’ was published. Written by HRH The Prince of Wales along with Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, the book set out a coherent philosophy of harmonious living for communities and society, along with inspiring examples and a roadmap to a better future. It was inspired by the philosophy of the Stoics of Greece, while acknowledging Taoism, Zen and the Vedic texts. The book aims to re-engage the thinking that sought harmony with the order of the cosmos and a reconnection with Nature. It covered subjects like architecture, urban design, natural capital, deforestation and farming.

Inspired by the book, Patrick Holden, former director of the Soil Association and founder and Director of the Sustainable Food Trust, organised a conference in Llandovery Wales on July 10-11. The aim of the conference, entitled ‘Harmony in Food and Farming‘ was to put meat on the bones of the Prince’s book and to map out a way forward for agriculture and food production that resonated with the principles of harmony.

The conference kicked off with an inspirational keynote speech and then looked at a range of subjects, with key speakers from all around the world. Rupert Sheldrake led a session on ‘Science and Spirituality,’ Prof Harty Vogtmann moderated a session on ‘Farming in Harmony with Nature.’

A session on ‘The Farm as an Ecosystem’ saw Helen Browning, director of the Soil Association, describing her new agroforestry project that encourages happy chickens to range free in a productive orchard of apple trees.

A session entitled ‘Sacred Soil, Sacred Food, Sacred Silence’ highlighted the extent to which faith communities put harmony first in developing their food production systems.

A session on ‘Agriculture’s Role in Rebalancing the Carbon Cycle’ was my opportunity to shine with a presentation entitled ‘Capitalism Must Price Carbon – or Die’ in which I showed that if carbon emissions were priced into farming organic food would be cheaper than industrial food and we’d get the extra benefits of biodiversity, cleaner water and regenerating soils – all themes familiar to readers of my column in NPN. Then Richard Young set out the case for livestock farming that could operate harmoniously within our climate constraints and Peter Segger described his carbon-sequestering vegetable growing operation, which was a fascinating field trip that afternoon.

A session on animal welfare sought to see a way forward to keep animals happy during their short lives and to make that final moment of betrayal as pleasant as possible, with reference to examples and a deepening of the understanding of the sacred relationship between the animals we rear with care and then kill.

Patrick Holden learned his farming at Emerson College and is empathetic to biodynamic principles. A session on Harmony and Biodynamic Agriculture showed how the ideas of Rudolf Steiner resonate with the Harmony philosophy. At a reception the evening before the conference I mentioned to HRH that our original Zen Macrobiotic company was called Yin Yang Ltd and that our brand was Harmony Foods and that we had taken our philosophical guidance from Zen Buddhism and Taoism, unaware that the Stoic philosophy or Greece was on the same page. He commented that the Egyptians had laid the philosophical foundations for the Stoics. I wondered at how a way of thinking that had arisen simultaneously in China, India, Greece and Egypt was now guiding the effort to restore balance to our dysfunctional and unsustainable world.

The conference was attended by delegates from every continent and the closing plenary session included individual delegates describing how the conference had affected them. It was very moving stuff and helped us realise how much we all had been changed by two days in Wales. Patrick stood up to finalise the session and received a prolonged and much-deserved standing applause. The conference was a remarkable achievement. It is now the job of the Sustainable Food Trust to build on its relationships with the organisations that were represented at the conference, capture the momentum of the gathering and give impetus to the movement for harmony, regeneration and an end to the war on Nature that has brought us so dangerously close to disaster.

The proceedings of the conference, filmed and edited, can be seen on the Sustainable Food Trust website.

My Sugar Odyssey

Now that the Government is slapping a tax on soft drinks I am going to indulge in a reminiscence of my troubled relationship with sugar, health and food. My first job, as a 7 year old kid, was to scour the streets of a Pittsburgh suburb called Bridgeville, collecting discarded soda bottles and taking them to my aunt Gloria's store to collect the 2¢ deposit refund.  At that time a soft drink was 10¢, so the drink was 8¢ and the bottle deposit was 2¢ and people still threw the bottle away.  The deposit didn't make much change in behaviour.  When people wanted sugar, they paid what it cost.

I didn't really have much appetite for sugar for most of my childhood, our mother was pretty strict about it.  I remember the day in 1953 when confectionery came off the ration in the UK  and some schoolmates emerged from a sweet shop with a bag of humbugs they'd just bought  without having to cajole their mother to come along with her ration book.  The nation went mad for sugar and the Government had to put it back on rationing until supplies recovered.

It was in 1965, when I was in Afghanistan, recovering in Kabul from a serious case of hepatitis, enhanced with dysentery, that I understood sugar.   My liver was on strike and the doctors told me that I should eat lots of simple sugary food to keep my blood sugar levels up.   The dysentery told me otherwise: I knew from an early bout in Shiraz, that a diet of unleavened whole meal flat bread and unsweetened tea was the key to stopping the runs.   So I tried it again and the dysentery cleared up in 2 days.   Amazingly, so did the hepatitis.  My liver stopped throbbing with pain and the whites of my eyeballs went from greenish yellow to something close to white.

That autumn, back in Philadelphia, I adopted the macrobiotic diet which forbids sugar.  My health rose to an even higher level and I haven't once needed to see a doctor since about my health.  After a few years I was able to reintroduce alcohol into my diet but tried to keep a lid on sugar.

In 1966 I was in London, aiming to open a macrobiotic restaurant and study centre. From December, I was a regular at the UFO Club, where proto-hippies would listen to the Pink Floyd and then buy macrobiotic food that my mother had helped me make.  My little band of macrobiotic missionaries would then explain to people trying this strange food that brown rice was good for you and sugar should be avoided.  I opened a little basement restaurant in Notting Hill in February 1967.  Yoko Ono was one of our first customers, as she knew about macrobiotics from Japan.

We made bread without yeast, macrobiotic-style and I imported books like Zen Macrobiotics by Georges Ohsawa (Nyoiti Sakurozawa) that were sold in Indica Books, the bookshop owned by Paul McCartney and Barry Miles.

Macrobiotics avoided yeast for the same reason they avoided sugar: too much could cause dysbiosis of the gut flora.  Meanwhile the American Medical Association called macrobiotics a diet that 'could lead to death'

Dr. Arnold Bender, Britain's top nutritionist, said white bread was the most easily digestible and nutritious bread you could eat, slapping down the wholemeal alternative as too slow to digest and with lower nutrients, because wheat bran fibre has no protein and carbohydrate.

In 1968 I had to leave Britain and my brother Gregory opened a larger restaurant in Bayswater called Seed.

None of the desserts were made with sugar - a touch of salt was enough to bring out the sweetness of the apples in the crumbles.  At festivals like Glastonbury and Phun City we would serve up porridge to the festival goers and got into trouble at one festival as our customers would head off to an adjoining catering tent to get sugar to sprinkle on their porridge and muesli.  We had a shop on the Portobello Road called Ceres Grain Shop that sold all the whole grains, beans, seeds and organic vegetables but the only sweet thing we sold was Aspall organic apple juice.

I wrote a book called About Macrobiotics in 1972 that was translated into 6 languages and sold half a million copies where I wrote: "If sugar was discovered yesterday it would be banned immediately and handed over to the Army for weapons research."

We were hard core.  My kids didn't dare even ask for sweets - they might sneak them with friends at school but would destroy the evidence before they got home.

We didn't believe in refined cereals either - no white flour or white rice touched our lips.  Our macrobiotic food wholesaling company Harmony Foods introduced the first organic wholegrain rice.   In 1973, with other pioneering natural food companies we wrote the manifesto of the Natural Foods Union.  We promised each other not to sell sugar or any products containing sugar or white flour or white rice.  We were committed to developing organic food sources which were then rare.  Signatories included Community Foods, our own Harmony Foods and Ceres Grain Shop, Haelan Centre, Infinity Foods, Harvest of Bath, Anjuna of Cambridge and On The Eighth Day in Manchester.

We published a magazine called 'Seed - The Journal of Organic Living' that had cover stories with headlines like "Garbage Grub - How The Poor Starve on Rich Foods" and a story on Britain's future which set out a dystopian vs Utopian vision where on one side people were clamouring for 24 Hour TV and More Sugar.  On the other they were tending goats and living in countryside communes eating whole natural foods.

Then in 1977 I worked out how to make jam using apple juice.  Being higher in fructose it was possible to make a jam with a lot less sweetening, so it tasted light and fruity.  They were 38% sugars from fruit when other jams were 65% sugars from sugar cane and fruit.  Whole Earth jams were an international success as they reached out to the increasing numbers of sugar avoiders in the UK, Europe and North America.

However our sales met stiff competition from much sweeter jams that used fruit juices like grape juice that were higher in glucose than white sugar and they used a lot of it, to match the sweetness of regular jam.  Our moral restraint cost us sales to these much more sugary jams.   However we also used apple juice to sweeten other products, marketing baked beans, soft drinks and salad dressings.  Even our best selling Whole Earth peanut butter contained a touch of concentrated apple juice to make it taste more mainstream.

Then, while searching for another source of organic peanuts I connected with Ewé tribal people in Togo, West Africa, who grew delicious peanuts as part of an organic crop rotation.  Unfortunately the peanuts failed our aflatoxin tests but the farmers also grew organic cocoa beans.  There was no organic chocolate on the market at that time so I got a sample made up of 70% solids chocolate made with organic cocoa beans.

We called it Green & Black's and launched it in September 1991. It was the first time I had sold a product containing real sugar from sugar cane.  It was the first organic and the first 70% and the first chocolate with a transparent supply chain.   So we put a sugar warning on the label – I think this is the only time that any company has done this. It read:  “Please Note:  This chocolate contains 29% brown sugar, processed without chemical refining agents. Ample evidence exists that consumption of sugar can increase the likelihood of tooth decay, obesity and obesity-related health problems.  If you enjoy good chocolate, make sure you keep your sugar intake as low as possible by always choosing Green & Black’s.”

How did I square this with my conscience?  Well, a French author called Michel Montignac had written a best-selling book called 'Dine Out and Lose Weight' that was one of the first places the idea of glycemic index had been in print.  In his book 70% dark chocolate had a ranking of 22 on a scale where sugar was 100.  Brown rice was at 50 and carrots at 70.  Fructose was at a mere 20.

Two of our best Whole Earth foods customers, Community Foods and Planet Organic, flat out refused to stock Green & Black’s because it contained sugar.  Tim Powell at Community said: "Craig, you were the one who got us all to not sell sugar back in the day - we can't stock this."  (they came around eventually)

I mentioned earlier that apple juice was higher in fructose.  The crystals of fructose and glucose, the two monosaccharides that make up a sugar molecule (sucrose), have exactly the same chemical formula: C6H12O6.  So what's the difference between glucose and fructose?

1. If you beam a light into the glucose molecule it bends slightly to the right. If you beam a light into a fructose molecule it bends slightly to the left.

2. If you put a given amount on your tongue the fructose will taste more than twice as sweet as the glucose

3. If you eat the glucose it raises your blood sugar within 20 minutes. If you eat the fructose it has almost no impact on blood sugar.

If you eat a given amount of sugar the glucose half hits your bloodstream, the fructose half passes down your digestion and is eventually turned into glycogen or into fatty acids.  These provide an energy source that is managed by the body rather than just absorbed in the way that glucose is.  So Lucozade, a glucose drink, was marketed on the premise that ALL the sugar - because it was glucose - got through to you immediately and that this would 'speed recovery.'  It was a deluded proposition, but it captured the fact that you got twice as many sugar bangs for your bucks.

