Germany

What is about the Krauts?  Are they really that much cleverer than us Brits?  Where did we go wrong?  Back in the day, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were the clever dicks, they rowed over from Germany, took over Britannia and made it the most powerful nation on earth  The Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and other Germanic tribes had to settle for Middle Europe.  We thrashed them in 2 consecutive world wars, reducing them to abject poverty twice in one century.  I remember, as a 13 year old in Germany in 1957, seeing a farmer hitch a plough to his missus so that they could plough a field to get in a crop of potatoes.   Not any more.

Now they are one of the world’s most powerful economies and they have a government that actually behaves like it hasn’t completely lost its marbles, unlike our Anglo-Saxon regimes.  Where did they go right?

Luckily for them, after our victory in World War 2 we imposed a constitution on them to make sure that they had a truly democratic political system, to make sure that Germany could never again be taken over by a genocidal dictatorship that would launch wars of aggression (you know, like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan).   Then they developed an economic system that relies on a lot of small to medium enterprises (the ‘Mittelstand’) instead of favouring the huge inefficient corporations that Americans and Brits subsidise so they become too big to fail.  

Proportional representation means people can vote for the party they really want, not be faced with the Tweedledum and Tweedledee choices of us Brits.  The Green Party has 44 seats in the German Parliament,  while in the UK Caroline Lucas, an outstanding politician, struggles along with the only Green seat in the UK Parliament. When Fukushima blew up Germany sensibly committed to closing down nuclear power.  They already lead Europe in solar power, with nearly half the total installed capacity.  Compare Britain, where the Tories reacted to Fukushima by giving huge subsidies, guaranteeing double the cost of conventional electricity, to companies from communist China and socialist France to build nuclear power stations on the flood plains of the Bristol Channel!  The last tsunami in the Bristol Channel was in 1607 – it’s the worst place imaginable to build a nuclear power station. 

The Germans love organic food –they consume twice as much organic food per person as Brits or Americans.  In 2008, when the market for organic food in the UK slumped, it just kept on rising in Germany.   One factor main was that the government in the UK has been consistently unsupportive towards organic food.  You’d never get an Owen Paterson in Germany – singing from the Monsanto hymn sheet and doing the minimum required by the EU to support organic farmers.  The German government says organic farming is ‘economically strong, eco-friendly and sustainable.”  If Owen Paterson said something like that the NFU would have his guts for garters – they are insanely jealous of the handouts they get from us taxpayers (a typical 2000 acre farmer in Suffolk gets £500 a day in income support).   The Germans dedicate around £16 million a year to research into improving organic productivity and educating consumers about organic food and farming. The UK has never supported a bid for EU funding to promote organic food. The Organic Trade Board took the initiative to apply for the funding that paid for the  “Why I Love Organic” campaign.  Biofach every February in Nuremberg brings together the global organic industry in a massively impressive trade show.

The Germans also don’t like wasting money on war and toys for generals and admirals.  They only spend 1.4% of their GDP on military expenditure, compared to 2.5% in the UK and 4.4% in the USA.  The billions they save helps to support health, education, investment in industry and infrastructure and support for organic farming.   Their government debt as a percentage of GDP is 57%, compared to 83% in the UK.

Don’t get me wrong, the Germans drink too much beer and eat too many sausages – obesity is as big an issue there as it here.  Their sense of humour is, as Mark Twain observed, ‘no laughing matter.’  

But you have to salute them (keeping the elbow bent) for their common sense and commitment to sustainability.

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.

Health Food & Natural Food

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

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?

Three cheers for ethical mob rule

We used to fear mob rule. But if the ‘mob’ is all nice people who you’d be happy to introduce to your mother, well, what’s wrong with that? Welcome to the Collaborative 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 each 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 Farm 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.

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.

Little supermarkets, big threat?

Having left local high streets for dead the big supermarkets are re-colonising them at a rate of knots with new small-format stores. Big threat to independents, right? Not necessarily, says Craig Sams

After decades of disembowelling the nation’s high streets, the supermarkets are rushing back in with a variety of ‘Local’ or ‘Express’ or other similar offerings.  It could be a case of too little too late, but if it means fewer charity shops and higher footfall then it could be good news for the high street organic retailer who has the right offering.

