When Robin Bines launched Natural Product News he helped bridge a long-standing gulf between the ‘health food’ and the ‘natural food’ worlds. The divide was artificial in a way, more of a generation gap than a difference of ideology.
The health food trade had its roots in the vegetarianism and pacificism of the 1930s. It sought, unsuccessfully, to change the world by logical argument and thoughtful articles. Wholemeal bread was its iconic food. George Bernard Shaw was a principal advocate.
The natural foods movement sprang up in the late 60s, its roots in macrobiotics and the hippie idea of creating an alternative society rather than arguing for change in a society that seemed hopelessly doomed. Brown Rice was its iconic food. Georges Ohsawa was a principal advocate.
The health food trade show was called Helfex and was put on by the Health Food Manufacturers Association. Our company, Harmony Foods, was the first natural foods company to exhibit their wares at this show. We wore jackets made out of hessian brown rice bags and had long hair. We had pictures of brown rice fields in Italy as a backdrop on the stand and focussed on our brown rice, along with miso, tamari, tahini, hiziki seaweed, millet, buckwheat and other unfamiliar foods such as umeboshi plums. We’d paid for our stand but we stuck out like a sore thumb. The hot product of the day was ‘Quintessence’ – a herbal tonic that had the endorsement of Barbara Cartland, the romantic novelist who was also the poster girl for the health food trade and a passionate advocate of the benefits of honey. We were carrying the natural foods banner, which dismissed honey and brown sugar as no better than white sugar.
When Barbara Cartland was walked around the show she would pose in front of each stand with the proud smiling owners…until she got to ours. Her minders firmly grasped her elbow and marched her past – no danger of her being photographed in the presence of a bunch of hippies. The Soil Association had a similar problem at the time. Before she died, Mary Langman confided in me that Lady Eve Balfour had been strongly advised to distance herself from us hippies who were selling organic food. They feared it would undermine the credibility of the Soil Association at a time when luminaries such as Lord Kitchener were tabling motions in the House of Lords calling for more research into organic food production. We were creating an alternative world rather than trying to change an established system.
In early 1970 our salesman Stan Stunning and Gregory and I went to the University of Sussex to give a talk about macrobiotics to some students there who wanted natural foods in the canteen. One of them was Peter Deadman, who soon teamed up with Robin Bines to found Infinity Foods in Brighton. A lot of other natural foods enterprises emerged in the next few years.
In 1973 we formed the Natural Foods Union with other pioneering retailers and wholesalers and set out the principles that distinguished us from the health foods shops. Not long after, Maurice Hanssen would invite me to speak at seminars where I would explain to health food retailers what this natural foods stuff was all about and explaining that they could get aboard without having to buy bulk and pack it down if they bought our Harmony Foods prepacks. I remember the owner of Sunshine Health foods speaking out, saying that he was delighted that Harmony Foods and others were taking the health food trade back to its pre-war roots when food rather than pills and potions was its stock in trade.
As time passed by the health food shops stocked more and more grains and beans and seeds and other natural foods products and the natural foods stores started to stock more vitamins, supplements, honey and tonics. This changing and merging of retail concepts was reflected in the Natural Products Show that sought to embrace all aspects of our trade.
The rest is history – Natural Products News reflected this new paradigm and the boundaries between natural foods and organic foods, which had always been somewhat artificial, have largely dissolved