If you have apple juice, there is more fructose than glucose or sucrose, so you don't get the same 'hit' as a lot of the sugar takes a different metabolic pathway.  Corn syrup is about 80% glucose.  Because glucose isn't very sweet on the palate, you have to use a lot more of it to get to the same level of perceived sweetness.  This increases the load of glucose to satisfy the taste for sweetness, with a resulting harsh impact on the blood sugar level.    'High fructose corn syrup' has a higher level of fructose, between 45 and 55%, so it is used in industry because it has nearly the same glucose/fructose balance as white sugar.  It's healthier than ordinary corn syrup, as measured by blood glucose impact.

If you really want to get all the glucose right away then it's best to drink it on an empty stomach.  All sugars are not absorbed equally.  If you eat dessert before you eat a meal the sugar will get into your system very quickly.  If you eat dessert after a meal then it has to work its way through the previously ingested food and has a longer exposure time to your digestive bacteria. The higher the fibre content of your meal, the longer it takes for the sugar to be absorbed.   There are some fibres that are particularly good at delaying the impact of sugar.  One of these is psyllium seeds.  Not only do they delay sugar absorption by up to an hour or so, they also bulk up, by absorbing water, your intestinal contents, helping regular passage of food.  Glucomannan also has this property as does oat bran.  Wheat bran doesn't absorb water to the same degree, but it absorbs sugar and delays its release in digestion.  The longer it takes for sugar to be absorbed, the less impact it has on blood glucose level.

There are also foods that help with insulin production and that reduce insulin resistance, thanks to the presence of  chromium.  Chromium-rich foods include black pepper, broccoli, bran, brown rice, lettuce and green beans.  The leaves of the white mulberry are considered particularly effective at delaying sugar absorption,  containing a component called reductase.

There are also co-factors that accelerate the rate at which your body metabolises sugar or that challenge your natural regulatory mechanisms.  These can increase the likelihood of a blood sugar drop, known as hypoglycemia, the symptoms of which are fatigue, depression and a craving for more sugar.

These co-factors include:

Coffee and, to a lesser extent, other caffeine stimulants like tea,  maté, cola, guarana and cocoa.  They will increase the rate at which the brain burns sugar.   Small wonder then that when you purchase a cup of coffee there is always an extensive display of white flour and sugar sweetened products to tempt you.  Your body knows it's going to be short of sugar after you drink the caffeine, so you instinctively go for the antidote to have on hand as you consume the stimulant.

The liver is the main organ, along with the pancreas, that regulates your blood sugar level.  As blood flows through the liver its glucose level is measured and, if it needs topping up, the liver dips into its store of glycogen, converts it to sugar and drip feeds it into the blood.

Alcohol  When you drink alcohol the liver prioritises dealing with what it perceives as a poison and puts dealing with blood sugar on the back burner.   The pancreas also finds it harder to produce insulin and regulate insulin levels when it also has to deal with the presence of alcohol.

Dope is another culprit.  When you smoke marijuana it increases the blood level in the brain by an estimated 40 millilitres.  This increases the amount of sugar available for the brain to burn and this heightened mental activity is part of what is called being 'high.'   However this increased usage of sugar makes it harder for the liver to keep up and the resulting drop in blood sugar is the symptom known to dope smokers as 'the munchies' - an irresistible craving for sweet foods.

Glyphosate or ‘Roundup’  - research has shown that ultra low doses of Roundup consumed over time leads to fatty liver disease.  Fatty liver doesn’t function very well and therefore makes it harder for the blood to maintain the right glucose levels.  Farmers spray Roundup at the end of wheat harvest to kill off the wheat plants.  When the plants realise they are dying, they frantically make as many babies as possible, i.e. wheat grains.  This is reflected in an increased harvest quantity, but ensures that every loaf of non-organic bread or other flour product contains a low dose of Roundup residue.

Antibiotics also can lead to powerful cravings for sugar.   If antibiotics are ingested, they don't just target the disease bacteria they are taken to cure.  They wipe out the beneficial microbes that are our healthy population of gut flora.  That's why it's advisable to consume yogurt or sauerkraut or other foods rich in lactobacilli to replace these important microorganisms.  It's also a good idea to eat foods rich in fibre to help the equally important bifidobacteria which are a pivotal part of the immune system in the large intestine.  A small population of these and other beneficial bacteria are always present in your appendix.  The appendix is the body's equivalent of a survivalist's food store, a place, at the junction of the small and large intestine, where, once the antibiotics are finished, the intestines can be repopulated.  Antibiotics can not kill off the tiny population of yeasts that are a part of the wider bacterial community of the gut.  But once the dominant lactobacilli and bifidobacteria are out of the way, yeasts quickly mutate into a fungal form, candida, a sticky white slime that imbeds itself firmly in the walls of the intestines.

There is an established communication between the gut and the brain and this is a vital part of our food choices, what smells nice, how hungry we feel and also what antibodies the gut flora need to produce to combat pathogens - what we call our immune system.  When candida gets a grip, like a Russian hacker taking over the CIA,  it  takes over the communication channel and sends a message to the brain demanding more sugar.  The more of these foods it gets, the more powerful it becomes and the more successfully it outcompetes the beneficial microbes that are trying to repopulate the gut after the antibiotic A-bomb has exploded.  Getting rid of candida is not easy, but there are ways to do it:

1. Saccharomyces - these little microbes compete effectively with candida for sugar, thereby holding back the growth of candida and starving them out. They come in capsule form

2. L-glutamine - this also attacks candida. Also in capsules

3. Fasting - I often say that 'breakfast is the most important meal of the day…to skip.' This is because by the time you wake up in the morning the liver's reserves of glycogen are low and it's time to convert fat into glucose to keep the blood sugar level up. This keeps sugar away from the gut and the candida, which then die off. If you eat a carbohydrate-rich breakfast, perhaps with a glass of fruit juice, the sugars keep the candida topped up and maintaining or expanding their population, perhaps even migrating to other parts of the body such as the vagina or skin. Starve them out by fasting for 17 hours a day.

4. Colonic irrigation - pumping water into the large intestine and then pulling it back out removes a lot of candida.

5. Lactobacillli - probiotics. Eating foods rich in lactic acid and consuming spores of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria helps to create ideal conditions for repopulating your beneficial gut microbes that compete with candida

6. Inulin - this is a molecule that is made of a long string of fructose molecules strung tightly together. It is indigestible and counts as fibre but when it gets to the large intestine the wonderfully beneficial bifidobacteria feast on it and increase their numbers by the billions.

Good food sources of inulin include whole grain wheat and rye, shallots, onions, leeks, chicory root and the white part of chicory leaves and Jerusalem artichokes.  These are all valuable nutrition for the gut microbes.  Inulin powder, extracted from chicory roots, is a concentrated source.

Candida puts pressure on you to consume the sugar it needs and urges your brain to crave refined flour products, dairy, wine, beer and sugar.  It's not just antibiotics that give candida its supremacy in the gut, it also benefits from hormone replacement therapy, the birth control pill, steroids and hydrogenated fat.

Vinegar also plays a role in sugar metabolism.  Nobody’s quite sure why, but if you take 2 tablespoons of vinegar before a meal the increase in blood glucose later is 34% lower than if you don’t take vinegar.  That’s a big difference as it keeps the level at a level less likely to be stressful.

Lactate

The brain consumes glucose as the energy source that enables neurons to fire.  It's the 'carb' or 'carbon' in 'carbohydrate' that is the energy source.  Oxygen feeds the fire of carbon in the body, which is why we breathe.  So we are like a coal fire, burning carbon to keep ourselves warm and to enable our brains and bodies to function well.  However,  lactate is another rich source of carbon for the brain.  If there is lactate in the blood then the neurons in the brain will preferentially coat themselves in it rather than with glucose.  It's as if lactate is like gas fuel for the brain, glucose more like coal or wood.  Where do we get lactate?

1. When our digestive system has a healthy population of lactobacilli they will compete with candida and other microbes that are eating starch or sugar and a by-product is lactate

2. When we walk, run, jump or dance or do any exercise our muscles burn glucose and give off lactate.

At some point in evolution our brains evolved to function best on the super fuel of lactate in preference to glucose.  Glucose for the body, lactate for the brain.

So exercise is really important as it provides a better quality of energy for the brain  - lactate also delays brain ageing and neurodegeneration.  The heart and liver use it, too. Insulin function works much better too if there has been exercise and lactate production.  This is why exercise is increasingly being used as a cure for pre-diabetic conditions and for curing Type 2 diabetes in many cases.

Plato wrote: 'I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency'.  Kellogg's say 'Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."  Who to trust on this?  Everyone has a different metabolism, but they all have the power to change bad habits.

Metabolic Syndrome is the name for the multi-symptom disease that is typical of modern sedentary people.

It's also known as 'Sitting Disease.'  If a person gets up in the morning, sits down for breakfast, then sits in a car or on a train or bus, then sits at a desk or an assembly line and then sits down to return home to sit down to eat a meal and then sits watching television or enjoying social media they lay the foundations for Metabolic Syndrome

Contributing factors are

1. Inactivity/laziness (Both cause and effect but a natural human condition)

2. Overeating - large food portions of food low in nutrients

3. Stress

4. Pesticides - these have a hormonal effect as well as being mildly toxic

5. Processed denatured food that is low in fibre

6. Hydrogenated fat - harms the circulatory system, reducing blood flow

7. Sugar and refined cereal such as white bread and low fibre breakfast cereals

8. Television, electronic games and sitting at computers.

So what's the answer?

Our Government has one solution for everything:  Tax it.

A tax on soft drinks will have little impact as the appetite for sugar is not responsive to pricing.  If your candida want sugar or you are on a cycle of high and low blood sugar you don't give a damn what the cost is of a soft drink.  It's the cheapest form of sugar already and a tax won't make a difference.  You get more sugar in a chocolate brownie than in a can of Coke and a brownie costs at least 3 times as much.   The best selling soft drink in Britain is Red Bull.  It costs double the cost of Coke and has just as much sugar.

A tax will help in one way though: The Government currently subsidises sugar beet farming and sugar production to the tune of £250 million per annum.  A sugar tax will raise an estimated £400 million.  So the soft drinks tax will neatly subsidise the taxpayers money that goes to sugar producers.  How smart is that?

There is a far more intelligent alternative.  Researchers studied a group of 46,000 people in a Japanese city who were over 48 years old.  They measured their blood sugar, blood pressure, lung function and other measures of health and then recommended actions to rectify any problems before they became serious diseases.  Not all of them complied, but enough did to make a difference.  They became ill less often and therefore cost the health system less.  The estimated average saving came to £200 per person per year.

In the UK, with 26 million people over the age of 48, that would be a saving to the NHS of  £5.2 billion every year.   Why don't doctors and pharmaceutical companies recommend it?  Why don't wine makers discourage wine drinking?  Why don't car makers urge walking instead of driving?  No business likes to lose its customers, even the caring professions.

In 2011 the Soil Association applied for and won a £17 million National Lottery grant to initiate its Food For Life project.  It was a huge success, with schools coming in at Bronze entry level and working up to Gold, where they offer a significant proportion of school meals that are organic, locally sourced and freshly prepared on the premises.  There are now 2 million school dinners a day served under the Food For Life Programme.  A lot of those schools have stopped serving desserts on some days a week.  These kids perform better and learn something really important: you are what you eat.

Those kids will fare better in life, but we have a couple of generations who got the worst of crap food, hydrogenated fat (recommended by doctors), exposure to lead and pesticides and other environmental toxins. They are the ones who need help.  Diabetes levels are already dropping in the Western world as more people eat more wholesome food and exercise a lot more, but there is still work to be done.  A soft drinks tax is pathetic when you consider what the government could be doing to support healthier lifestyles

Change begins with the individual and it's about education.  If people are junk food junkies they will always find junk food. Trying to reform the food industry, which is responding to demand that arises from a multiplicity of causes, is to fight the wrong battle.  If we change demand then supply will follow.