All the organic brands that started life in the natural food stores and then migrated to the supermarket shelves followed a well-trodden path: the supermarkets all had their ‘A’ stores (huge floor space, high end demographic) right down to stores that were cramped and in less salubrious locations.  An aspiring organic brand such as Clipper, Yeo Valley or Green & Black’s would get its shot at stardom in a handful of ‘A’ stores (Sainsbury’s started G&B’s out in 12 stores and the buyer was highly reluctant about allowing that). If it performed then it would move on to the B’s, the C’s and, well you get the picture.

So where do the ‘local’ supermarkets fit in? Limitations of space mean that the range available is greatly restricted. There’s no room for many of the organic lines stocked in the big stores.  But frustrated customers can easily pick them up at the nearest natural food store – along with anything else that catches their eye.

Historically local authorities have been part of the problem – shortsightedly, they bribe supermarkets to move into the outskirts and then greedily ramp up downtown parking charges to further deter drive traffic out of town. But this kind of stupidity is in decline.

The small independent convenience stores aren’t going to be a pushover. Menzies now offer retailers a smartphone app that lets them amend orders, make credit enquiries and find out what’s in stock and what’s not in real time from the shop floor. Result: fewer out of stocks, less money tied up in stock, more flexibility, higher sales, happier customers.

A recent report from the Association of Convenience Stores says that 55% of independent retailers are earning less than the minimum wage and 69% are earning less than the living wage (£7.45 per hour). It’s always frustrating when your Saturday girls are earning more per hour than you are, but sometimes that’s the price of freedom and owning your own business. Independent retailers are usually engaged in other community activity, making their neighbourhood a better place to live. Being part of a community is its own reward, one that is increasingly appreciated as central government becomes ever more remote

The big stores are investing in more space. The next five years could see 19 million square feet of new store space and 6 million square feet of internet growth-equivalent space. The new store space will be mostly small. The smaller stores cannibalise sales from the edge-of-town dinosaurs, making them less profitable. What’s worse, supermarket convenience stores are less profitable than big box stores.  But they have to make the move.  Why?  One reason is that people are finally getting it about waste: one big Saturday shop leaves you with more food than you need, stuff goes out of date or just doesn’t look very appetising when the leaves on the lettuce start to curl and the milk is barely fit for Little Miss Muffett.  Better to shop little and often, you’ll spend less and waste less.  People find they’d rather get a life than stand in a long checkout queue on a precious Saturday morning to get food they never knew they wanted before they entered the hypnotic environment of the big store.

The other big factor coming down the line is carbon footprinting.  When you factor in the total greenhouse gas emissions associated with big stores, food waste, being non-organic, excess meat consumption and all that driving around it’s not a pretty picture.  From September 30 this year every major company will have to declare its total annual greenhouse gas emissions. In a few years there’ll be a carbon tax that will force them to swallow a cost they’ve been able to dump on society up till now. That will tip the balance even further towards locally sourced, organic, lower meat and dairy, less waste and healthier food choices.

Perhaps not ‘roll on Tesco Express’, but not as scary as you might think.

Sugar – are you a user or an abuser?

As experts flail around not solving the global obesity crisis Craig Sams ponders the merits of establishing a new category of crime – Food Abuse

Fat Chance, a recent book by Prof. Robert Lustig, puts forth the hypothesis that it is sugar, not fat, that is making us fat, diabetic and lazy. It rang a little bell so I pulled out an insightful little paperback book called About Macrobiotics, published in 1972. It read: “It is quite natural to find that diabetics are fat, reflecting heavy sugar consumption.” The author went on to write: “If sugar were discovered yesterday it would be banned and handed over to the Army for weapons research.”  The author? Some 26-year-old, name of Craig Sams. Yeah, the chocolate guy.

When my kids came home from school, grumpy and hungry, I’d cross-examine them to see if they’d sneaked some sugary junk with their pals.  They grew up with a healthy attitude to sugary food, less fanatical than me, but moderate to the point of being minimal with sugar. When I announced that Whole Earth Foods was about to sprout Green & Black’s chocolate, they were horrified.  When I took it to Community Foods Tim Powell fixed me with a beady eye and spluttered: “Chocolate? You? Craig Sams, who got us all to give it up back in the day?” It’s true that my brother Gregory and I persuaded the Natural Foods Union to state in our 1973 manifesto that we would not stock sugar or products containing sugar. This pledge held until 1991, when Green & Black’s came along and blew the gates off their hinges. Sugar, organic sugar even, was back in the game.

