1960s Rebels: Craig Sams, Health Food Pioneer from Victoria & Albert Museum

In conjunction with their exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966 – 1970 (10 September 2016 – 26 February 2017), the Victoria and Albert have uploaded a series of videos interviewing 1960s Rebels including myself.

The late 1960s saw progressive ideas emanate from the countercultural underground and revolutionise society. Challenging oppressive, outdated norms and expectations, a small number of individuals brought about far-reaching changes as they sought to attain a better world. Their idealism and actions helped mobilise a movement which continues to inspire modern activists and shape how we live today.

Agribusiness

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When a business sector sees a rash of mergers and acquisitions, it's for one of two reasons, growth or decay. The organic food industry has seen a lot of acquisitions by companies anxious to get in on the ground floor of the 5% annual growth rate in organic food and regenerative farming. Meanwhile, on the dark side, Monsanto is facing takeover by Bayer, not for any positive reasons, but because they are both looking into the abyss. Merger is one way to survive when the farmers they are competing for are spending less. Farmers aren't stupid - they can do the maths. When they see diminishing returns on their investment in seeds and agrichemicals, they reduce their spending. Normally in a situation like this the agribusiness operators would go to the EU or Washington and just wheedle more subsidies out of the national purse, bleating about food security while encouraging biofuels to prop up soy, rapeseed and corn prices. Who cares if you're destroying the earth's precious farmland at 30 football fields a minute? If you were a big landowner, you'd feel entitled to being paid to do this. That's what us mugs are here for. Now that the EU even subsidises grouse moors you'd think the gates were wide open. But the money is running out. Half the EU budget goes to farmers, much of it British money going via Brussels to France. The US spends $350 billion a year propping up agriculture in the US, channeling money through farmers to agribiz.

Let's take a look at who's eating whom. The potash fertiliser price has halved in the past 3 years, from $450 a tonne to $219. So in Canada, Agrium and Potash, two of the world's biggest potash producers, are merging in a desperate attempt to keep afloat while they wait for a bounce in price that may never happen. Bayer and Monsanto are both facing plunging sales and profits. Monsanto have the seed and Bayer have the pesticides to go with them. But again it's desperation. They hope that innovation will save them, but innovation is not something you find in mega corporations.   GMOs are losing support - US farmers never wanted them but were denied choice after Monsanto bought up all the seed companies and forced GMOs down their throats.

The whole ethanol biofuels scam is blowing up, too. It was never even vaguely 'carbon neutral' - it takes more energy to produce a litre of ethanol than the energy you get by burning it. It's more energy efficient to just mix corn with coal and shovel it into a power station, but that would be too obvious and repulsive.

Chem China has taken over Syngenta. They make the herbicides that Syngenta's GM seed can resist. Nobody in China will eat GMO rice but they'll tolerate pork or chicken fed on GM maize. But the real prize for Chem China is Syngenta's strong presence in US market: they're after Bayer/Monsanto's piece of the diminishing pie. Their US competitors are suddenly bleating about food security.   Two other agrichemical giants, Dow and DuPont, also merged recently. They're all like a bunch of drunks spilling out of the pub after a good night out, trying to keep each other from falling down.

If you're a farmer, what do you do? You used to be able to play off one agrichemical giant against the other, but soon you'll just take what you're given. Or look for an alternative and boy, what an alternative is on the horizon!

When the French '4 per 1000 initiative' succeeds at the Marrakech COP22 climate conference in November every hectare of organic farmland will be set to get over €150 a year in carbon credits. A hectare of chemical-dependent farmland will have to pay for its carbon footprint and that could cost close to €100 per hectare.   It won't happen overnight but the French have fixed a price of €56 per tonne for carbon, to take effect by 2020. The world will probably follow, even the US.   If you were a government that was facing huge annual costs to subsidise farmers with money that flows through their bank accounts to Dow/DuPont, Bayer/Monsanto and Chem China/Syngenta and you could instead just let the carbon markets transfer the money from fossil fuel power stations direct to organic farmers, what would you do? Keep on propping up a dying industry or finally recognise that organic food, when the carbon is priced in, is actually cheaper than the degenerative kind that is destroying our available soil at the rate of 30 football fields per minute? (I can't repeat this often enough)

Governments have been holding back for quite a long time because of the immense political power of the agrichemicals industry and of the landowning fraternity. They passionately hate socialism in all its forms, until it comes to their welfare payments.

It's time for a change. We need to bring freedom to farming. Carbon pricing that encourages regenerative farming instead of degenerative farming is the way forward. Organic is good for you and the climate, too.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

I was delighted to give the keynote speech at a dinner to mark the opening of a new exhibition about the '60s - 'You Say You Want a Revolution?' at the Victoria and Albert museum.

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

Brexit – should we stay or should we go?

As the nation ponders the Brexit question, Craig Sams reflects on the EU’s inglorious record on food and health

I was around when we joined the EU in 1973. What was the impact on food and health? Here’s my summation of the good, the bad and the ugly – well the last two anyway.

The first thing was that land prices shot up. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) guaranteed subsidies favouring larger landholdings. Overnight land became an investment asset, its value underpinned by the EU. City money poured in, paying contract farming companies to operate monoculture on vast tracts of land. They cut down the hedgerows, drained the wetlands and sprayed out biodiversity. Pesticide and fertilizer use shot up. In the early 1970s Exchange and Mart listed smallholdings in Britain. When one came up for sale City money would buy it, consolidate the 15-50 acres into an industrialized landholding and sell off the house as a second home. The deck was stacked against small farmers in favour of large chemical-dependent enterprises. The ads for smallholdings disappeared.

Jam could no longer be called jam. The EU list of permitted sweeteners included white sugar, brown sugar, ‘sugar syrup containing not more than 0.2% sulphur dioxide preservative’, glucose syrup and another ten industrial sweeteners. Despite our urgent representations to include ‘fruit juice and fruit juice concentrates’, the EU refused to put them on the list. So Whole Earth had to rename our healthier jam ‘pure fruit spread.’ Lobbyists in Brussels had made sure the deck was stacked in favour of EU-subsidized sugars.

The ongoing suppression of herbal and natural medicine began. The HFMA fights doughtily to protect people’s right to VMS and herbal remedies, but it can be a losing battle with the EU banning much-loved products for obscure reasons, not unrelated to pharma pressures on unelected commissioners.

Hydrogenated fat got a major shot in the arm. It popped up everywhere as a replacement for naturally hard fats like coconut oil or palm oil. This plasticky heart-destroying material was made from rapeseed oil, subsidized to the eyeballs by the CAP. EU levies on imports of palm oil and coconut oil guaranteed that hydrogenated fat was always £50-60 a tonne cheaper than natural fats. Then the medical industry weighed in, encouraging consumption of transfat-rich margarines. By the late 1990s, when the evidence against hydrogenated fat was overwhelming, the EU still wouldn’t budge until Bantransfats.com and the Danish Government finally made transfats unmarketable. So the EU brought out the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation which required member states to mix rapeseed oil with diesel to burn up this food that nobody wanted.