The new science of epigenetics informs us that acquired characteristics can be inherited.  The unhealthy acquired characteristics of previous generations has been one factor in the increase in autism, birth defects, hereditary diabetes and other diseases, food allergies and other developmental problems.  But we need not despair, this is already being turned around and future generations can look forward to even better food produced in a cleaner environment to make healthier happier people, whose babies will be even healthier and happier.  We know more now about these factors than we ever did before, so we have the power to evolve positively.

Dark Act

We have Sainsbury’s and Safeway to thank for the fact that there are no GMOs in our food, (though still in animal feed).

One of the first GMO foods to hit the market, back in 1995, was the Flavr-Savr tomato, created by a company called Calgene.  The idea was that that tomato would stay fresh on the supermarket shelf for longer.  Nobody checked how it travelled and the first shipments to American supermarkets ended up soggy and bruised due to some unforeseen aspect of genetic engineering and despite all the research showing no evidence of health risks. 

Tomato growers in California weren’t happy but the huge planting of tomatoes in 1996 got turned into tomato puree and was sold in tins at Sainsbury’s and Safeway at a considerable discount to the normal tomato puree price.  In other words, it was dumped on the British market to try to salvage a GMO disaster.   The supermarkets proudly labelled the puree as ‘Made with Genetically Engineered Tomatoes’ and consumers, who had never heard of GMO, just bought them because they were so much cheaper.  Then in 1998  Dr. Arpad Puztai, one of Britain’s most renowned and trusted experts on food safety,  spoke out on TV about his research on the dangers of GM potatoes.  The rats had shrinking brains, livers and hearts and he said he wouldn’t eat a GM potato unless more research into its safety was completed.   Puztai was promptly sacked from his job at the Rowett Research Institute and gagged, with the threat of losing his pension.  Then they sacked his wife. This happened allegedly after Monsanto phoned Clinton who phoned Tony Blair who phoned the heat of Rowett Professor James and told him to gag Puztai.  Puztai’s career was ruined, he had a couple of heart attacks and continued to campaign for his research to be duplicated, which has never happened.  The Government set up a ‘Biotechnology Presentation Group’ to try to mask the reality about GMOs.

But it was too late.  The Soil Association and its European counterparts lobbied strongly for labelling of GMOs and got their way.  After all if it was good enough for Safeway and Sainsbury’s customers, what about everyone else?   Labelling was agreed at an EU level and nobody ever tried to sell a GM product again.  The public were on high alert after the Puztai scandal and weren’t going to be duped.

In the USA it was different.  Americans didn’t know what GMOs were, although they were in their corn chips and other staple foods.  When the realisation came the Organic Consumers Association campaigned for labelling so people could choose.  Eventually, after heavily contested votes in California and Washington the little state of Vermont (Bernie Sanders’ home state) passed a law saying GMOs needed to be labelled.  Some food manufacturers complied.  Then came the DARK Act.  (Denial of Americans Right to Know). This was introduced in Congress to prescribe that any GMO information can be reached via the QR code on the packaging and shoppers could simply check the QR code to find out what GMOs were in their prospective purchase.  Hmmm…so this is how that would work. Well, you scan the QR code and go the manufacturer’s website, where you are greeted with an array of products you might like to know about, then you choose the produce you are scanning and get to a list of ingredients and more advertising, then you can click on each ingredient to see which one is a GMO.  Then, after about 10 hours of shopping, you have a basket full of food that is GMO free.  Or you just buy organic.

The new law was signed into effect by Barack Obama who, as a presidential candidate, promised that he would bring forward GMO labelling.   He has the support of 93% of American consumers, who a respected ABCNews poll recently showed want labelling. 

Here in Britain and in Europe we take GMO labelling for granted.  In the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy the will of 93% of can be blocked by the resistance of a handful of companies with political influence that dwarfs that of the citizenry.  I wonder how the 93% of Americans who thought they were on the way to having GMO labelling, 20 years after we secured it in Europe, must feel now.   Where there were referendums on GMO labelling, as in California, more than $30 million was spent with scare advertising to deter voters

Sugar - All They Want is the Tax, Man

Before everyone stampedes into a sugar tax, may I just try to shine a small beam of light of sanity into this increasingly hysterical ‘debate?’ I’m no sugar lover and have fought the good fight to keep my consumption as low as possible for many decades. In 1971, in my book About Macrobiotics I wrote: “If sugar were discovered yesterday it would be banned and possibly handed over to the Army for weapons research.’ But at the same time, without sugar we’d all be dead. It's all about how much we consume and in what form - simple or complex. But when even the Financial Times editorialises about ‘The Compelling Case for a Sugar Tax’ it’s time to dig a little deeper into the obesity and diabetes epidemic before rushing out to slap a tax on drinks containing sugar.   What have taxes on booze, fags and petrol ever done to reduce consumption? Governments will always love the tax option, it’s so much easier to make money out of a problem than to solve it.

To begin with we need to understand about blood sugar. I am going to oversimplify. Life depends on glucose, the simplest sugar. When we eat or drink sugar, the glucose element quickly tops up our blood sugar level because blood sugar is glucose. The fructose element follows a different metabolic pathway and ends as fat or stored glycogen in the liver, which can then be converted into glucose when it is needed.

When we eat too much sugar the blood glucose level rises to dangerous levels and the pancreas pumps out insulin to bring it down. But it overshoots, so the insulin keeps taking glucose sugar out of the blood and before you know it, the blood glucose level is too low. The body panics as sugar is vital to cell function and brain function, so it tells the liver to release some of its stores of glucose, which helps. But the liver only has a limited supply and struggles to keep up with the demand, so the craving for sugar eventually becomes irresistible. It’s a natural inbuilt survival mechanism to crave sugar when blood sugar levels are low.

In our gut there are 10,000 different types of microbes, including useful candida yeasts, which help with the breakdown of sugar. When there’s a lot of sugar those candida multiply like crazy and outcompete the other gut flora. Worse than that, they mutate into a resilient and greedy fungal form that demands more and more sugar. Candida gets a lock on your brain and remotely controls your appetite to deliver more sugar. You can’t tax candida, you have to kill it. By starvation. Once candida is put back in its box the cravings for sugar diminish. Probiotics can help to suppress candida, as will berberine, grapefruit seed extract, garlic and oregano. But the key is to cut off its food supply.  But starving candida ain't easy.

How does candida get such a grip? Candida’s takeover of our digestive process is much easier when the other gut flora, such as lactobacilli or bifidobacteria, are dead or dying.

This happens when you take antibiotics or regularly consume food that contains antibiotic residues, particularly non-organic chicken and pork. Other medications that kill off the digestive system microbial community and clear the path for yeasts and candida include birth control hormones, hormone replacement therapy, acid-suppressing drugs and steroids. Doctors who dish out antibiotics for common cold are helping drive the obesity epidemic.  Maybe we should tax doctors who dish out antibiotics willy-nilly?

Caffeine plays a role, too. Ever notice how many people piously say ‘no’ to sugar in their tea or coffee, and then have a brownie or a big cookie? A brownie can contain twice the sugar of a can of Coke.   Caffeine increases the flow of blood to the brain, where ¼ of our sugar consumption takes place – thinking is hard work and uses a lot of glucose. Drinking a double espresso accelerates your brain and the rate at which you burn glucose, leading to low blood sugar and sugar cravings. The liver just can’t keep up with converting glycogen to glucose. People ingest a lot more caffeine nowadays than ever before. In Britain there has been a dramatic fall in scone and teacake consumption too, with a corresponding rise in consumption of cookies, muffins and brownies. Drink it or eat it, sugar is sugar.

Alcohol also creates sugar cravings. Especially on an empty stomach. Alcohol increases insulin output, which reduces blood glucose levels and it inhibits the liver from producing glucose to top up those levels. Result? Uncontrollable urges to consume sugar.

How about a glass of milk? Milk contains 5% sugars, about half what you’d get from a can of Coke. Tax milk at half the rate of soft drinks? Tell that to the NFU.  Is giving kids milk instead of water doing more harm because of the sugar than good because of the calcium?

If you’re going to tax sugar, then ALL sugar should be taxed, regardless of whether it’s in a brownie or a glass of apple juice or a cup of tea or a can of Coke. Whether sugar comes from a cane, a root, a bee, a cactus, a coconut tree, a maple tree, a cow, a goat, a camel or a grape or an orange or an apple or a pineapple it should be taxed equally. Otherwise you just move sugar consumption around based on pricing. Taxation never stopped people smoking but education and bans in public places has helped.

So what’s the answer? There are organic natural sweeteners such as stevia, licorice and erythritol that can provide a sweet taste without the glucose impact of sugar. But ultimately there are 3 words that sum it up: education, education, education. The Soil Association’s massively successful Food For Life school meals programme supplies 2 million school meals a day that commit to be freshly prepared, with local and organic ingredients. Jeannette Orrey, the legendary autobiographical author of “Dinner Lady” told me recently that Food For Life school meals now often have puddings made with half the sugar than usual and some participating schools are no longer serving pudding at all and the kids are cool about it. Time builds up bad habits. If kids grow up with minimal exposure to excesses of sugar, fruit juice, milk, cookies and other sugar sources and are helped to restore healthy probiotic conditions in their gut after exposure to antibiotics or other medications then they will be healthy adults with sensible appetites and a much lower predisposition to obesity and diabetes. For the rest of us, particularly those who have overdosed on sugar from an early age, the path to health is much harder and, for some, impossible. A tax will never solve this, education and behavior change will.

To create real change in the world sometimes you have to compromise

Last week four Soil Association trustees resigned from the charity accusing it of lacking conviction on organic. But to create real change you sometimes just have to compromise, says Craig Sams

In 1946 two pioneering women, Eve Balfour and Dr. Innes Pearce, founded the Soil Association. Eve was a farmer who developed organic principles by creating healthy soil on her farm in Essex. Dr. Innes Pearce ran the Peckham Project in one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods and showed that good nutrition led to healthier families, better academic achievement by kids and fewer men deserting their wives. The Soil Association’s founding principle was that a healthy diet, supported by nutrient-rich organic food, would change the world for the better.

In 1966, the doctors, dentists, nutritionists and veterinarians who were members felt the Soil Association had become too farmer-oriented and resigned to set up the McCarrison Society, named after Sir Robert McCarrison, whose 1926 book on nutrition and health inspired both Balfour and Innes Pearce. This was a sad moment as it marked the divorce between the advocates of healthy soil and the advocates of healthy eating. A year later we founded our macrobiotic business Yin Yang Ltd (to become Harmony Foods and later Whole Earth) which brought together, at a commercial level, organic food and healthy eating.

Happily the Soil Association has rediscovered its roots. At a conference in 2002 titled ‘Education, Education, Education’ I gave the keynote speech that highlighted the few examples at the time of how better school food could improve kids’ behaviour and academic performance. Then the Soil Association, with Garden Organic, Focus on Food and the Health Education Trust got a £17 million Lottery grant to make it happen.

The grant money was well spent. Not only have over 4500 Schools enrolled with the project, and started to teach children to cook and grow and also taken them to visit farms, but the Soil Association Catering Mark has been developed too.This starts with the Bronze standard (75% freshly prepared, no GMOs, no hydrogenated fat, free range produce). Then they graduate to the Silver standard (a proportion of organic, a larger proportion of locally sourced, Fairtrade, MSC, LEAF). Then they go for Gold which takes it to even higher levels. The migration is only ever one way, from Bronze to Gold and the impact on organic suppliers is spectacular. The Gold holders are now asking the Soil Association for a Platinum category. More important is that schoolkids become aware of organic food, go home and challenge their parents. 950,000 school meals a day  are served with the Catering Mark and it’s now also improving food served in nurseries, hospitals, care homes, offices and industrial canteens. By this time next year there will be 2 million school meals a day served to the Catering Mark standard – half of all schoolkids in the UK. This all sounds pretty good to me and if Dr Innes Pearce were alive she would be punching the air with triumphant joy that her dream back in the 1930s and 1940s was finally being realised. And this is just the beginning. The Catering Mark is the fastest-growing activity of Soil Association Certification and is sucking in more and more organic food as the biggest national foodservice companies get behind it.