Robert Lustig almost hits the nail on the head.  For sure overconsumption of sugar is the cause of obesity and obesity related diseases like diabetes.  But he blames advertisers and a cynical drug-peddling mentality among food companies. James Ehrlichmann’s mini-book “Addicted to Food – Understanding the Obesity Epidemic” says we are food addicts, with sugar, fat and salt being the key addictive substances that work on the brain like opiates to keep addicts hooked.  He points out that since Stone Age days we are biologically programmed to lay on fat in anticipation of times when the mammoths and berries are scarce. He wants regulation and taxation. But there are so many addictive substances: sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco, mood-altering pharmaceuticals, cocaine, painkillers, opiates, even television and sex.

We’re all hooked on some combination or the other of them. Every addict has their own preferred folly mixture.  At times I’ve been hooked on cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate and ice cream, even a few months dabbling in cocaine and for 40 years drank at least 6 cups of tea a day.  So I know a thing or two about addiction, (though never got into hard stuff like opiates or coffee and steered well clear of over-the-counter and prescription drugs). I still enjoy many of the above, but I’m in control now and don’t overdo them.

Taxation and haranguing users with traffic lights and skull and crossbones images won’t change things. Cigarette consumption fell because of smoking bans in restaurants and pubs, not because of taxes.

But we can’t ban food in restaurants and pubs. So what to do? Why not create a new category of crime called ‘Food Abuse.’  Anyone whose Body Mass Index exceeds 30 gets hauled up before a magistrate. If they have a mitigating factor such as a glandular condition they get let off. Otherwise, sentence them to four weeks … at a retreat in the countryside.

A day in a NHS hospital costs £300 – a week at a health farm with full detox treatments, healthy diet, nutrition education, yoga, pilates, wheat grass juice and country walks – the lot, costs £100 a day, a third of the price. Prevention isn’t just better than cure, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.

Anyone who’s been to a health farm knows it only takes a few weeks of enforcing healthy habits to drive out the unhealthy ones. The reformed characters will be less likely to be a burden on the NHS so there’s a long term payback,too. The ex-cons will also be more likely to shop in a natural food shop than at Iceland. The big food companies and supermarkets will respond in a flash – they have no particular commitment to one food or another, they just sell what people buy.

There is no silver bullet to cure obesity and there is no single junk food. The ‘junkie’ is us and the monkey on our back can only be controlled by going cold turkey and learning good habits.

Only organic can rescue our dried out planet

Water trumps everything. Water is food. But the worldwide well is running dry. Only organic can rescue our desiccated planet, says Craig Sams

In March I attended the City Food Lecture at Guildhall. This is a glitzy event where the City livery companies (Fruiterers, Grocers, Poulterers, Butchers, Fishmongers) lay on a lecture and discussion and canapés. The speaker this year was Peter Brucke, CEO of Nestle.  The discussion was chaired by Sheila Dillon of Radio 4’s Food Programme.

Peter Brucke’s theme was water. He outlined how diminishing water resources are beginning to impinge on food production. It’s quite a story. He told us what was wrong but failed to mention how it all went wrong.

First the story – all over the world, in the US Midwest, in China, in Punjab, in Saudi Arabia there are massive underground lakes that have accumulated water for thousands or millions of years. They just sat there until the last 50 years, quietly just being water. Then they got pumped to the surface and now they’re exhausted, empty, pumped out, kaput.  We’re back to relying on rain ­­– just when climate change is making rain more unpredictable than it’s ever been.

How did this happen? Well, companies like Nestlé encouraged backward farmers to modernise, to use chemical fertilisers and adopt the high yielding wheat and rice varieties of the Green Revolution. Chemical fertilisers trigger a breakdown in soil organic matter.  Any farmer who has converted degraded soil into productive organic soil can tell you that it can take quite a few years before that soil holds water and nutrients and has the biological resilience that protects plants from fungal and other diseases. Any fool can go turn rich farmland into degraded semi-desert but it takes skilled husbandry to recover what is lost.