The EU took over organic regulation in 1993 and bogged it down in bureaucracy. In the US if you want an organic no-calorie sweetener, processed from organic raw materials, to be permitted in organic food, you apply to the National Organic Standards Board which looks at the evidence and decides in a matter of weeks. In the EU you have to go to the Soil Association which consults other certifying bodies, then makes a representation to DEFRA, who makes a representation to Brussels who then consults with the other 25 ministries of agriculture in member states, who consult with certifying bodies who consult with licensees and then feed back to Brussels after a few years, usually with someone dissenting and deadlock. Organic food in the EU has to be full sugar because regulatory constipation bars safe organic sweeteners. US makers of low-calorie products can sell in the EU due to the US-EU equivalence agreement, where minor differences in organic standards are just overlooked.

I live in Hastings, where the fishermen operate small boats. The EU gives 97% of the fish quotas to the big trawlers that destroy the sea bed and 3% to the small boat fishermen who are responsible for 50% of employment of fishermen. Our fishermen have to throw fish overboard or buy extra quota from the trawler operators to whom Brussels lobbyists have given more quota than they can possibly use.

For 19 years the EU Court of Auditors has refused to give the all clear to the EU’s accounts because of money that just disappears out of the CAP, which eats up half the EU budget. Unelected and unaccountable, they just laugh at any attempt to stop the corruption, most of which is in farm subsidies.

I’m not saying that Brexit would be any better, mind. Given the level of competence at Westminster, it could be argued that things would be even worse if we let power and responsibility reside there rather than Brussels. Nonetheless, it’s unfortunate that our food and farming are being held hostage by unaccountable bureaucrats, be they in Brussels or closer to home

Soil and Gut

Q, What's the functional difference between a carrot and an intestine?

A.  Nothing.

One is the mirror image of the other.  One is outward looking and the other is inward looking but they do the same things.  The parallels between how we eat to sustain good health in your bodies and how we farm to sustain good health in the body of the earth have never been so clear.   The digestive system is just a root turned inside out, but the functions are the same.

When you grow organically you are supporting a system of food production that is biological, using the marvelous intelligence of the trillions of microorganisms in the soil - when you eat organic whole foods you're supporting a system of food digestion that is biological, using the marvelous intelligence of trillions of microorganisms in your gut.

When we eat food it becomes soil-when we grow in soil it becomes food. 

Plants consume sun energy, carbon dioxide and water to make carbohydrate-we consume carbohydrate and to make energy, carbon dioxide and water. 

Soil is comprised of ‘soil biota,’ trillions of microorganisms that digest every bit of nutrient that comes their way- our gut is composed of 'gut biota,’ trillions of microorganisms that digest every bit of nutrient that come their way.

The soil microbes do 'transmutation' - they are little chemical factories that can convert stuff into other stuff – the nutrients that make plants healthy.  Our gut microbes transmute our food into whatever our bodies need, including manufacturing stuff like vitamins such as B2, B12 or C and essential minerals from the raw materials of the food we eat.

When we put chemical fertilisers on the soil plants that are making the carbohydrates that feed the soil microbiota stop sending them down.  Why should they?  The farmer is giving the plants soluble nutrients for free.  So the microorganisms that nourish the plant and defend it from disease are exterminated by disease-causing bacteria and fungi that attack the plant.  The resulting disease can be controlled with toxic pesticides, which end up in our food, but the soil sickens and cannot support healthy plant growth anymore. 

When we put excessive junk food and sugar into our digestive systems the microorganisms in our gut are not needed and die off or are exterminated by fungi like candida.   The result is that the microorganisms that support our immune system no longer support health and vitality.   The resulting disease can be controlled with toxic medications, which end up in our bodies,  but the gut sickens and cannot support health any more. 

The only real difference between a carrot and the gut is the that carrot looks outwards, sending its root hairs away from the carrot to collaborate with the friendly microorganisms and the food and immunity they bring.  The gut looks inwards, sending its root hairs into the intestine to collaborate with the friendly microorganisms and the food and immunity they bring. 

Not farming organically is shortsighted - you waste precious living soil microbiota in order to get temporary crop yield increases that leave you with degraded sickened soil that can't support healthy life and is dependent on drugs like fertilisers and biocides.   Not eating healthily and organically is shortsighted - you waste your precious living gut microbota to get temporary energy increases that leave you with a degraded, sickened digestive system that can't support healthy life and is dependent on drugs and antibiotics.

When you add charcoal to soil it helps protect the microbes in the soil from dying off so they can cure soil degradation and plant disease.   When you add charcoal to your diet it helps protect the microbes in the gut from dying off, curing gut degradation and disease.

A healthy soil is full of mucus, a sticky substance called glomalin that holds the soil particles together to ensure that nutrients and soil microbes all stay happily in the upper layers of soil

A healthy gut is full of mucus - sticky material made by gut flora that helps ensure that nutrients and gut microbes stay happily in the upper layers of the gut lining. 

The parallels go on. Whether you grow organically or eat organically, you are following the road of biology.  When you don't you're following the road of chemistry and drugs.  Chemistry creates addictive behaviour.  We have to kick the habit, in growing and in eating.  

 (Craig Sams will elaborate on these parallels at NOPE.  He will discuss the implications and opportunities of this emerging awareness for vitamin and supplement manufacturers, natural food processors and growers and farmers)

Cheer up, we just reversed humanity’s decline

OK, reversing humanity’s decline took 40 or 50 years longer than we thought. But let’s celebrate it anyway, writes Craig Sams

Could this be the Big Lifestyle Turnaround that we’ve been dreaming about and waiting for?

Every year for decades there has been an annual increase in new cases of Type 2 diabetes, which correlates with comparable figures for obesity, which is a factor in cancer and heart disease. That’s the bad news. What’s the good news?

Over the last 6 years (averaged to avoid ‘blips’) research shows there has been a significant DECLINE in incidence of diabetes in the US. Diabetes is still happening, but less and less each year. That means that, going forward, there will likely be less cancer, less obesity and less heart disease. The endless upward graph is going into a downturn.

The researchers, at the US Governments Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), took a shot at what might be behind this encouraging news. Their studied conclusion? People are more health conscious than hitherto and this is reflected in healthy and informed food choices and greater commitment to regular exercise and bodywork, including yoga and pilates. In other words, the message of healthy living is getting through. More people than ever are shopping at natural food stores or Whole Foods Market. Supermarkets are giving more and more space to organic and healthy foods. We’ve always said that this could happen and now the evidence is in that a healthy lifestyle prevents degenerative disease.

So where does that put Coca Cola? Their sales are down in the US, with the international market also weakening.

And MacDonalds? For seven straight quarters up to the middle of last year, their sales have been dropping with no evidence of a turnaround. Big Macs and Coke once seemed invincible – the obesity epidemic and resulting diabetes soared in parallel with their sales. Now their growth has stalled.