“We compromised on organic, we compromised on sugar-like sweeteners, we compromised on restaurant food (where organic regulations don’t apply). We never compromised on GMOs. We are winning because we were pragmatic. And how we’re winning!”

But concern about the Catering Mark is the main reason why four trustees resigned from the Soil Association Council at the beginning of December. They felt it was an ethical sell-out to allow non-organic food in meals that bore Soil Association approval. They were unhappy that the standards permitted organic food that was frozen or canned, as this was not ‘fresh’ even if it was ‘freshly prepared’

I got into the world of organic food from the standpoint of the macrobiotic diet. We ate natural and wholegrain and organic whenever possible, which wasn’t often in 1967. But we mapped out a route that helped us get to where we are today. The reason the marvellous macrobiotic diet that has been the mainstay of my health and happiness for five decades never went mainstream was because it got hijacked by people who were rigid and restrictive. The macrobiotic guru and author of Zen Macrobiotics, Georges Ohsawa, was horrified to see this and just before he died he tried to correct this by writing that, thanks to macrobiotics he could enjoy whisky, chocolate and other taboo foods, as long as he did it in moderation. We compromised on organic, we compromised on sugar-like sweeteners, we compromised on restaurant food (where organic regulations don’t apply). We never compromised on GMOs. We are winning because we were pragmatic. And how we’re winning! The tide is turning. Finally clinicians are recognising that food is medicine and the Hospital Food Standards Committee have recommended Catering Mark as a scheme that can improve hospital food.

You might have missed it, but School Meals Week was in early November. The Minister of State for Education, David Laws MP, praised the Soil Association’s Food for Life Catering Mark, commending it as a scheme that allows school leaders to choose caterers who are committed to providing school children with high quality, nutritious food. He said: “My message is: ‘Quality really matters’. This is our challenge for 2015. I would like to see all schools and their caterers holding – or working hard towards – a quality award like the excellent Catering Mark.” The evidence is compelling – kids at Catering Mark schools have better attendance rates, better academic performance and better understanding of food and nutrition, the key to avoiding obesity.

The three journalists and a baker who resigned from the Soil Association cited the Catering Mark as the main example of how the Soil Association has lost its way. If that’s what losing its way looks like then perhaps the Soil Association should ‘lose its way’ more often.

Small is still beautiful

Who needs big organisations that are inherently inefficient in this age of smartphones and smart farmers? The future is small, the future is beautiful … and resilient

The Royal Scottish Geographical Society, in their wisdom, decided to bestow their Shackleton Medal (for Leadership and Citizenship) on me, and my wife Jo Fairley. The event was in Perth, traditionally known as the ‘Fair City’ but also a registered Fairtrade City.  Supporters poured into the Perth Concert Hall and we met two schoolgirls whose school curriculum included writing an essay about Justino Peck, a personal friend of ours in Belize. Justino led the Toledo Cacao Growers Association in 1993 from near collapse to a vibrant cooperative built on supplying organic cacao to Green & Black’s for Maya Gold. Arguably he should have been awarded the Shackleton Medal – he moved heaven and earth to get organic cacao production up going in Belize.

What sank in as we prepared our speech was how much the world has changed. In 1993 British aid advisors and agricultural experts from the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) urged the cocoa farmers to ignore us, warning that if they went organic and abandoned chemicals their cocoa orchards would be wiped out and they’d never be able to repay the money they’d borrowed to buy hybrid seeds and chemicals in the 1980s. Justino advised the farmers to trust us and go organic – most farmers don’t like spending money on chemicals anyway.

In the 1960s there had been a massive move towards big industrial scale cocoa plantations to ‘modernise’ cocoa production. 420,000 hectares of cacao were planted in Malaysia and over 200,000 in Bahia province of Brazil. Now there’s fewer than 20,000 hectares in Malaysia and even less than that in Bahia. What happened? Quite simply, the experts were wrong. They confidently gave crap advice that led to a huge waste of money. Big plantations planted cacao trees 8 feet apart with no shade trees (instead of 16 feet apart and with shade trees. Teams of workers were paid by the hour to harvest and ended up picking under-ripe pods to meet their targets.  The result was cacao that was rubbish for anything but the cheapest chocolate. The Malaysians sent teams to Ghana to find out that complexity of flavour comes when you have lots of independent farmers growing cacao and picking it only when it’s ripe.  In Brazil a disease called Witches Broom spread like wildfire in 1989, the fungicides failed to work and 90% of the trees in the Bahia region died.  An awful lot of money, human effort and heartbreak went into this misguided scheme to ‘modernise’ cocoa farming. A lot of women got cancer or had deformed births from spraying chemicals into the underside of the trees. Some plantations wouldn’t give women jobs as backpack sprayers unless they could prove they’d been sterilised. Cheap food at what cost?

Now it’s all changed and all the chocolate companies are actively courting smallholder producers.  Big is not beautiful, it’s a disaster. Tyre companies like Michelin want smallholders to plant rubber trees. Unilever want them to plant oil palm. The big plantations don’t work. Now everyone has to make nice to the smallholders. They have the whip hand and, organised into cooperatives, can command fair prices, supported by the Fairtrade Mark and other assurances.

The thinking behind depopulating the countryside was that all those peasants were needed to go and work in factory jobs, assembling computers and cars.  Only robots now do the job cheaper.  Apple’s new factory in Arizona will make computers in the USA again, but with very few jobs.  But there’s no point in making stuff if nobody has the money to buy it. The independent smallholder farmers, getting fair prices for what they produce, will be an important market for manufactured goods.

What’s more, independent people who own their own business or land are the backbone of any representative democracy. They’re harder to push around.

Just look at what a mess ‘Big’ has got us in. Big farmers in the US and EU depend on subsidies for half their income – they’d go bust overnight without £400 billion each year of taxpayer support. Big supermarkets are struggling, squeezing suppliers for cash to prop up their flagging share price, while independent butchers, bakers and brewers and other small retailers are popping up all over the place.

“Just look at what a mess ‘Big’ has got us in. Big farmers in the US and EU depend on subsidies for half their income – they’d go bust overnight without £400 billion each year of taxpayer support. Big supermarkets are struggling, squeezing suppliers for cash to prop up their flagging share price”

EF Shumacher wrote Small is Beautiful – as if People Mattered and went on to be president of the Soil Association. Who needs big organisations that are inherently inefficient in this age of smartphones and smart farmers? The future is small, the future is beautiful…and resilient. Just look at the cacao example – it’s the same wherever you look.

Was Adam a Fungus?

At the Soil Association conference in October I heard comments that the name wasn't very sexy and maybe something like 'The Organic Society' might be more compelling.  I have to disagree, based on my, admittedly quirky, interpretation of world history.  Also, I'm an acolyte of the Zen macrobiotic guru,  Georges Ohsawa, who said that humans and soil are a unity.   Here's my take on what he meant.

When life began on earth 500 million years or so ago there wasn't much around beside stringy little mycorrhizal fungi living on rocks. A mycorrhizal fungus had to erode a piece of rock with enzymes, helped along by carbonic acid from rain (the air was mostly carbon dioxide back then). It would get enough carbon to survive. 

Then a miracle happened - little green bacteria called cyanobacteria managed to harness sunlight in order to turn carbon dioxide and water into a simple carbohydrate, glucose sugar inventing photosynthesis.  That was when life really kicked off.  The mycorrhizal fungi, no slackers, saw the opportunity and created chain gangs of these sugar-producing bacteria, sucking out some of their sugar and feeding them with minerals like phosphorus that they harvested from rocks.  The chain gangs got bigger and bigger, organised into fan shapes to maximise capture of carbon dioxide.  Then they installed tubes that helped deliver the sugar that much quicker to the ever hungry, sugar-addicted fungi down below. 

These were the earliest plants.  Nothing has changed since.  Even a mighty oak tree

is nothing but a collection of tubes that carry water and minerals up to the sugar factories in the leaves and carry sugar down to the hungry mycorrhizae clustered all around the roots.  Then they form a network of filaments that can be 8 miles of superfine threads in just one cubic inch of soil. They communicate with each other through chemical signalling, electric pulses, smell and touch, making sure that the system runs smoothly.

So far so good, but what about all the other organisms down there? We know of 10,000 different bacteria and fungi that all have some role.  They need sugar too.  And the only way they can get it is to make nice with the mycorrhizae, the sugar barons of the underground.  So they do.  They even copy fungi in shape, so much so that before electron microscopes people thought bacteria like actinomycetes and streptomyces were fungi because they formed the same stringy filaments as their sugar-dealing masters.  We all mimic our wealthy betters, so why not bacteria?  Those filaments help to channel mineral nutrients to the fungi that reward them with sugar before trading it on to the plant up above.  If mycorrhizae are Mr. Big then the actinomycetes are the street dealers in the sugar racket.

It's not all peace and love, though.  From time to time nasty fungi and bacteria that eat plants' living tissue come along. The mycorrhizae have the answer, though. They just feed sugar to SAS commando bacteria, which quickly mulitply and kill off the invaders. You might call them an immune defense system.  Most of our antibiotics come from soil bacteria - they're very, very effective at wiping out nasty bugs.  Once the killer bacteria have seen off the invasion, the sugar supply tapers off and their population is reduced to a minimal state until they're needed again. 

Inevitably, some rebel fungi and bacteria thought 'Why are we so dependent on the mycorrhizae?  Let's get mobile, grow legs and wings and mouths and eat the plants instead of waiting passively to be fed"   Animal life emerged, all the way up to us humans.  We all have our own resident population of bacteria and fungi that date back to the origins of animal life.  They are our immune system, just as mycorrhizae are the plant's immune system.   They may be little, but there are 500 to 1000 bacterial species in a human gut with 100 times more genes than the human genome and comprise 10 times the total number of human body cells.  Humbling, isn't it?  Are we just walking food gathering mechanisms for a bunch of clever bugs who have been evolving for half a billion years before the first humans came along.

Are we a triumph of their evolution?

And did the name 'Soil Association' unconsciously (or bug-consciously) reflect the fact that it is an organisation dedicated to restoring the chemical-depleted global population of soil-dwelling organisms to their former glory?

Sharing Economy

I farm 20 acres, mostly woodland and orchard, with 2 acres of organic vegetable production.  I farm people – and they farm me.  They work the vegetable land and they call themselves Stonelynk Community Growers.

20 members put £50 a year into the kitty.  I match fund it and pay for the Soil Association certification.  Then we split the crop 50-50.  I sell my half to local natural food stores, box schemes and restaurants, they eat their half.  They get £500 worth of fresh vegetables and work 100 hours a year. The farmer next door does any machinery work, like rotovating.  This is just one example of how the sharing movement is gaining traction. 

I was keynote speaker at the ‘Grow It Yourself’ launch in Birmingham in July. It’s an event that Mark Diacono of Otter Cottage described as a ‘Gardeners’ Glastonbury.’  Allotmenteers, community gardeners, gardening journalists and publishers were all there.  People who grow their own food together have a special bond. Most grow organically – who would spray insecticide on a lettuce they were going to serve a day later to their friends and family? 

When people grow and share their produce their attitude to food changes.  They want provenance and trust.  They buy local.  They insist on organic.

There are a small number of farmers with large landholdings who can’t make it pay without massive subsidies and there are large numbers of people without land who would love to get stuck in.   Social farming is a lot of fun – you don’t just share the harvest, you share good times, friendship, knowledge and fun.  Hard to put a price on, but it means the cucumber you grew on a community farm is worth infinitely more than the one some Dutch hydroponics engineer grew under glass and which never touched the earth.  People are reconnecting with the real physical world. 