Soil that is depleted of organic matter doesn’t hold water.  Dave Vetter, who farms organically in Nebraska, uses  just one seventh of the water that his non-organic neighbours use – they put on the chemicals, add water they pump up from the nearly exhausted Ogalalla aquifer and it mostly just drains off the land, into the Missouri River, down to the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. What a waste!  What’s worse, there is no life in the sea for 200 miles off the coast of New Orleans because the nitrates and other chemicals are so intensely concentrated. The shrimp boats aren’t coming anymore.  The same is true in India, where farmers add more chemicals every year and get diminishing returns. Their water is running out, too. The Saudis have started to buy land in Africa, their own investment in farming worked out for about 20 years, now the water’s gone.

Sitting at the high table, flanked by bottles of their San Pellegrino, Nestle’s boss lamented the situation but avoided the only answer that makes any sense. Go organic. Everyone still worries about the cost. But the externalised cost of degraded soils, water depletion and crop failure is a lot more than tuppence on the price of a Milky Bar. It’s war, famine, disease and death – our old friends the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“Everyone still worries about the cost. But the externalised cost of degraded soils, water depletion and crop failure is a lot more than tuppence on the price of a Milky Bar”

China got to grips with a dried out dust bowl in Heilongjiang Province back in 2001.  The Beijing bosses told the local boss to stop letting the dust from dried out fields blow all over the place.  The Heilonjiang apparatchiks ordered that 1,500,000 hectares convert to organic within 10 years.  Bang on schedule, in 2011, the last 150,000 hectares went organic and China now rules the market for organic commodities like sesame, pumpkinseed, aduki beans, sunflower seeds, etc etc.  And the dust clouds are a distant memory.

Of course we can’t just order that sort of thing in our representative democracies.  We have to fight our way past agribusiness lobbyists in Brussels who have a mysterious grip over the better judgement of EU Commissioners for agriculture. The CAP is rotten to the core. The USDA is little better. But when companies like Nestle start ringing the alarm bells, then companies like Monsanto, Syngenta and the nitrate fertiliser merchants will have to run for cover.

Water trumps everything. Water is food. The old soul tune says you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.  Well, it’s running dry and there’s only one way to fix that. Organic farming – the only way to deal with a dried out planet.

• Craig Sams will talking on the themes raised in his two most recent NP blogs in ‘No Place to Hide: The Future of Food in the New Age of Transparency’. The talk takes place at Olympia, London at 10.30-11.15 on Monday April 8 – visit www.naturalproducts.co.uk for more information.

No place to hide

The internet is the most powerful tool for transparency ever invented. There literally is no place to hide for the perpetrators of food scandals, writes Craig Sams.

Oh, dear, another scandal from the meat industry. We’ve barely put away the sickbags from the ‘pink slime’ revelations before we get another nauseating example of how little respect consumers can expect from the purveyors of their animal protein.

Organic cynics might say it’s about time – we haven’t had a good scandal for ages.  Every time something like this comes up there is an upward blip in sales of organic food as consumers rush for the safe haven of uncontaminated, inspected, certified food produced by people with faces who care about the welfare of their animals and the health of their customers.

When Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks revelations hit the front pages the curtain that protected high-level lawbreakers from scrutiny was ripped away. Those revelations were symptomatic of a greater transformation that is taking place.  It’s the new transparency. We are no longer spoon-fed a particular version of reality, massaged by corporate spin doctors and fed out through compliant news organisations.  The truth, horrible as it sometimes may be, can’t be kept under wraps any more. The internet is changing things rapidly. Yes, it’s full of bullcrap and whackos, but it quickly sorts the truth from the rubbish and gives us all a clearer understanding of what’s going on. It’s eroding trust, but if trust is misplaced, then it’s better to mistrust. Common law makes much of assuming innocence until guilt is proven. Nowadays it’s smarter to assume the worst until you can be confident otherwise.

Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, wants GMOs to be grown in the UK.  He announced at the NFU conference in January that we were all eating them anyway as our meat is from animals that eat GM feed. He didn’t mention GMO oats at the time, I guess he wasn’t counting the horses. When I was a lad, if a government minister presided over a scandal that reflected badly on him and his department he did the honorable thing and popped in to 10 Downing Street to proffer his resignation. Patterson is brazening it out. He is even pushing to get Britain to have more relaxed meat labelling and content standards.

If his department can’t keep horses out of burgers, hot dogs and ready meals how the hell is he going to give consumers who don’t want to eat GMOs any protection? The recent events have shown that unscrupulous processors can drive a coach and, er… equines through the controls that supermarkets and the Food Standards Agency agree are enough to protect our freedom of choice. How on earth are they going to give us a choice about eating GMOs?

The meat industry has a dismal record. When my brother Gregory sold his Vegeburger business in 1988, the new owners moved production to a big meat processor and the first batch went out to Sainsbury’s. The burgers were so convincingly like meat that customers raised the alarm. Somebody had pushed the wrong button in the factory and the Vegeburgers had been accidentally made with beef (or horse, dog, cat, hamster, whatever).  Linda McCartney got so angry when her processor made a similar mistake that she forced them to build a separate, totally meat-free, factory to process her branded ready meals. And it’s not just meat they contaminate. When e.Coli contamination of spinach triggered nationwide recalls in the USA it turned out the e.Coli came from irrigation water. The water was contaminated with cow poo from an intensive beef feedlot at the top of the valley. One of the reasons supermarket buyers rotate every six months or so is because the meat buyer is almost inevitably corrupted by suppliers and the only cure is to keep moving them around. Even in Medieval times, ‘the butcher’s thumb’ referred to the practice of resting his thumb on the scale as he weighed out your pound of flesh. Even when there’s no meat on the bone, they’re still at it. When Rabbi Kahn visited our jam factory to certify it Kosher, he was particularly vexed about human collagen in gelatin. Our factory manager, who once ran a gelatin factory, mentioned how rings and jewelry would appear in the ‘cow bones’ from India that they processed.

Under the harsh glare of the internet, there are fewer and fewer hiding places for wrongdoers.  The truth will out, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.

So what to do? Choose  organic? Go vegetarian? You took the words right out of my mouth.

GM - Dream or nightmare

The American people are going to be very, very angry when the truth about GM food finally comes out, writes Craig Sams

When Mark Lynas got up at the National Farming Conference this January and said he was an environmentalist who realised he had been wrong about GM and that we should all adopt it, at once something smelt bad. He said the organic movement and Indian peasant farmers should stop fighting against the inevitable, crops to combat malnutrition and grow in drought conditions were being delayed and we have to feed the world. Owen Patterson, the new ‘Environment Minister’ attacked opponents of GM and said we couldn’t let the world starve any more (no mention of the subsidised biofuels NFU members are bribed to grow so we can burn food instead of eating it). He also said we’re all eating meat from animals that eat GM feed, so resistance is futile.

All part of Big Biotech’s new campaign to break the GM opposition in Europe. In that same week Poland banned two previously permitted GM crops. France one and various other European countries hardened their resistance. In Africa, Kenya joined the growing list of countries that completely banned GM seeds and imports of GM food. A scandal erupted in China where kids were fed toxic GM food without their knowledge in a falsified experiment.

It’s war!

The first casualty in War is Truth. Truth in the GM wars died back in the mid 1990s, now much more is at stake: the credibility of science. It’s a shame that it has come to this and that the men in white coats are trotting out the lies again.

When Monsanto discovered the DNA in petunias that makes them immune to Roundup, they fired petunia DNA into soybean DNA again and again until they got a mutant soybean that was resistant to Roundup. Bingo! With the Roundup patent expiring in 2001, they needed some way to keep farmers hooked on their herbicide and not migrate to cheaper generics at one third of the price. However, saying “We can continue to overcharge you after patent expiry for Roundup” didn’t make marketing sense. “Higher yields”, “Lower herbicide usage”, and ‘Feeding The World” were more buzzy.

They tested the GM soybean for yield and found yields were actually lower. US farmers found that Roundup usage actually increased. The biotech firms also claimed that in the pipeline were crops that could grow in salinated soils (every year we lose another 120 million hectares of farmland that’s become so drenched in chemical fertilisers that they can no longer support life – the salination is not seasalt, its salts of chemical fertilisers). There weren’t. Then they said they would develop crops that would grow through droughts. That never happened either, 17 years on. If a witness in a court of law has a record of lying they are not trusted again. Here the same old stories are trotted out, without any supporting evidence, and Tory ministers parrot them uncritically.