So where is the money going? Last year yoga and pilates studios in the US had sales of $9 billion, up 7.5% year on year. There are 30,000 businesses employing 95,000 people, about three per business. It’s a horde of small enterprises that are capturing people’s longing for physical wellbeing, core strength and flexibility. The yoga bunnies and pilates enthusiasts are alive to nutrition, healthy eating, the gut microbiome and anything else that points them towards a longer, healthier and happier life. There’s little opportunity for scale in this market – there are a few big gym chains but most of this healthy stuff is run by sole practitioners or a small local group that might also include nutritional advice, massage and counseling. In the caring, sharing economy of the future there is a lot more peer-to-peer and a lot less corporate-to-consumer relationship.

It’s not going to be easy to get humankind back on track, though.

The junk food decades from the 1950s to the 2000s meant that a lot of kids were born who inherited the epigenetic legacy of their parents’ poor diet and environment. We know that what you eat affects your health – now we also know it affects your genes and is an undesirable legacy to your children. I won’t go into the detail of DNA methylation and transfer RNAs, but suffice to say that if a father or a mother eats too much sugary and industrial food and is exposed to environmental contaminants such as pesticides, food colouring and preservatives their baby’s start in life is clouded and the kid is more likely to suffer impaired insulin tolerance that could lead to diabetes. The good news is that epigenetics cuts both ways. A lot of the crap that used to screw up our genes is now out of the system – things like DDT, lead, hydrogenated fat, toxic dyes and preservatives and high levels of pesticide, fungicide and herbicide residues in our food are all non-existent or much lower. So going forward we could be passing on healthier and more robust genes.

When we launched Yin-Yang Ltd, the macrobiotic food company that would morph into Whole Earth, Vegeburger and Green & Black’s, we thought the healthy eating revolution would be over by the early 1970s. It was so obvious. We naively thought everyone would go for it – after all, who didn’t want to live a long and healthy life? As my brother Gregory said, we were looking at the future through the wrong end of the telescope. We saw the future, we were just out by 40 or 50 years. Boo-hoo about the ruined lives along the way, but hip hip hurrah for the coming reversal of humanity’s decline.

 

Rhythm 'n' Bliss - Thomas Cohen Single

When Victor Gutierrez asked me to front the video for Thomas Cohen's debut single 'Bloom Forever' it was a pleasure to agree.  The actual shoot, like all shoots, demanded an unboreable brain that can ride out the repeated performing of the same stuff until eventually Victor was happy to do it in one run.  

'Bloom Forever' has a haunting melody that, not just because I've heard it 100 times now, is embedded in my brain and pops up uninvited but welcome quite often.  It's hard to classify, not lounge, not chillout, not a lullabye - not quite sure what to call it... but imagining Thomas writing this in the maternity ward having just 'had' his child, a son, in the bliss of first parenthood, helps explain the quality of the song that I just can't quite nail. "Rhythm 'n' Bliss" perhaps?

Is Agribusiness a 'stranded asset' class?

Is it time for investors to dump Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer?

The UNFCC has launched its '4 per 1000' initiative based on data from the French National Institute for Agronomic Research that shows that just by increasing overall the carbon-rich organic matter of soil by 0.4% per annum we could completely and totally offset all our annual GHG greenhouse gas emissions.  The farming methods that can take carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it in the soil include big reductions of nitrate fertilisers and fungicides.  Just doing that will make a difference as they represent a 15% contribution to annual GHG emissions.  The rest comes from 'agroecological' practices, mostly pioneered by organic and biodynamic farmers, that are now tested, refined and proven to be competitive in yield with industrial methods of farming.  They do not deliver high revenue streams to agribusiness companies and they also do not externalise all sorts of other costs onto society.  These biggest cost is greenhouse gas emissions as that's the planetary existential threat.  But the personal and social costs are pretty costly, too: pesticide residues in food, soil erosion, dust storms, water pollution, flooding, biodiversity loss, toxic algal blooms and an archaic subsidy system that has the hard-working poor subsidising rich landowners in the name of 'cheap food.'.  But forget about that, just concentrating on the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from farming is enough.  There are plenty of untested technological solutions like mirrors in space or the delusion of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) that you can pump carbon dioxide into old oil wells and somehow convince yourself and everyone else that it will stay there.   The beauty of what I should like to call Soil Carbon Capture and Storage (SCCS) is that with soil carbon, what goes in the ground stays in the ground.   All it needs is the right price signals.  If carbon has a value then the farmer who reduces emissions and increases sequestration will be rewarded. When carbon has a value it will be traded and there is no need for complicated and inequitable government farm subsidy policies that punish environmentally responsible behaviour.  SCCS farmers will sell their carbon right alongside their corn and beans.

Ideally a SCCS farmer would receive three carbon-related payments per annum,  as well, of course as their normal income and profit from growing wheat or carrots or alfalfa or eggs or whatever .  There would be a capital payment and an interest payment and an avoided emissions payment.  Here's how it could work:

1. Capital Payment: This is a payment to a farmer for the net annual increase of carbon in the soil. Rodale's research has shown that an organic farm can sequester 2.5 tonnes CO2 per hectare per year. There are 1.5 billion hectares of farmland and 3.5 billion hectares of pasture. For farmland alone, 1.5 billion ha. times 2.5 tonnes is 3.75 billion tonnes of CO2 per annum. Conversely, a farm that continues to reduce its soil carbon annually would have to pay for that reduction.

2. Soil Interest Payment - This would be an 'interest' payment of the market price of carbon based on the amount of carbon that is already in the soil, the 'deposit' so to speak.

3. Avoided emissions payment - emissions include fossil fuels and the emissions involved in the manufacture and application of fertilisers, pesticides and agricultural equipment.

How does it work in practice?   Let's say a farmer has 100 hectares of land.   The carbon price is $50 per tonne CO2.  There are already 60 tonnes of CO2 as soil organic matter per hectare.  The farmer adds 2.5 tonnes in one year.  What is the annual carbon payout?

Capital Payment: 100 hectares x 2.5 tonnes x $50 =   $ 12,500

Interest Payment: 100 hectares x 60 x 0.5%            =   $    3,000

Avoided emissions payment:  1 tonne $50  x 100     = $    5,000

So the farmer can sell carbon credits to gain an additional $20,500 of revenue on 100 hectares

What about the  industrial farmer?

Capital Payment: 1 tonne p.a. soil CO2 decrease, $50 x 100   =   - $5,000

Interest Payment: 100 hectares x 60 x 0.5%            =                        $ 3,000

Emissions Payment:   .5 tonne CO2/ha =                                         -$ 2,500

(a fee for nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide emissions from the soil due to the use of nitrate fertiliser and pesticides and fungicides)

Total carbon cost of farming as usual:                                          $4,500

Total 'spread' between SCCS farmer and industrial farmer 100 hectares:

$20,500 + $ 4,500  =  $25,000

If yields are equal and input costs are comparable then this is a significant edge in competitiveness in favour of the agroecological or organic farmer.