WWOOF now covers more than 50 countries, where volunteers help out on organic farms and get plugged in to the organic movement.   Landshare was launched at River Cottage in 2009 and has connected more than 55,000 growers, sharers and helpers.

The peer-to-peer economy is replacing the top-down economy.  Instead of owning things people increasingly are just using things and sharing tools and time.  Building social capital is replacing the desire for things – we want good times, not to be surrounded by junk in social isolation.

These social transactions cut out the middle corporation and bureaucracy and provide secondary income while maximising efficient use of resources such as bedrooms, money, cars, energy and kitchens and, potentially, almost anything.

Bedrooms: Air BnB is so much nicer than hotels.  They cover 192 countries, anything from a bedroom to an apartment to a house.

Money: After getting uncomprehending treatment from the banks, Dominic of Inspiral Foods went for crowdfunding.  He quickly reached in his target £250,000. The investors were like-minded people who shared Inspiral’s values, people who want their investment to do good and do well. Funding Circle has loaned over £133m, Zopa £278m, matching up investors with borrowers. With an average 5.8% return and no banks or middlemen, crowdfunding pays.

Cars: Why bother to own a car when you can pick one up as easily as a Boris Bike. Or tap into a lift sharing app to find a ride or a passenger from London to Exeter.

Energy: Why buy electricity?  Generate it, keep a storage battery in the shed and feed power in and out of a smart grid in an energy sharing network that doesn’t need a toxic nuclear plant or coal power station at the end of ugly pylons.

Kitchens: Cookening helps you eat locally with local people who host dinner in their homes.

This kind of stuff upsets the health and safety people because the rating of a service is done by the users, making bureaucrats redundant. 

Schumacher wrote ‘Small is Beautiful.’

Shelley wrote “Ye are many, they are few” 

Put it together and you get the Collaborative Economy.  Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing  and sharing are the practical application of what we used to fear as ‘Mob Rule.’  But as long as the ‘mob’ is all nice people who you’d be happy to introduce to your mother, what’s wrong with that?  At least you know them and they aren’t spying on your emails.

Agroecology – The new Organic?

Over the past few decades the gap between organic food and the rest has narrowed.  Not that long ago, if you wanted to be sure you were avoiding pesticide residues, artificial colourings and flavourings and preservatives, animal cruelty, human exploitation, soil degradation, hydrogenated fat and GMOs, the only safe haven was to look for the word ‘organic’ on the label, or at the very least, ‘natural.’

In March 2 2012 Nestle announced they were removing artificial ingredients from their entire range.  That’s 80 formerly ‘safe’ additives that are now disappearing in ‘response to customer demand’ (and possibly also due to legal advice).  The RSCPA Freedom Food label and ‘free range’ are nearly organic.  Fairtrade reassures on exploitation.  Hydrogenated fat is finally out of most of our food, though the fast food industry need to pull their socks up.   The US is pushing for GMO labelling, which will be a nail in its coffin

Nestle’s announcement coincided with the Soil Association conference.  Farming is moving towards organic as well.  For a long time the Soil Association maintained clear blue water between organic and the rest by raising its own standards.  But under Helen Browning’s leadership a more pragmatic and outward-looking approach is emerging.  The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Agroecology.’  What is agroecology?  Well it’s organic, with knobs on - but also with more flexibility.  So it considers things that go beyond organic, such as air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions,  social and economic and political impacts. It looks at food from a global holistic aspect, not just from the view of the farmer and the food processor.   And it’s on a roll.

A big driver has been the 2010 IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development) report, where 400 of the world’s top agricultural experts agreed that there was no future for more intensification of agriculture; that the Green Revolution was a disaster; that GM foods won’t help; that we have to look to small farmers for the wisdom and the resilient technologies of the future if we are to feed the world and prevent climate change.   Download a copy and read the executive summary of this influential document. Monsanto and Syngenta, who helped choose those experts, dismissed it grumpily the week before it was published.

When Lady Eve Balfour founded the Soil Association in 1946 nobody was worried about greenhouse gas and global warming. 

The day before the conference I visited 2 Soil Association licensees.  One creates remarkably effective organic fertilisers. He criticised Soil Association policy of restricting external farm inputs.  The other said that, as a propagator of vegetable plugs that go out to most of the country’s organic vegetable growers, there was no way he could operate without external inputs.  He has no livestock and no need of them.  He uses peat (with Soil Association blessing) to get seeds off to a good start.  At the conference’s agroecology workshop 4 of the speakers guiltily commented that they had to buy in some inputs.  Who cares?  If you have a farm of a certain size, and you raise animals for meat or milk, then you can create a system that is a self-contained island or productivity.  But what if you just grow vegetables, or cereals?  What if you’re vegetarian?  Agroecology says we have to reduce meat and dairy consumption if we are to get the right balance in food production.  It encourages agroforestry, where you use trees and shrubs as part of food production, to increase tree cover, improve soil quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Organic encourages dependence on cows and other methane-emitting animals as part of a mixed farm system.  That means more pasture and fewer trees.

It’s time to lighten up and to embrace the ‘opposition’ and bring them towards a holistic and environmentally sound system that is truly organic…and agroecological.   They’re already moving in our direction and the Soil Association conference was a historic step toward embracing them and bringing them into the fold before it’s too late.  Look out Monsanto – the ground is starting to slip away from you.

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.

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?

Subsidised Theft

In 2005, the US government paid $180 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to American farmers.

MY GREAT-GREAT-grandfather Lars Dugstad emigrated to America from Norway in 1842. He lived in a dug-out cave for fifteen years while he cleared eighty acres of virgin Koshkonong Prairie land in Wisconsin. His was the typical pioneer experience.

His son Ole, my great-grandfather, went to Nebraska in 1887 and broke the prairie sod on 160 acres of land in Dakota County. Ole’s son Lewis, my grandfather, farmed it until I was born there in 1944. Lewis’ only son, my Uncle Floyd, sold it and went on to become one of the first beef feedlot operators on the farm he bought across the Missouri River in Iowa.

Floyd offered me 625 acres in 1966, but I didn’t like the idea of sticking diethylstilbestrol hormones behind the ears of cattle, and I made the fateful decision to come to London instead and open a macrobiotic restaurant. That led on to a career in the retail, manufacturing and marketing of organic foods that included Whole Earth Foods and Green & Black’s chocolate, and also my work with the Soil Association.

Uncle Floyd’s son now farms those 625 acres as part of an expanded total of 1,600 acres – all farmed with just one assistant. Last year he lost $40,000 on sales of $300,000 but ended up with a net farm income of $110,000, thanks to a hefty $150,000 subsidy from the US government.

So from Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a rural democracy, where every self- sufficient and prosperous family had a small farm or business, we have reached – in three generations – a corporate state where a viable family farmer needs 1,600 acres, a lot of machinery and GM crops and still operates at a huge annual loss that has to be made up by subsidies.

In 1944 Charles Erwin Wilson, President of General Motors and Director of the War Production Board, called for a Permanent War Economy to prevent a post-war return to the Great Depression. The Permanent War Economy, in giving birth to the military-industrial complex, also gave birth to the military-agricultural complex. Both operated on the same principle – if the free market wouldn’t take everything that was produced, the government would take up the slack, keeping the economy humming. The same companies that made tanks for the war could make tractors and pick-up trucks; the same companies that made nitroglycerine explosives could make nitrogen fertilisers.

The problem was that farmers weren’t up for it. Either a command economy or false economic signals were needed to force them to industrialise and adopt chemical inputs.

In the UK, the Soil Association was lobbying hard for a sustainable post-war agriculture based around rural communities and the avoidance of chemical fertilisers. ICI lobbied hard for increased nitrate use and eventually, with the Agriculture Act of 1947, ICI won the argument and the British government fell in line with the policy of its European and US counterparts by introducing a direct cash subsidy of ten shillings on every bag of nitrate fertiliser.

This subsidy made all the difference to farm economics: once nitrates were in use weeds thrived on the extra nutrients and created a market for herbicides, fungal infections proliferated on the densely packed plants and created a market for fungicides, and the elimination of fertility-building rotations created a market for insecticides to deal with the inevitable build-up of pest populations. CO2 emissions from the soil escalated, as soil structure and carbon-rich humus collapsed under the onslaught of chemical fertilisers.

Subsidies set land prices and farm incomes from then on. Agriculture had, in effect, been nationalised and was part of the Permanent War Economy that has been the economic model of the West and of Russia ever since. From the start, US farmers saw what was coming and formed leagues in which they all faithfully promised each other never to accept subsidies. But once some farmers took the subsidy, they could sell their crops more cheaply; the rest had to follow suit if they were to be competitive. The inherent bias of government policy towards larger producers led to the steady extinction of small farms.

The same thing happened in industry. The US Government pays out $167 billion a year to support the US’s largest corporations. In 1950, 25% of US tax income came from corporations. That figure is now 10%.

In 2005 the US government paid out more than $30 billion in direct payments to US farmers and an estimated further $150 billion in indirect subsidies including tax breaks on fuel and equipment, tariffs, protective pricing, drought loss payments and purchasing surpluses.

The biggest recipients of this support are the largest corporate farmers and commodity giants like Cargill and ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), agrichemical and seed suppliers like Monsanto and Dupont, and huge corporations such as the Fanjul family’s Florida Crystals sugar empire and meat producers Tyson and Smithfield.

The real damage from this subsidy policy is not just the financial cost to the US economy, though the numbers are significant. The real cost is to the health of the global economy, to the stability of our climate and to human health.

THE COST TO THE health of the American people has been spelt out by such authorities as the Harvard School of Public Health. The fast-food industry has contributed directly to the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and osteoporosis. These degenerative diseases threaten the future capacity of Western economies to finance health care. If subsidies on corn and soybeans alone were removed, the cost of a cheap hamburger would be forced up from $1 to $3. This would directly affect rates of junk food consumption. If the subsidised rangeland that supports the production of cheap calves were charged at a market price and if the externalised costs of the beef industry such as unsustainable levels of water pollution, environmental degradation and greenhouse-gas production were taken into account, the same hamburger would cost closer to $5 or $6. At this level hamburger consumption would be reduced to the healthier levels that public health authorities urgently recommend. The cost of obesity to the US is estimated at $117 billion just in lost work days and in additional health-care costs, a high price to pay for unfeasibly cheap burgers.

But the real harm of the subsidy system is to the global economy. So, the question is: How do US subsidies cause world poverty?

US farmers grow maize at a cost of 6¢ per pound. A Mexican farmer can grow maize at a cost of 4¢ per pound. So you would think that Mexico would export corn to the US – and at the very least would dominate the US domestic market. But the world market price is set at 3¢ per pound on the Chicago Board of Trade on the basis of subsidised US farmers. If the Mexican farmers seek to make a profit over their cost of 4¢ per pound, grain traders around the world will import or, more importantly, threaten to import US corn in order to continue to purchase at a price of 3¢ per pound. In the cruel world of subsidised agriculture, the so-called inefficient Mexican farmers go out of business trying to compete with truly inefficient US farmers whose cost of production is really 6¢ per pound, but who have the mighty US taxpayer prepared to subsidise their farm-gate price down to 3¢ per pound. In recent years 100,000 Mexican farmers have been driven off the land, denied access to their domestic market by US imports. Real trade justice would be to either abolish the subsidies or allow farmers all around the world to get the same subsidies from Uncle Sam.

Subsidies in the US determine the commodity prices quoted on the Chicago Board of Trade, which are the benchmark for commodity prices worldwide. It is not the actual exports as much as the fact that a phoney price is the global standard that causes the damage.

Majority world farmers, if they were allowed to benefit from their greater efficiency, would prosper from both increased income and land values, their countries would prosper, and problems of disease, overpopulation and poverty would be greatly alleviated by the increased domestic and foreign income. We also know that, as family income increases, family size decreases: it’s the paradox of wealth but another good reason to liberate food prices in order to non-coercively stabilise global population growth.

So can we quantify the actual cost of subsidies to the world economy?

A simple calculation can be made on the basis of the US and EU current subsidy levels. James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, sets the total annual subsidy spend at $350 billion – nearly $1 billion a day. Subsidies now represent 50% of net farm income in the US and the EU.

This means that, if subsidies were not in place, US farmers would need to double their prices to make a living.

On the basis that the US and the EU represent one-sixth of the world’s food production, we can assume that, if commodity prices doubled worldwide, the increased income for the majority world would be $2.4 trillion per annum. Total foreign aid amounts to $50 billion, or just 2%, which is paid back to the victims of what amounts to global theft from farmers outside the industrial countries that benefit from the rigging of market prices.

However, because the producers of the majority world operate on lower cost bases, are more efficient and have a higher real productivity level, the price of agricultural commodities would probably not double, as market forces would come into play at this stage. US and EU production of cereals and oilseeds would fall dramatically if faced with global competition and a level playing field.

THERE IS ANOTHER factor. The price of oil is going up. It was $12 a barrel in 1998, George Bush came to power in 2000, and it has now touched $70 a barrel and shows little sign of falling. The increase in the price of natural gas has already led to the closure of half of North America’s fertiliser manufacturing capacity in the past four years.

Demand for our diminishing reserves of natural gas for domestic heating and cooking or as motor fuel will ensure that natural gas, which generates tax income, will always be, as a priority, used in those applications where it can bear the extra cost of being taxed. This does not include fertiliser manufacture, where it is already too expensive. People are prepared to pay a 300% tax on petrol and diesel for their cars, because consumers put a high value on personal transportation. When similar taxes are imposed on bunker oil, aviation fuel, heating oil, natural gas and power generation, people’s subsequent choices will reflect the real cost of fossil fuels.

Growing food needs energy. To produce a calorie of food using fossil-fuel-dependent industrial farming takes fifteen calories of energy input. To produce a calorie of food organically still uses five calories of energy input. A gardener with a hoe uses one calorie to produce twenty calories of food. Organic farmers are closest to optimising energy use with productivity, and since their only fossil-fuel use is in running tractors and equipment, they will have the economic advantage as energy prices increase. When the oil price reaches $100 per barrel farmers will no longer be able to justify the use of inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides. On a global scale, the farmer who is ‘carbon-frugal’ is due for big rewards.

Carbon isn’t the only greenhouse gas we get from agriculture. Intensive cattle-rearing also leads to increased methane emissions. Feeding a cow on corn and soybeans leads to an acid rumen, incomplete digestion, and methane emissions several times more than from a cow fed on grass and hay. When you consider that the combined weight of cattle on this planet exceeds that of human beings, that’s a lot of gas. The widespread use of nitrogen fertilisers is the main source of atmospheric nitrous oxide, a gas that is nearly 300 times more warming in its effects than CO2.

As the price of oil-based inputs rises, farming on a small scale will become more attractive. Hobby farming, where farmers have other sources of income but use their farmland to augment that income, will expand. We will see more diversity in the countryside, and more vibrant local economies.

This article is based on the Martin

Radcliffe Lecture 2006. www.brookes.ac.uk/public_lectures

PREVENTION vs CURE - IN FARMING AS IN FOOD for BANT

Untitled

The story of my beginnings goes back to 1965 when I first got into the macrobiotic diet.   I had been travelling in Afghanistan and India and amoebic dysentery led to hepatitis. I discovered that a diet of unleavened wholemeal bread and unsweetened tea cured the dysentery and the hepatitis symptoms subsided. This was the beginning of my understanding of the importance of gut health to overall health. Back at university some friends introduced me to the macrobiotic diet and I adopted it enthusiastically

At the time it was radical and Reader's Digest ran a cover story calling it the 'Diet That's Killing our Kids' while the American Medical Association said it could lead to death. Which is pretty much true about any diet, the question is more about when than whether. Nowadays eating wholegrains, organic seasonal and local food, avoiding sugar and hydrogenated fat and artificial additives doesn't seem so weird but at the time it was revolutionary. So revolutionary that the FBI closed down the macrobiotic bookshop in NY and burned its books because they suggested that healthy diet could prevent cancer.

Seed

So, in 1967, my brother and I started Seed Restaurant, the legendary hip -and hippie - macrobiotic watering hole of the late 60s, where brown rice and organic vegetables formed the backbone of the menu.   We figured if the AMA and the FBI didn’t like it then it had to make sense.

lennon cartoon

John Lennon gave my brother Gregory a little cartoon in appreciation of our food and of Harmony, the magazine Gregory published.

Books

I wrote a guide to macrobiotics called, imaginatively, About Macrobiotics, which was translated into 6 languages and sold nearly half a million copies.

More recently I wrote a guide to all issues surrounding food called The Little Food Book

When I wrote About Macrobiotics I just tried to simplify the complexities of Yin and Yang that made some earlier books on macrobiotics daunting and even impenetrable. It was well received for that reason.

We soon had Ceres - Britain's first natural foods store - on the Portobello Road. Then other budding retailers came to us for supplies, forming the customer base for Harmony Foods, which evolved into Whole Earth Foods.

Ceres interior

Our business thrived on innovation. We were the first with organic brown rice and were known as The Brown Rice Barons because if you bought brown rice in the 70s it came from us.   We bought and milled or flaked all of the organic grains grown in this country and usually exhausted available stocks before the new crop came in. In our retail and wholesale business we only sold food, only wholefood, no sugar and not even honey and no vitamins or supplements. We were macrobiotic then and I continue to follow the diet, not religiously but almost passively. In other words I eat whatever I feel like, but mostly I feel like eating wholegrains and vegetables.   Occasionally I take zinc or Vitamin C when I feel a cold coming on, but otherwise don’t take supplements.

Whole Earth Peanut Butter label

Eventually we pandered to market demand, with a successful brand of peanut butter that rose to take the number 2 position after Sun Pat in the UK market. I created the first range of fruit juice sweetened jams, using apple juice instead of sugar as a sweetener. We had created a market for sugar avoidance - and apple juice - if only for semantic reasons, satisfied it.

In my quest for organic peanuts for our peanut butter I came across a group of farmers in West Africa who also grew organic cacao and from that encounter Green & Black’s, the first ever organic chocolate, was born.

Green & Black's 1st bar

Needless to say, my kids, who had been brought up in a committed macrobiotic household, were somewhat dismayed to see their Dad going into the sugar business, but I consoled myself with the fact that 70% chocolate had a glycaemic index of only 22, less than half the GI of brown rice, and carried on developing the brand.

So what are the key aspects of macrobiotics?

You should eat wholegrains and vegetables as the basis of your diet.

ZEN MACROBIOTICS

You should always choose organic, seasonal and local

You should avoid yeast and sugar

You should avoid preservatives and other chemical food additives.

You should minimise meat and dairy

There are good nutritional reasons for all of the above, seasonal food is fresher, organic food doesn’t contain pesticide residues, wholegrains have more B vitamins than refined cereals and preservatives can give you cancer. But is there more to all of this? A nutritional therapist might feel that there is insufficient emphasis on maintaining a high intake of necessary nutrients and it’s true that in the early days a lot of macrobiotic followers looked rather wan and pasty-faced. They blamed it on expelling toxins but it was more like nutritional deficiency. Was it the fault of macrobiotics or was this part of a transition to better health?

One of the key facets of macrobiotics is that you don’t get sick. Prevention is everything and cures are fairly perfunctory.

One of the key facets of organic farming is that your plants and animals never get sick. Prevention is everything and cures are fairly perfunctory. In fact if you cure a problem with chemicals or drugs on an organic farm, whether with plants or livestock, you lose your organic status.

The Soil Association regularly has a debate about its name. Should we change it to The Organic Society or something similar?   We always decide to keep our rather unappealing name because we firmly believe that ‘The answer lies in the soil.” But we never ask the question: The answer to what?

I submit that it is the answer to the question: “What is the Meaning of Life?”

So how can the soil contain such a revelation?

A gramme of healthy soil contains over 10,000 different species of microbial life, you could say that it is a microbiotic jungle. Except that it is remarkably ordered, with bacteria, viruses, algae and protozoa living in a web of complex fungal growth. Worms play an important role as well.

We are always impressed at how well organised and efficient bees and ants are. But bees only have three variants – the queen, the worker and the drone. Ants are similar.

Yet the most efficiently organised system we know comprises 1o thousand life forms, all working in close tandem. They communicate with enzymes, chemicals and odors and probably electric charges. Research into this is in its infancy. At the heart of the system is the fungal mycelial network that feeds the other life forms, regulates their growth and variety.   In plant growth the most important are the mycorrhizal fungi, which are, to organic farmers the foundation of soil health and fertility.

These organisms predate plants by 100s of millions of years. If your parents predate you then you consider yourself their offspring. We trace our ancestry back to early primates, respecting and recognising their importance in creating what we are today, a recognition confirmed by genetics and DNA research. We respect and honour our ancestors, but soil is seen as something dirty and underfoot, barely worth of recognition. Are we missing the point of our existence?

Long ago, when the atmosphere contained a lot of carbon dioxide, life forms were anaerobic, they didn’t use oxygen in their life cycle.

CYANOBACTERIA

When the earliest microorganisms dwelt on this planet one group, the cyanobacteria developed the ability to convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using sunlight, thereby opening up a new food source, thin air.

Once this ability emerged, it was harnessed by the existing network. The cyanobacterial ability to make carbohydrates out of carbon dioxide was captured and enclosed in cells called chloroplasts and we had the first green plants.

Plants are the means whereby a very well organised team of soil microorganisms can extract food from the air.   The mycelial network brings together the rest of the life in soil to support this food gathering mechanism and to extract its main benefit to them, which is sugar. These fungal webs can have eight miles of thin mycelium in a single cubic inch, stretching over miles underground, communicating with each other.

When you look at a tree or a blade of grass or a fern, you are looking at the food gathering and early stage digestion mechanism of a very clever bunch of invisible organisms. The plant works hard up there, busily converting carbon dioxide and sunlight and water into carbohydrates that it then feeds to its underground masters. It even knows who’s boss. It will only feed those mycorryzzal fungi that have the correct identity papers. They are good servants and only take orders from their master. When this happens the fungal lord inserts a tentacle or hypha into a subcutaneous layer of the plant root so that it can drink its sugar solution direct from the source. It needs to keep the plant going so it gathers phosphorus, nitrates and other minerals to ensure that the plant thrives and competes successfully with other plants. The mycorrhizal fungus lives for about 32 days, then as it decomposes it provides food for a network of other soil organisms that support it and that benefit from its demise. It generates a carbon-rich substance called glomalin, both proteins and carbohydrates, that is sticky and helps bind soil together in aggregates that give the soil structure and keep other soil carbon from escaping.

As the world’s atmosphere became filled with the excreta of these plants the level of oxygen increased.

It was now possible for new complex teams of soil biota to organise themselves to move about and capture plants. Animal life was discovered. In effect they invented airplanes and cars to increase their range and were able to capture from above the food of their underground brethren. With flying creatures and worms and eventually mammals, one thing was shared by all: a set of controlling microorganisms that guided every stage of the animal’s development, ensuring that it could gather food and reproduce.

These mobile plants used smell and vision to identify likely food sources and arms, legs, mandibles, and claws to gather it up.