That's $250 per hectare.  About what a farmer gets nowadays by way of government subsidy but, instead of it coming from the taxpayer and the farmer acting as a conduit that channels it to agribusiness the payment is funded by the carbon markets and most of the money stays in the farmer's pocket.

Michael Pollan's made a lovely video that tells the story of soil carbon.  And Deborah Garcia's film 'Symphony of the Soil' is certainly worth watching to get a full understanding of the real underfoot magic of our existence.

And the Financial Times published my letter on December 18th 2015 that was a warning to investors not to get caught in a meltdown of agribusiness shares similar to what's been happening with fossil fuel company shares - the writing is on the wall for businesses that generate high greenhouse gas emissions - there's no hiding place any more.  The Paris talks have tipped the balance.

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.

My Salad Breakfast

This morning, for breakfast, I went into the garden with a couple of slices of bread slathered with mayonnaise and a rice cake smeared with Jersey butter. Then I proceeded to pick from my winter salad garden: lamb’s lettuce, French parsley, various Japanese winter veg including mizuna and two frilly but intensely hot mustardy greens, land cress (a thicket self seeded from a single plant earlier this year), lettuce, winter purslane and, for a touch of the bitters, artemisia – wormwood. I added a leaf of radicchio from plants that have sprung up through the brickwork of a path. Just as we think of ‘food miles’ there is a parallel concept of ‘food days’ from harvest to consumption. In this case it was ‘food seconds’ – the leaves barely knew they had been plucked before they disappeared into the welcoming warm darkness of my esophagus, still brimming with vitality as they headed for the acid bath of my stomach.  The garden owes everything to Rocket Gardens Winter Salad Collection, a superb collection of cold-tolerant plants that were delivered to me back in September, to get established before the cold set in. They haven’t been tested by frost (well, a very light one a few weeks ago) but my experience has been that my biochar-rich soil has such an active biology that the warmth it gives off acts as underfloor central heating for the plants. Soil is everything and I am lucky to have Carbon Gold at my fingertips, continually discovering new aspects of the joys of biochar gardening.

But enough about the soil, it’s the variety that gets me every time I have my salad breakfast.

Here they are, sharing a plate with a buttered rice cake and the lamb’s lettuce growing just behind.   But read on for the individual varietals and pictures.

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I love the light mucilaginousness of winter purslane, with its spade-shaped leaves that look like they’ve escaped from a deck of playing cards.

Then there are the red chicories – radicchio and rosso de Treviso, both squeezing through the brick path. These provide a crisp bitterness.

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The Japanese Red Frills Mustard leaves are hot and mustardy and satisfyingly crunchy. Here are the purple ones, finding space between the turnips and the spring onions.

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And here are their green cousins, the Green Frills Mustard

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The land cress is easily as peppery as its aquatic cousin

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The Lamb’s Lettuce miraculously replaces removed leaves almost, it seems, overnight. Light in flavour and texture.

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French parsley does the same, endlessly offering up new leaves to replace those plucked earlier.  Here it is in the foreground, with emerging Babbington’s leeks just behind.

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Mizuna rounds it out, though it seems to be struggling more with the cold than the others.

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A dab of Artemisia is always a good digestive tonic, but very bitter, so I get that down first and then follow with the sweeter and more pungent leaves.

YUM!

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End of the road for Monsanto?

When we lived in Omaha we’d drive through the countryside up to Sioux City past endless fields of corn.  Along the roadside were signs with the name of the seed company who supplied their seed, mostly ‘Pioneer’ or ‘DeKalb.’   The seed company salesmen were local guys who had gone to school with the farmers and were known and trusted.  They’d buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie and arrange to take you on a fishing trip to Canada.  So in1996 when Monsanto paid a fortune for the DeKalb seed company it bought all that intergenerational love and trust.   In 1997 Monsanto bought Holden’s Foundation Seeds, who produced the parent seed that most of America’s corn is bred from.  At Iowa State University, Professor Neil Harl took a look at the prices Monsanto was paying and calculated that they were paying 2 to 3 times market value on the basis of sales and profits.  His conclusion?  Monsanto’s strategy was to gain monopoly control of the seed supply in order to increase their prices and profits.  Monsanto’s patent on Roundup ran out in 2000, so they needed to lock farmers into using it before cheaper alternatives flooded the market.

Sure enough, by 2000 US farmers had no choice – their favourite seed varieties were now only available Roundup Ready and could only be grown with Roundup.  Monsanto had America’s farmers by the short and curlies.

Once they had America under their thumb they went to work on Argentina, where they grow their seed corn to sell in the US, as well as soybeans.  This year in Argentina 30,000 doctors called for Roundup to be banned because of the horrific epidemic of disease  it had triggered in farming regions.  More recently the WHO rated Roundup as a ‘probable carcinogen.’  Within days not a garden centre in Holland or France stocked Roundup.

In their latest  financial statement, Monsanto reveals that it is losing $5 million a day.  You don’t need a degree in Economics to know that’s not sustainable for very long.  Their world seems to be falling apart rather quickly.

In the US, for all the crap about ‘feeding the world’ things are going pear-shaped. 40% of America’s GMO corn gets converted to ethanol to be compulsorily mixed with gasoline, feeding Fords instead of people.  The oil industry hates ethanol – they are being squeezed enough by the Saudis without having to compete with subsidised bio-fuel.  But without ethanol, half of America’s farms would go bust. Corn prices are currently 50¢ a bushel below break even.  Farmers can’t afford to pay inflated prices for Monsanto’s GMO corn and Roundup, so sales are dropping.  Roundup-resistant ‘superweeds’ are now infesting half of America’s farms, refusing to die despite a huge increase in herbicide applications and the bringing out of retirement of pesticides like 2,4-D that had been removed from the market because they cause cancer.  What an unholy mess.

Monsanto recently ambitiously tried to take over Syngenta, their main competitor, but that deal fell apart – both companies face the awful reality that their R&D isn’t coming up with new products that work – like drug companies they depend on patented medicines to protect inflated profit margins.

In September the New York Times revealed that Monsanto bribes scientists to make claims for GMOs that are unsupported by evidence.  Nobody will believe a man in a white coat again who touts the benefits of GMOs without wanting to check his bank account. 

In 1999 Patrick Holden and I had a meeting with Hugh Grant (Monsanto’s CEO) and other Monsanto executives under the guidance of the Environment Council, who sought to reconcile our views on GMOs.  My notes of the meeting show Patrick and I actually had to explain what organic farming meant.  Monsanto had no idea of organic principles and asked us to repeat this as they felt they needed to understand it properly.  They knew we opposed GMOs but just thought we were stupid Luddites.