So if we accept that the soil biota created and control plants, why is it so hard for our egos to accept that perhaps the reason for our existence is to perpetuate the dominion of a very clever collection of soil biota who created an internalised soil environment in the gut of living animals? Is it really that humbling? Consider Genesis 3:19

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

This dated from an era before the sky gods took over and mother earth took a back seat

Let’s take a closer look:

There are 200-600 million nerve cells in the gut - more than in spinal cord, what does this tell us about the importance of the gut to intelligence and consciousness? It appears to be linked to information storage, decision-making and joy and sadness.   The question is, who’s holding the reins? Is the control originating in the gut and determining our conscious decisions or do we make conscious decisions in our brains and then, for some reason, pass this information to the gut? A nerve is a 2 way street. No other part of the so called peripheral nervous system acts autonomously and locally. The Enteric Nervous System is called our ‘second brain.’ I submit that it could well be the Primary brain. After all, why does our gut need to tell our brain that it is regulating intestinal contractions, the release of digestive fluids and all the other activity in the gut? Our gut talks to itself and only bothers to communicate with our brain when it considers a message from the eyes, nose or palate about what food is out there. All the gut needs to tell our cerebral consciousness is if it feels pain, hunger or satiety. You don’t need half a billion nerve cells to do that.

There are 500 to 1000 bacterial species alone in the gut with 2 to 4 million genes, if you look at them as one microbiome they contain 100 times more genes than the human genome and represent 10 times the total number of human body cells.   They are overwhelmingly anaerobic, in other words they evolved in the absence of oxygen and like to keep it that way.

The gut biota make a huge difference to the development of capillaries in the intestinal villi, promoting host nutrition. When they are absent a breach in the gut wall can be fatal, when they are abundant a breach in the gut wall is harmless and doesn’t trigger inflammation.

So if soil biota and gut biota are related and our relationship to plants is derived from that ancient relationship what similarities are there between the way we produce our food, in soil and the way we prepare and digest our food, in our gut soil. Which the Chinese call ‘night soil.

So let’s look at a few examples and compare

In the 1840s, when Baron Justus von Liebig discovered that nitrates and phosphates were essential soil nutrients it engendered a revolution in agriculture. No longer did farmers have to faff around with fallow periods, fertility building cycles or any of the traditional ways of extracting a crop from the earth. Instead they could add chemicals. What happened?

First: The nitrates and phosphates short circuited the cycle whereby mycorrhizal fungi fed these minerals to plants in exchange for sugars.

Second: The mycorrhizal fungi died off, unable to compete with free food. As they died and decomposed, the soil structure collapsed and vast amounts of carbon were emitted. Even Justus von Liebig realised what a terrible mistake he’d made and 20 years after he started the chemical farming revolution he wrote: SLIDE LIEBIG

I have sinned against the Creator and, justly, I have been punished.

I wanted to improve His work because, in my blindness, I believed that a link in the astonishing chain of laws that govern and constantly renew life on the surface of the Earth had been forgotten.

It seemed to me that weak and insignificant man had to redress this oversight.

But it was too late, human greed was in full spate and the farmer who didn’t use chemicals had trouble competing on price as part of his yields were sacrificed to keep the soil biota happy, reducing overall yields and income. Nobody got paid for maintaining topsoil depth and quality.

Nearly one half of all the increase in carbon dioxide in today’s atmosphere since 1850 is the result of this folly. Global warming’s roots stretch back to his one big mistake that still haunts us.

Liebig spent his later years on a project to recycle London’s sewage for agricultural use but lost the argument to the great Victorian sewer builder Joseph Bazalgette, who made sure all London’s waste was carried out to the Thames Estuary.

If we are seeking parallels, what is the human equivalent of nitrates? Plants feed the soil biota with carbohydrates in the form of sugars in order to get minerals.   Animals feed on plants in order to get carbohydrates. Around the same time that nitrates were introduced into agriculture, sugar became a major factor in our diet, with equally deleterious effects.

Just as cheap nitrates killed off the web of soil life, so cheap sugar quickly pushed aside slower digestive and gut biota-based mechanisms to deliver glucose straight to the organism. Just like the poor old mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, the carbohydrate - producing digestive flora were outflanked and rendered redundant. Even more humiliating, the consumption of sugar led to rampant overgrowth of aggressive yeasts that caused all manner of upsets and the destruction of whole swathes of formerly stable gut biota. It also led to heart disease, diabetes, tooth decay, cancer and obesity. We don’t know what other quick fixes bypass the gut flora, but we should consider the impact on them when we consume vitamins or supplements that may displace some gut function and render it redundant, creating an ongoing dependency on supplementation.

Bread suffered as well. Roller mills made white flour as cheap as wholemeal and white bread replaced wholegrain breads, with resulting diverticulosis and, thanks to industrial yeast, candida.

Let’s compare 2 ways of making mankind’s principal food, wholemeal bread, the modern and the old fashioned .

Modern – Chorleywood Process – take wholemeal flour and ascorbic acid and sugar and 24 times as much yeast as you would use in a traditional bakery and whizz it in a high speed mixer for 20 minutes until the yeasts are agitated and in a feeding frenzy. Shape into loaves, dump into tins and as they bread goes into the travelling oven it is rising. Oh, add a little hydrogenated fat to give it structure so it doesn’t collapse when it comes out – just one hour after you’ve started. It was introduced in the 1960s, around the time that irritable bowel syndrome, gluten allergy, Crohn’s disease really began to become widespread issues. You could say that we just hadn’t realised those diseases existed before then, but for anyone who’s experienced IBS or had a reaction to gluten you know that’s pretty unlikely

Old Fashioned – Judges Bakery process. Germinate wheat and liquidise. Add to organic wholemeal flour, add kelp powder, sesame seeds, hemp nuts and flax seeds. Make up a dough and let stand overnight in linen lined baskets for 18 hours. The enzymes from the germinated wheat snip the long chain proteins of gluten into shorter, less clingy and tastier proteins and make maltodextrins slowly available for fermentation. The bran softens throughout the process with phytic acid breakdown of up to 90%. Lactic acid bacteria increase magnesium and phosphorus solubitility.

If you were a colony of gut flora, which bread would you prefer?

ROUNDWORMS EARTHWORMS

What about worms? Not only are worms common flatmates with gut flora and soil flora, many species can live freely in soil and also survive quite happily in the digestive system.

In the soil worms are the great grinders of all vegetable matter into fine particles. Charles Darwin wrote admiringly of their ability to pile up vast amounts of soil and raise its height.

The soil doesn’t have teeth, but we do. Chewing your food 50 times does much of the work that worms do in the soil. This is recommended by all macrobiotic dietitians from Christophe Hufeland (Goethe’s doctor) through to George Ohsawa, creator of the Japanese version known as Zen Macrobiotics. So what if we just puree our food? Doesn’t that do the same thing? What about if you puree food and then spit in it and leave it for a while, won’t the salivary enzymes do the job for us?

Research published in the Archives of Surgery showed that patients who had part of their colon removed passed gas and solids up to a day sooner if they chewed gum. The process of chewing stimulates nerves in the gut and hastens recovery. Now we have to ask what is stimulating those gut nerves, is it the chewing, or does chewing activate the gut flora, which then stimulate the gut nerves? When you chew the gut biota are getting a signal that food is on the way, so they become active in anticipation. This activity stimulates the nerves in the gut.

GUT WORMS

In the gut worms are seen as parasites, but they fulfil similar functions in the case of roundworms, of helping with the digestion of food, particularly when it has been poorly chewed. They also provide exudates that prevent auto immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and they are food for many fungi.

EARTHWORMS

In modern sterile soils worms are infrequent. I remember visiting Paul McCartney at his farm in Sussex, which is certified organic. He commented – ‘the Soil Association may say my land is organic but I don’t believe it really is until the soil is teeming with worms when the plough goes through.’   Could we consider the absence of worms as the pathology? When 80% of the world’s population are host to worms, can that be abnormal?

What about Gooey stuff – mucus and humus.

In the soil Glomalin is the product of the mycorrhizal fungi. It is sticky like glue and it binds together bits of sand and clay and organic matter into joined up granules called aggregates. These help to keep carbon in the soil instead of escaping into the atmosphere and they also help retain moisture. This creates ideal conditions for soil biota and a soil that is rich in glomalin has a high and stable population of bacteria, fungi and protozoan life.

What is the digestive equivalent of gooey stuff? It’s the mucus membrane, but how do we support it?

In macrobiotic medicine the cure for all tummy troubles is ume-kuzu. That’s a blend of kuzu arrowroot and pickled underripe plums that are rich in sodium sorbate, a natural yeast inhibitor. The yeasts get controlled and the kuzu provides a rich sticky matrix in which gut biota can flourish and rebuild their populations. Other sources of mucilaginous material are traditional remedies such as comfrey and aloe vera, both of which contain allantoin, which encourages cell proliferation. Chicken soup is a natural gel that also helps in this way.

If our gut biota came from the soil itself, then is soil good for you?

There are lots of examples of what is known as geophagia and not all of them relate to desperate hunger or psychological disturbance.

When we don’t have food, we can still feed our gut flora and they can still feed us. We don’t just eat clay to fill our bellies, it may not have nutritive value by analysis, but if it provides a medium where gut biota can proliferate. We can then get nutrition from them.

KWAN YIN

Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth describes how Chinese peasants would eat what they called ‘Goddess of Mercy earth’ named after Kwan Yin, the goddess of Mercy of Taoist tradition. In Taoism Yin is the earth and Yang is the sky.   In Haiti mud cakes are a traditional food, particularly sought after by pregnant women, a compound of clay, fat, salt and pepper.

MUD CAKES FACTORY IN HAITI

Hippocrates described Geophagia 2500 years ago, saying “If a woman feels the desire to eat earth or charcoal and then eats them, the child will show signs of these things.’

Pliny recommended red clay as a remedy for mouth ulcers. In the Levant it was called Terra Sigillata and used to help childbirth and alleviate menstrual problems.   In France they call it argillophagy and a popular hangover cure is to take argile verte, or green clay, in a creamy solution on the morning after. A three week course begins with a twice daily glass of white clay and then a transition to green clay mixed with liquorice powder, with separate doses of charcoal.

CARBON GOLD

And what about charcoal? I must confess a commercial interest here as the founder of Carbon Gold, an enterprise that seeks to restore the soil’s carbon content by the expedient of turning biomass into charcoal and ploughing it in.   Charcoal encourages high populations of soil biota which are extremely stable, very water retentive and antagonistic to pathogenic fungi and bacteria, helping to prevent soil-borne plant diseases. Charcoal stays in the soil for hundreds of years so it effectively is the only way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keep it out.   It also reduces the acidity in soil that causes methane, turning this toxic greenhouse gas into the 60 times less toxic carbon dioxide.

CHARCOAL BISCUITS

Charcoal biscuits and charcoal tablets are a common treatment for wind and other digestive upsets. They adsorb gases like methane and create a healthy environment for the gut biota to thrive, providing niches and structure in which a shattered gut population can rebuild itself. Just as it suffocates toxic bacteria in the soil, in the gut it cracks down on aerobic bacteria such as salmonella and shigella.

Charcoal in soil encourages microbiological density, reduced activity but higher population.

In the soil charcoal maintains an ideal slightly acid pH but even adding wood vinegar to a char- enriched soil doesn’t make it more acid, the bacteria maintain stability at an optimum pH level that is unfriendly to pathogens

What about Fallowing?

Let’s compare organic farming’s fallow periods with our own dietary resting times.

One of my least popular sayings is: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day - to skip.” I always try to skip breakfast and also to fast at least one day a month. Why?   If your digestive transit time is somewhere between 12 and 18 hours then skipping breakfast means that for a few hours each day your gut is empty.   This allows the gut flora to rebalance their population. Every time you excrete, one third of the weight of the faecal matter is gut flora who get flushed away, the remainder need time to recover from the loss of their gutmates. There are of course, also other factors – the blood glucose and the liver’s stored glycogen are used up by the time you wake up in the morning and so the body has to turn to its fat reserves for carbohydrates. It’s like the Atkins Diet, but without all the meat and fat. But it’s a good idea to let the gut flora have a rest in between bouts of food digestion.