Monsanto is running out of road:  hired liars in white coats can’t fool anyone any more; tobacco-style Roundup poisoning lawsuits beckon; farmers can’t afford to pay high prices for seed and chemicals that don’t work;  resistant weeds and insects refuse to die; country after country worldwide is declaring itself GM-Free; the demand for labelling of GMOs in the US is reaching a climax and now Wall Street is losing interest in phoney biotech claims.

Genetic engineering was the great hope for industrial agriculture – it would solve all the problems that pesticides and chemical fertilisers had caused.  It didn’t happen.  Instead, smart companies like Rijk Zwaan in Holland are using genomics to naturally breed stronger, healthier plants than anything from Monsanto or Syngenta. 

E F Schumacher wrote: “Modern man…talks of the battle with Nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle he would find himself on the losing side.”   Nature’s allies have fought for 20 years against the GMO takeover attempt – let’s hope that we are finally on the winning side.

Panic over?

Global warming?  Panic over.  Fly guilt-free where you like as often as you like.    Splash out on that 7 litre Mercedes you’ve always secretly wanted.  The global warming crisis could be over.  There’s an easy solution that’s been staring us in the face for decades.

The make or break climate conference, COP21, is happening in Paris in December.  There will be a lot of haggling, a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of moaning.  India and China will fight to keep their coal-fired power stations.  Exxon and their Saudi pals will continue to fund corrupt scientists who deny climate change.  Brazil will fight to protect their right to chop down the Amazon rain forest.  Let them have their way… for the time being.

There needn’t be any pain.  The negotiations in Paris could be a doddle.

We can continue to burn fossil fuels, using our abundant and cheap reserves of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. We can save liquid fuels for airplanes and ships.   We must still go for wind and solar and geothermal, but in a less panicky way.

So how do we do it?  The answer lies in the soil.

Farming is responsible for 30% of excess greenhouse gas emissions.  But farming could cancel out 100% of our annual excess greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s already happening right now, but on less than 2% of the world’s farmland, the organic land.

Carbon dioxide is killing us all.  Organic farming sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it into rich soil that will feed us forever.  Sounds like a pretty good deal.  Of course going organic means we’d have to eat food that tastes better, not get sick from pesticides in our food, enjoy cleaner water and more biodiversity – but that’s a small price to pay for having a habitable planet.

This is the UN International Year of Soils 2015.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that on current trends we have 60 years before the soil runs out.

On August 31 2015, global food giant General Mills announced an investment of $100 million to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent. This will include sourcing products from an additional 250,000 acres of organic production. Jerry Lynch, the company’s chief sustainability officer pointed out that organic agriculture promotes soil that helps farms better endure droughts, heavy rains and pests, while pulling more carbon from the air and putting it into the ground in the process. 

A 34 year trial at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania growing field scale crops shows that organic farming can sequester 1 tonne of carbon per hectare, year after year.  The Rodale trial figures show that if regenerative principles were applied globally to arable farming and pasture we could offset all of the annual increase in greenhouse gas.  

Change is afoot. The Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance brings together Government, industry and NGOs to advance new solutions to food production that protect soil from further degradation by increasing carbon-rich soil organic matter.

The French National Institute for Agronomical Research states that

if we adapted farming practices to boost organic matter in soils by 0.4% a year it would compensate for all global greenhouse gas emissions. (link to source?) France’s Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll recently commented: “We could store the equivalent of anthropogenic carbon gas produced by humanity today. Storing carbon in the soil is organic matter in the soil, organic matter is fertilizing the soil.”

The benefits of soil organic matter as a carbon sink can be further enhanced by the use of biochar - finely ground charcoal used as a soil improver.  (That’s what I do at Carbon Gold).  Biochar has a centuries-long residence time in soil, so it acts as a long term carbon sink for carbonised biomass such as rice husks and forestry thinnings which would otherwise decompose or be burned and produce more carbon dioxide.  And it accelerates the buildup of organic matter in soil. 

So it’s not just me. The Rodale Institute, the UN’s FAO, General Mills and the French government all agree: grow organic, save the planet. Agriculture can be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

The COP21 climate conference is in Paris in December. Every participating country will make INDC commitments (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) to reduce emissions.  All they have to do is convert agriculture to organic and they can surpass those commitments with ease.

Solving global warming was never going to be easy, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if we cast off the deadly grip of agribusiness and started farming for the future.

Bitter Sweet Insanity

How seriously should we take official exhortations to cut sugar consumption while governments continue to subsidise industrial scale sugar farming? asks Craig Sams

When my brother Gregory and I set up Harmony Foods in 1970 we committed to never using sugar in our business. In 1972, in my book About Macrobiotics, I had written about sugar: “If it were discovered yesterday it would be banned and possibly turned over to the Army for weapons research.” But the same chapter had recipes using apples, raisins, currants and apricots. Our macrobiotic guru, Michio Kushi, even gave his support to candies made with rice malt sugar. We were all a little bit hypocritical.

In 1976 we created a separate brand, Whole Earth, so that if we ever sold Harmony products to supermarkets we had a separate brand that would not upset health food retailers’ sensibilities. Then in 1977 Waitrose and Safeway saw us on BBC News and wanted to order Harmony Peanut Butter right away. They insisted on the Harmony brand. Sales boomed in supermarkets as well as health food shops and Harmony Peanut Butter soon swept away our competitors Granose and Mapleton’s.

Then in 1977 I did something nobody had done before. I invented a jam based on apple juice and fruit. We decided to market it. We couldn’t use the sugar-free Harmony brand as apple juice concentrate is a sugary syrup. So we dusted off the Whole Earth brand and launched a hugely successful range of jams made with apple juice and marketed as ‘100% fruit, no sugar added.’ Sales of Whole Earth soared so much that we eventually retired the Harmony brand and put the peanut butter under the Whole Earth brand. For a while we were the biggest users of apple juice concentrate in the world, apart from the cider industry. My ethical defence was that our jams were only 38% sugar while white sugar jams were 65% sugar. But it wasn’t long before competing ‘no sugar added’ jams also hit the 65% level.

Now the Government has, surprisingly, got a health policy that makes sense: cut down on sugar. All sugar. Beet sugar, cane sugar, apple juice, grape juice, honey, agave syrup, coconut sugar, jaggery, maple syrup, corn syrup and any other product that is 99% sucrose, glucose and fructose. To paraphrase Romeo’s insightful sweetheart Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call sugar, by any other name would taste as sweet.” All sugars are in the sights of Professor MacGregor of Action on Sugar, who is leading the charge. The same thing is happening worldwide.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a horrifically misguided campaign that urged tens of millions of Britons to abandon butter in favour of margarines that were rich in trans fats from hydrogenated fat. The result was millions disabled or killed off by heart disease. The US has now banned all transfats and it’s almost non-existent in Europe. Then there was the demonisation of salt campaign. That killed off a goodly number of older people for whom salt
was essential to vital functions and made little difference to anyone else.

But the sugar campaign makes sense. 500 years ago Paracelsus wrote: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; the dose makes the poison.” Most people overdose every day on sugar and that’s why it’s such a major factor in obesity, cancer, diabetes, tooth decay and heart disease. But in smaller quantities can it make a useful contribution to our health and energy levels by enhancing our enjoyment of food and drink?

What’s a safe dose? MacGregor wants a 30% reduction. Others think we consume three times too much: the overdose makes the poison.

When we developed the Gusto Cola recipe we aimed for a level of sugar one third of what you’d get in a can of Coke or a bottle of apple juice. We opted for stevia as a calorie-free sweetener. Ooopsadaisy! EU Organic Regulations don’t allow stevia, unless it’s in a drink imported from the USA. So we canned it in the US, using organic stevia. Oopsadaisy! EU regulations for soft drinks, organic or not, restrict stevia levels, so you still have to use 50% sugar to match the sweetness of regular drinks – or add aspartame. Yuk. So we made the recipe less sweet and it tasted fine.

But it made me wonder why the EU and our Government exhort us to cut back on sugar while enforcing regulations against natural sweeteners that have exactly the opposite effect. Even worse, the EU subsidises sugar farmers and refineries. So does Brazil, to the tune of $2.5 billion a year. Just one French producer has had €60 million over 3 years.

A good start would be to let the sugar market find its own level instead of using taxpayer money to drive down the cost. Then exhort people to consume less.

Which is cheaper – human life or chicken breasts?

Back in May I was at the Sustainable Food Summit in Amsterdam where I heard a shocking figure - by 2030 more people will die of antibiotic resistant disease than from cancer and diabetes.  The speaker projected a figure of 10 million lives lost every year.  

We can blame lazy overworked doctors, who happily prescribe antibiotics inappropriately just to get whining patients out of their surgery clutching a bottle of pills that won’t cure their sniffles.

Or blame hospitals.  They use antibiotics to disinfect surfaces and in other situations where a bit of human labour, soap and a bit of elbow grease could do the job.  

But is it fair to lay all the blame on lazy doctors and hospitals?  Not really.  The source of 80% of antibiotic resistant disease is the food industry

Imagine you took a troublesome boy and smacked him around the ears and whacked his backside, like in the old days before we got civilised.  By the time he grew up he would be the kind of guy who thinks it is worth it when there is a fracas in the pub and will shake off the restraining arm of his girl friend to have a go at someone who looked at him the wrong way.  That’s the way it is with bacteria, too.  The more you whack them the tougher and nastier they get.  

E. coli is the perfect illustration of this.  When the first Wimpy Bars opened questions were asked in Parliament about E.coli.  Once meat is ground up the tiny amounts of E.coli that might be on the surface are able to penetrate and multiply through the entire burger.  The worry then was about diarrhoea, which was the main symptom of infection.  A few people got the runs, but burgers replaced bread and dripping as Britain’s favourite snack.  But at the same time, grazing and hay for beef cattle got replaced by intensive feedlots where cattle stood in their own poo for most of their lives, spreading infection hither and thither.  The feedlotsproduced the cheapest beef.  But those darned cows kept getting sick and infecting each other every time they dumped.  So antibiotics came to the rescue.  E.coli hates antibiotics and was pretty much wiped out once the cows got their meds.  But you can’t keep bad bacteria down.  The E.coli toughened up their act and at the same time as they became more resistant they also became a heck of a lot more virulent.  This super tough bacterium was named E. coli O157:H7 to differentiate it from its namby-pamby ancestors.  So instead of the runs people who ingested E.coli O157:H7 became violently ill and suffered kidney failure, either dying or spending much of the rest of their shortened lives on dialysis machines.  When they did die the cause of death was ‘kidney failure’ or something else that pointed the finger away from the real cause: antibiotics in farming.

MERS, SARS, MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant diseases are spreading like wildfire.  Thousands of people are dying every day from diseases that are the result of our race to the bottom in meat production.

Is cheap meat really worth this?   If meat was vital for human existence you might understand the importance of making it as cheap as possible, but any vegetarian or vegan is living proof that meat is a luxury, a frippery, a bit of icing on the nutritional cake that sustains life.  So why do we compromise on quality about something that we are already consuming in excess?  Why not just cut back to a healthy level and consume ‘better and less often’ as the Soil Association, Slow Food and various health authorities recommend? 

The global market for meat is worth about $800 billion.  

If we cleaned up the meat market the antibiotic-resistant bacteria would quickly die out - Nature never wastes energy and no bacteria will bother wearing a suit of armour and a sword if nobody is trying to poison them.  But that would probably increase the cost of meat by 25 %, adding $200 billion to the global meat food bill.  

10 million lives lost per year to antibiotic resistant bacteria could be prevented for an additional expenditure of $200 billion. That’s $20,000 per human life saved, or £13,000, half the price of a Ford Mondeo.     

Which would you choose?  Cheaper chicken or a longer life? 

Real change is coming

People have had enough of corrupt politicians and their ruthlessly self-serving corporate backers. Real world change is breaking out everywhere

Did you get what you voted for in the election? More GMOs from Monsanto? The chance for NATO to bomb another country into chaos? More useless drugs based on junk research sold at extortionate prices to the NHS?  More untested pesticides in your food? More global warming? More fracking? More nuclear power stations? I don’t think so. All you got to be passionate about were the insulting little bribes about pensions, tax allowances, housing and benefits, while the big bribes are quietly discussed in Brussels and Whitehall between lobbyists for industry and politicians, trying to keep a firm grip on power.

But, as Russell Brand says, voting doesn’t matter so much any more – in the real world things are changing, and they’re changing fast. It doesn’t matter what the drug companies and GMO merchants would like to see: if people don’t buy, then their products don’t fly. Solar is outselling fossil fuels for energy, and nuclear is uninsurable and on the way out. More and more people question the value of pharmaceuticals, and fracking is on the skids. Organic food is booming, too.

It’s beginning to look like we’ve reached a tipping point with GMOs. If I was a Monsanto shareholder I’d be dumping stock in the light of how things are going.

Hugely successful fast-food chain Chipotle has announced that its food is now GMO-free. Its sales grew 31% year-on-year last year and profits are up 57%. Meanwhile its GMO-loving competitor McDonalds agonizes over a 2.7% drop in sales and a 33% drop in profits. Chipotle had to work at it: in the US, vegetable oils, tacos and tortillas and cheese are all made with GMOs. But they did it, and it’s watching customers flock to its outlets and abandon the dinosaurs who still don’t get it. Funny thing is that McDonalds owned 90% of Chipotle shares ten years ago but cashed out in 2006 to invest more in its own business. Big mistake.

A federal court has just upheld the state of Vermont’s law requiring GMO labelling, something we take for granted in Europe. The manufacturers who opposed it claimed it violated their free speech rights! Or their right to stay quiet?