Organic and traditional farmers have fallow periods, the farming equivalent of fasting, where nothing is added to the soil, it is just left alone. The soil flora need a period when nothing is happening so that they can sort themselves out, deal with imbalances, before the next crop is planted. Fallow is not just about rebuilding fertility, it’s about recreating a healthy balance of food gathering biota. Eating food is like ploughing manure into a field. There is nutrient being introduced but there is also disturbance as a new set of nutrients is introduced, along with the oxidising effect of air on stored carbon, along with the disruption of the mycelial networks.

I’ve just been in Belize. The farmers there don’t even plough the soil. The grow on quite steep hillsides with no erosion problems. Every year they let an area of ground become overgrown, sometimes for several years, then they cut the resulting vegetation and let it rot or, in some cases burn it off. They plant their corn direct into the ground, where the crop takes off, surrounded by beans and squash as ground cover, so that other plants are crowded out. The soil has no fertilisers, not even compost or manure, added to it and it generates healthy crops of corn with plants 12 feet high.   The farmers abhor the idea of tearing up the soil and have resolutely avoided offers of rotovators and other mechanical ploughing aids.

NEZ PERCE CHIEF JOSEPH

"The earth is our mother. She should not be disturbed by hoe or plough. We want only to subsist on what she freely gives us." --Chief Joseph, Nez Perce

We can’t go back to that level of respect for the soil in today’s crowded world, but it is worth noting that in the long term agriculture has to address its problems of unsustainability and treat the soil as a living organism, not as a hydroponic system with dirt added.

I was there in Belize because they supply cacao to Green & Black’s. They provide us with fully fermented cacao beans in which all the simple cyanins have been oxidised and have lost their astringent taste. The reason our chocolate tastes so good is because the farmers are so good at fermenting the beans.

Every few months Mars publish more research saying that chocolate is good for the heart and have even launched a chocolate range in the US called Cocoa Via based on research that shows that anthyocyanins from unfermented cacao lowers blood pressure. So I took at look at the research to see why they’d launch a chocolate with a mildly unpleasant taste as a nutraceutical. What I came across was the European Polybind Project. They were looking at polyphenolic substances and trying to assess how they could help prevent cancer. They studied onions, apples, broccoli and chocolate. What did they find?

Chocolate contains procyanidins and other simple phenolic compounds. When it is fermented these become oxidised polymers and lose their astringent taste. They also don’t have a noticeable effect on blood pressure, unlike unfermented chocolate where the phenols trigger a measurable pressure drop soon after ingestion.   Hence Mars’ excitement about using unfermented chocolate in their products.   But the Polybind Project found something else: the complex phenolic compounds stayed in the gut wall. When the host was stressed the gut flora would snip them up with enzymes and pass them into the host in the exact amount needed to modify blood pressure.   Instead of outwitting and bypassing the gut flora, it makes more sense to work with them.   The same arguments apply to inulin-rich foods such as chicory and Jerusalem artichokes.

A ‘gut feeling’ is more than a feeling, it’s knowledge, indeed wisdom.

The gut flora control intelligence. They can memorise and learn and encode much faster than multicelled organisms such as us.   They don’t forget as their memories go straight to their DNA, which is constantly in flux.

By maintaining a healthy balance and large population of gut flora the nutritional therapist also offers psychotherapy in a genuine way - this may be described as a ‘placebo effect’ by some, particularly doctors whose summation of nutrition is ‘eat your greens.’   By eating organic food we are mirroring the natural process by which healthy food is grown and we are avoiding the chemical residues that are just as toxic to the health of our gut biota as they are to the health of soil biota.

To me the importance of nutrition has been a guiding light. I have not had to see a doctor since 1965.   Nutritional therapy is ultimately about treating the originators of plant and animal life on this planet with the respect they deserve. More than that, with the respect they demand. They can get quite angry if they are ignored, as sufferers from IBS and colitis, to name a few examples, can attest.

To go even further, if the gut biota are really the All-Knowing, All-Seeing masters of our universe, our original and true Creator, with a capital C, then the nutritional therapists are the high priests of human society and are our true link with the infinite and unknowable!

Thanks

Slow Food Skye Speech

This was my keynote speech at the launch of Slow Food UK back in 2005.   I was the Chairman of the Soil Association at that time  (and went on to be Chair of Slow Food UK)

The Soil Association was founded in 1946 with a mission to research and develop an understanding of the link between the health of the soil and the health of the plants, animals and humans that it supports and to then establish an informed body of public opinion on these matters.  That informed body of public opinion was established but still had no political impact so we went one step further and helped create a $30 billion worldwide market for organic food.  Dr Innes Pearce, one of our founders, had shown, with the Peckham project, that if working class people were educated in how to freshly prepare wholesome food the indicators of social well being such as education, income, marital stability and staying out of jail all improved. So we married agriculture with social and health issues.  How, you may ask, does this fit with the Slow Food philosophy, which has its roots in gastronomy and food culture?

 Last year the Nobel Prize in medicine went to Richard Axel and Linda Buck, who mapped the code between genes and odour receptors.  They found that we have 350 genes that connect to our smell receptors.  There are another 600 genes that are dormant, reflecting humanity’s reduced reliance on smell.  Taste uses only 29 genes, and sight a mere 3, so this research emphasises the importance of our sense of smell.  As the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote: “Everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the whole world is the nose.” 

So how is it that smell, or flavour, is so important?  When plants evolved on this planet, long before animal life, they needed to create substances to protect themselves against oxidation from oxygen, ultraviolet light from the sun and the various viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects that threatened their existence. These antioxidants, anthyocyanins, antiseptics and antifeedants come under the general name of flavonoids.  When animal life evolved it never created any of these substances, Nature is too efficient for that.  Instead we animals get them from our food.  How do we know where they are?  By our sense of smell – what we perceive as flavour is actually the antioxidants and other health-giving flavonoids that are in food.  So when food tastes really good to us it is because it really is good for us.  Cuisine and digestion concentrate and combine these flavonoids in a way that underpins our health and is at the root of our culture and civilisation. 

When a farmer uses artificial fertilisers, pesticides or other crop protection chemicals the plants produced have reduced levels of these flavonoids as they don’t need to produce them. Organic crops have to protect themselves with their own natural defensive chemicals, so their levels are often 50% higher. These natural defensive chemicals taste good to us for evolutionary reasons.  That’s why organic food tastes better and is better for us.  Gastronomy and good health spring from the same source, healthy soil and healthy plants.

The use of chemicals and artificial fertilisers springs from and underpins the industrialisation of agriculture – they reflect the need to reduce labour costs and to squeeze every last drop of cash out of every hectare of land.  The use of artificial colourings and flavourings  in food processing deceives our noses into thinking we are eating good food when we aren’t.  That’s why organic farming and food processing regulations exclude these unnatural chemicals.

Organic farming is by nature human scale and mixed.  Smaller farms are actually more efficient and more productive than large farms and, as the oil price rises, industrial agriculture will need ever increasing subsidy support.  The Soil Association supports the restructuring of land use around optimal sized mixed farming units.  Many of the pictures you saw this morning were from Soil Association conferences where Pam Rodway organised superb Slow Food lunches drawn from local producers, some organic, some not.

We heard this morning about proposed guidelines for Slow Food.  In the early days of organic food a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and we soon saw the need for standards defining the word ‘organic.’  This led to the need for inspection protocols and then to certification systems.  The Soil Association pioneered these developments and has since helped the Biodynamic Agriculture Association, the Henry Doubleday Research Association, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Vegan Organic Trust, the Forestry  Stewardship Commission and the Fairtrade Foundation to create efficient effective systems to ensure that claims can be verified.  The day may come when Slow Food will want to protect its integrity and I hope that we will be able to help by sharing our experience and expertise in this area. 

We are only too aware that inspection and certification is a burden on the small producer – I myself pay far too much in fees for a bureaucratic process that is excessive relative to my tiny levels of production.  The Soil Association is developing and testing systems that will enable a high degree of self-certification and a reduced frequency of inspections, so that the cost of being certified organic for the small producer can be dramatically reduced.  However, these need to be approved at a European level, which will take a long time.  An ideal outcome might be that Slow Food certification enabled small producers to have an independent assurance of their integrity and that we could help with this.

Allow me to read from The Little Food Book by, ahem, Craig Sams. “Slow Food sees children as the Slow Foodies of the future and seeks to educate them in the taste of food and in how it is produced.  They even produce a book teaching kids about flavour and its appreciation via ‘aware’ tasting.”

Our Food For Life campaign to improve school dinners inspired Jamie Oliver’s influential TV series.  The Dinner Lady and author Jeanette Orrey, who now works for the Soil Association,  is now running a cooking school for dinner ladies at Ashlyns Farm in Essex.  Our Policy Director sits on the Government committee to improve school meals.  Palates that are trained in childhood never lose their taste for good food.  Our inspiration for this campaign came from the example of Italian schools, where Slow Food has been so instrumental in bringing about change.  A few weeks ago Jo and I spoke at a meeting at Sacred Heart school in Hastings where the headmistress is determined to produce school dinners on site when her catering contract expires in a year’s time.

In all our work, the Soil Association sees itself  more as an enzyme to bring about change rather than  as an empire-builder.  We initiate and support change without trying to control it.

Let me describe one effort, typical of what is beginning to happen all over the country at the local level.

Jo and I have recently taken over our founded-in-1826 local bakery in Hastings and expanded it to a retail shop that sells organic local fruit and vegetables grown locally.  Last month we budgrafted 25 trees of the near-extinct Saltcote Pippins, one of the surprisingly few indigenous varieties of apple that Sussex can boast, which originated 5 miles from Hastings in the early 19th Century.   Eventually we’ll harvest them from our orchard in November for sale when they reach their prime in late January and February and use them in our apple turnovers.  We have lamb and beef from the salt marsh a few miles away at Pett Levels.  We sell cheeses from sheep’s milk that is the natural dairy product of the Downs to the north and south of us and cheeses, ciders and wines that represent the continuation or the revival of the traditional foods of East Sussex.

We’ve kept on baking Judges’ popular and traditional white bloomers, teacakes, Eccles cakes, wet nellies,  pasties and sausage rolls – but now all 100% organic.  Many customers have commented on the improvement in flavour,  but we have not blown the organic trumpet at all.  We’ve introduced almond croissants, sweet little gingerbread seagulls, sourdough rye, onion focaccia and pan Pugliese. Whenever you go into the shop there is something to be sampled – the sale of local cheeses has soared.

ALL our breads, even our standard white tins, are Slow Bread – which to us means that the doughs ferment at least 18 hours and that the starters are nourished and built up for 3 days before the bread goes into the oven.  Some people with bread allergy have found that they can eat it without ill effects.

We aim to be part of a Slow Food ‘convivium’ that will reach out to local producers and bring together local customers who share the Slow Food ideal. Now that we’re up and running we plan to have regular Slow Food lunches where our customers will sample the produce of East Sussex producers and become part of a network that combines enjoyment with reduced food miles, just-picked freshness and that ineffable satisfaction that comes from being part of a community.  When your database of membership for the UK is up and running, remember that there are 60,000 members of the Soil Association and HDRA as well as perhaps another 100,000 supporters who are prospective members of local conviviums.

The Slow Food Manifesto speaks of ‘dealing with the problems of the environment and world hunger without renouncing the right to pleasure.’

Organic farming offers solutions to the problems of the environment. Decentralised self-sufficient farms are the answer to world hunger. Organic production fulfils the aspirations of gastronomy to take pleasure in the production, preparation and shared enjoyment of good food.  With these goals in common, I see Organic and Slow Food as natural allies – with a shared interest in combining the joy of eating with responsibility for health and the future of the planet.