Brazil’s National Cancer Institute has condemned the use of Roundup Ready soya, saying: “The cropping pattern with the intensive use of pesticides generates major harms, including environmental pollution and poisoning of workers and the population in general.”  Brazil’s Public Prosecutor has called for a suspension of glyphosate use. Holland has banned it for gardening use and it disappeared off the shelves of French garden centres this year. Colombia’s Health Ministry has recommended a ban on Roundup spraying on coca crops – too many farmers are getting ill.

The World Health Organization has also reported that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Over 30 years ago the US Environmental Protection Agency said the same, then reclassified it as non-carcinogenic right about the time the first of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready products hit the market. Cover-up or honest mistake? We’ll never know as the evidence can’t be released for reasons of ‘commercial confidentiality’.

Let’s not forget that when Roundup Ready soya beans were first planted in 1996 Monsanto promised that it would lead to reduced herbicide use. In the intervening 15 years its sales of Roundup increased tenfold. Just in the nick of time: its patent on glyphosate ran out in 2001 and competitors were offering it for a third of the price, but by then farmers were hooked on Roundup-hungry Roundup Ready soya beans and corn and had signed contracts not to use the cheaper stuff.

Neil Young’s new album is called The Monsanto Years – it is anything but a hymn of praise to America’s most reviled company. Made with Willie Nelson’s two sons, it is a plea to reverse the harm to family farms and the Midwest’s soils of the past two GMO decades.

Jo Wood, ex-wife of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, recently hosted a screening of GMO OMG– supporting GMfreeme.org. Even my missus, who’s heard it all before from me, got fired up by the film’s powerful message.

In the US Moms Against GMOs is leading the charge with the motto: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” With a little help from Chipotle and retailers and producers of organic and natural foods, things are changing.

Organic food pioneer and polemicist Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

Don't wreck our soil

In 1885, when my great grandpa Ole Doxtad first ploughed the virgin land of his farm in Nebraska the soil contained over 100 tonnes of carbon per hectare.  Now that same soil contains about 5 tonnes.  That lost carbon is now in the atmosphere and has contributed about a third of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since that time.  Most of that carbon was contained in the microbial life of the soil, mostly mycorrhizal fungi but along with thousands of species of fungi and bacteria, all working harmoniously to feed plants and protect them against disease.  Every time Ole's plough turned the soil, those fungi and bacteria died in their gazillions, decomposing into greenhouse gases.  What was left was dead dirt.  Yields went down.  Luckily tractors came along in the 1920s and Ole's son Lewis (Grandpa) could plough twice as deep as with horses, bringing up deeply buried organic matter to refresh his tired soils.  That worked for a while, then fertility fell off again.  Luckily after WW 2 artificial fertilisers were cheap and subsidised so farming could keep going.   Now the FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) says we have about 50 years of soil left before there is no land fit for farming.  Our luck has run out, whatever the GMO hucksters may promise. That's why 2015 is the UN International Year of Soils.

Healthy soil is rich in organic matter - decomposing plants and teeming microbial life.  The more microbial life there is the healthier the soil and the healthier the plants that grow in it.

Ploughing the soil breaks up that social community and forces it to rebuild, with many participants dying and decomposing during recovery. Adding artificial fertilisers to soil breaks the cycle of mutual nourishment between plants and the living soil, so microbial life dies off. Fungicides and pesticides are the final knife in the heart of life in the soil. When the living organisms in the soil die, the soil dies with them and disintegrates.  Killing soil is a slow form of suicide by humankind.  With a 50 year deadline it’s time we did something about it.

Why are mycorrhizal fungi so important?  A plant uses sunlight and photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar.  Some of that sugar is exuded through the plant's roots to feed the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil .  Why does a plant give away its precious sugar?  Because the payback is worth it. 

Those mycorrhizae use the sugar to feed the helpful fungi and bacteria in the soil:

the ones that convert nitrogen into nitrate fertiliser;

the ones that dissolve phosphorus to make it accessible to plants;

the the ones that fiercely defend 'their' plant against pathogens and pests that could kill or weaken their host plant.  Soil microbes are the probiotics of plants, keeping them healthy and well nourished while protecting them from disease.

Does this sound familiar?  We humans are just like the soil.  Our 'organic matter' is the kilo or two of microbial life that we call probiotics that inhabits our gut.  Their ‘soil’ is the food we eat, which feeds them. Like the microbial life in soil, these fungi and bacteria provide us with valuable nutrients and eradicate any disease-causing organisms that threaten our health.  They keep us happy and healthy.  The parallel doesn't stop there, though.  The soil is a vast living organism, stretching across continents with an interconnected ‘mind’ – a consciousness that spans countless numbers of tiny living beings.  Our gut flora also have a mind – neuroscientists call them the 'second brain' and 'gut feelings' are their manifestation in our first brain.  Sometimes what we think is our brain thinking a thought is actually a thought being controlled from the gut - all the more reason to eat well, keep the gut bacteria happy and think positive thoughts.

The cooperation among soil microbial life provides an admirable example of how cooperation and collaboration and sharing of food can benefit health and vitality.  A healthy soil, full of life, will support growth and yields equivalent to what can be achieved using chemical fixes. Just as a healthy gut will support life and vitality in humans, without recourse to sugar and antibiotics.

Our planet is blessed with an abundance of air, water and sunlight.   That's all that's needed to generate all the food we could ever need - as long as we don’t wreck our soils.

Hoppy

John 'Hoppy'  Hopkins passed away at the beginning of February.  Known as the ‘The King of The Underground’ in the 1960s, he gave me my very first platform for supplying macrobiotic food to the public and thereby gave me my leg up into this wonderful industry. 

I met Hoppy in 1966 at the All Saints Church Hall in Notting Hill when he organised a small event where an unknown band weirdly called The Pink Floyd played their first London gig. It was a benefit for the London Free School, which Hoppy helped run.  At firste there was plenty of room for the few dozen attendees to dance but after a few weeks the poor little church hall was bursting at the seams and people were turned away.

So Hoppy hooked up with Joe Boyd, renamed the event 'UFO' and ran a Friday night allnighter at a basement club on Tottenham Court Road.  It opened in early December 1966. I was already importing and selling books about macrobiotics and Hoppy asked me if I could cater.  We laid on simple finger food, with thanks to my Mum Margaret who stuffed vine leaves with brown rice, fried up felafel and made brown rice rissoles.  During the breaks in the music (Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Crazy World of Arthur Brown) me and my small band of macrobiotic missionaries would sidle up to people and explain to them what this strange food was that they were eating, why sugar was bad and brown rice was good.  We were building the customer base of a little restaurant-cum-macrobiotic study centre that I was planning to open in Notting Hill in February 1967.  You couldn’t ask for a more positive association in people’s minds than the Pink Floyd and macrobiotic food.

In January 1967 Hoppy organised a 'happening' in Piccadilly Circus.  It was lovely.  The police stood by smiling indulgently and the press coverage was kind.  Nobody had learned to hate hippies  yet.  Hoppy tootled on a little flute while the Dutch artist couple Simon and Marijke beat tambourines.  It was the 'coming out' party of the 'underground' scene in London.  

Hoppy went on to found International Times (IT), the newspaper of this emerging community.  It wasn't long before it got busted, for publishing small ads that enabled gays to meet each other, at a time when being gay was imprisonable.   International Times was taken off sale at newsagents and the only place you could get a copy was in our restaurant - we gave away bundles and people went off and circulated it to their friends, so it still managed to reach its readership.  On a Saturday morning Hoppy got into a coffin symbolic of the death of IT and traveled on the Circle Line, emerging at Notting Hill.  A procession of IT supporters danced, played flutes and whistles and got to the spot on the Portobello Road where, 4 years later, we would open Ceres Grain Shop. Then unsmiling police moved in in force and scattered everyone in all directions.  No more indulgent good natured bobbies, the honeymoon was over.   

To raise the money for IT's legal costs Hoppy and music producer Dave Howson decided to put on a mega-event at Alexandra Palace - called The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. They went to the music companies who by then had bands like the Pink Floyd under contract and they were all keen to showcase their groups on the bill.  One little hitch - Hoppy hadn't actually booked Alexandra Palace as there was a £400 booking fee.   He and Dave persuaded me to lend the money.   Once Alexandra Palace was booked the record company money flowed and I got my loan back two weeks later.  The event was legendary.  I served a macrobiotic breakfast in the morning sunshine before the revelers went home.               

This kind of troublemaking alarmed the authorities.  Hoppy was targeted and busted for a small amount of dope, branded ‘a menace to society’ by the magistrate and sentenced to nine months imprisonment.  When Mick Jagger was arrested that year, after a set up by the News of The World, William Rees-Mogg wrote in The Times; "Who would break a butterfly on a wheel?"   The answer was any government, Tory or Labour that felt threatened by a bunch of young people wearing colourful clothes and enjoying being alive, eating healthy food, caring about the environment and loving one another too freely.

Recent evidence reveals that while the authorities were fretting over healthy eating, sexual liberation and environmental activism they were allegedly also busy procuring young boys from orphanages for sadistic purposes.  For Hoppy being in jail changed his life.  He'd learned his lesson and after coming out of jail spent his time in quasi-academic pursuits and pioneered the exploration of a novel new technology: video.  He lived long enough to see YouTube empowering ordinary people with video capabilities and the widespread adoption of a healthier way of eating.  A bright spark that fired up the alternative society has gone out.

Michio Kushi, last of old school macrobiotic gurus, is no more

Modern Zen macrobiotics was created by the Japanese leader George Ohsawa. His leading apostle was Michio Kushi. Kushi died in December, leaving the macrobiotic movement leaderless for the first time in its history in the West. In any belief system there is always the potential to confuse the messenger with the message. The Ten Commandments ban worshipping graven images and Islam prohibits images of Mohammed. This prevents believers worshipping a fellow human who connected with the universal spirit of love and peace (or ‘health and happiness’ if you prefer) instead of seeking that connection themselves. In macrobiotics the tendency to follow the man rather than the practice has been a marginalising factor that has kept it as a cult instead of the universally popular diet that we once thought it would become. Yet macrobiotic principles are now the guiding principles of the renaissance in nutritional awareness that is gathering pace worldwide. It looks like we’ve won, just not under our flag.

The Zen Macrobiotic diet originated as a reaction to the introduction of American food in Japan. In 1907 The Shoku-Yo-Kai association was formed to educate the public in healthy eating and to encourage a return to the traditional Japanese diet and avoid the meat, dairy products and sugary refined foods introduced from the West. Japanese were beginning to succumb to hitherto unknown diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The President of Shoku-Yo-Kai was George Ohsawa in the 1930s. He was jailed and nearly executed because he opposed Japan’s militaristic and imperialistic adventures that led to World War 2. One of his students was Michio Kushi, who took the message to the US in 1949. He was not the only one. Another was a Hollywood-based Shoku-Yo-Kai practitioner called Dr Nakadadi, who in 1947 cured my father Ken, who suffered debilitating intestinal disease for years after fighting as a Marine in the Pacific war. But it was in the 1960s that Ohsawa’s book Zen Macrobiotics lit the fuse under the macrobiotic rocket. It married the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang to diet and lifestyle. Taoism, like Zen, ideally seeks to achieve states where you transcend earthly day-to-day worries and become a mover and shaker while playing and staying in a state of constant bliss.   This is why macrobiotics appealed so much to the Sixties hippie generation, who experienced those states temporarily and sought something that could bring them there without having to rely on psychoactive substances.

Ohsawa died suddenly in 1966, leaving the macrobiotic movement leaderless.

Michio Kushi on the East Coast and Herman Aihara on the West Coast, took up Ohsawa’s mantle. Kushi set up the East West Institute in Boston. It was a mecca for burned-out hippies who would make the hajj to Boston and work in the study centre or the associated restaurant and food wholesaling business Erewhon, while learning the philosophy and how to cook the food. Kushi’s lectures to his followers were published in The East West Journal and the Order of the Universe magazines, reaching more than 100,000 subscribers worldwide. His students became the missionaries of macrobiotics beyond Boston. Many of them came to London, where we welcomed them and gave them jobs in our restaurant, bakery and shop. We rented them a house in Ladbroke Grove where they could promulgate Kushi's message, give shiatsu classes and teach cooking.   They disdained our free and easy approach to macrobiotics and advised us to go to Boston to study with Michio. We thought they were too ‘straight.’ They wore suits, smoked cigarettes and drank Guinness and coffee just like Michio. But the rest of their diet was much stricter than ours, allowing little in the way of sweeteners or dairy products. It was a bit alienating, but we thought 'each to his own' and were grateful to be introduced to shiatsu and to have active missionaries spreading the message.

A few years ago I wrote here about our macrobiotic sea cruise. It included late stage cancer sufferers who had, thanks to Michio Kushi's teachings, been clear for five or ten years. It was moving to hear their stories and their gratitude that macrobiotics had given them life beyond their doctors' expectations.

Will macrobiotics thrive in Kushi’s absence? The philosophy is now everywhere, the basic principles of making healthy diet the foundation of your physical and mental well being; eating whole unrefined cereals; exercising actively; always choose organic; avoid sugary refined foods; prefer sourdough over yeasted breads; avoid artificial preservatives and colourings; no trans fats; eat locally and seasonally… these were once quirky macrobiotic precepts but are all now well-established and the stuff of Sunday newspaper supplements. George Ohsawa once commented that as long as you were in a state of bliss it didn’t matter what you ate, you were macrobiotic. Kushi’s messaging was more prescriptive, but it reached a lot more people. These great men are no longer with us, but thanks to their teachings the quality and variety of food we can easily obtain is better than it has ever been in human history. There is no excuse for eating crap any more. For this we should be eternally grateful.

Seed Magazine 1975

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.