Monsanto had to get past the FDA, guardians of America’s food safety. Top scientists studied Monsanto’s feeding trials and counselled a ban. They were overruled by the political appointees who run the FDA, a good many either past of future Monsanto executives. The EU was easier. The CAP is so corrupt that the EU Council of Auditors have refused to approve their accounts for nearly a decade. Getting Commissioners to approve was a piece of cake.

In 1996 4% of the US soybean crop was GM. But an investigation carried out by the UK Food Standards Agency raised suspicions that all soy exports were deliberately contaminated with GM soy to deny EU users any choice.

They reckoned without Richard Austin of Rainbow Wholefoods, who galvanised the natural foods industry to boycott GM TVP from soya and GM soya lecithin, Greenpeace and the Soil Association drew a red line and the market has segregated GM and non GM ever since. This enables Waitrose to guarantee that all their own brand products are GM free, including the feed that goes to their meat animals.

The British government commissioned the most trusted and respected GM scientist, Arpad Puztai, of the Rowlett Institute, to do research GM to shut the critics up. Puztai found that GM potatoes caused cancer and deformities. He was abused by the Royal Society and his career shattered. Other researchers who got the same results were also fired or publicly humiliated by their fellow scientists. Not once has any independent research body been commissioned to duplicate their results. Too much money is at stake for the truth to come out. But it must.

We need to have proper research. Not by Monsanto’s scientists, not by Syngenta’s scientists – you can buy a scientist for about £60,000 a year, according to New Scientist magazine’s employment pages. The huge human guinea pig experiment with GM food in the US coincides with a calamitous deterioration in public health. The American people will be very, very angry when the truth comes out.

Civilising influences

The ancient Mayan civilisation collapsed over a thousand years ago, but its people lived on and are now part of a new ‘civilisation’ – of how business is done, writes Craig Sams

I first visited Belize in 1987 to film the Deer Dance of the Maya because it was, according to the Maya Calendar, the ‘Harmonic Convergence’ – the August 17 alignment of the planets that was the lead-in to the 2012 excitement that various overexcited doomsayers are saying is ‘the end of the world.’  In fact, the Maya Calendar is clear, there is a paradigm shift taking place.  We come to the end of a 5200-year Great Cycle of History on December 21st 2012, but the assumption is that we will move to a higher spiritual dimension.  It will signal the end of the old world of greed and exploitation and herald the onset of a new age of connectedness and shared mutual interest.   At least that’s what we thought when we went to Belize in 1987 while simultaneously ‘sun dancers’ stood on Glastonbury Tor holding hands, with similar events at other sacred spots like Chaco Canyon, Machu Picchu and Stonehenge.  Shirley MacLaine, Timothy Leary and John Denver were all participating.

While I was in Belize I met some cocoa growers and the first little seeds of an idea started to germinate in some fertile corner of my skull.  4 years later we had launched Green & Black’s.   We had some pretty clear objectives from day one:

– we’d pay a fair price to encourage increased production and farmer income;

– the cocoa beans would be organic and sustainably produced;

– no exploitation of children and respect for women’s rights;

– no exposure to toxic pesticides or fungicides

– the environment would be protected and ecosystems kept intact.

In 1993 we pumped $20,000 cash into underpinning the producer cooperatives that would make it happen.

Green & Black’s had these principles embedded in its DNA from birth.  We won the Ethical Consumer Award, the Worldaware award and became the first Fairtrade marked product.  Sure, it tasted good, so we won awards for that, but the big prize was that we proved it was possible to do good and do well without compromise.  Now this sort of thinking isn’t just commonplace, it’s what conscientious customers expect.  But what about Big Business?

When Cadbury’s took over the Green & Black’s in 2005 the hooting and hollering reached a crescendo.  Everybody expected them to drop organic, drop Fairtrade and turn Green & Black’s into a high-class variant of Dairy Milk.  In fact they helped the Maya growers in Belize recover from the terrible damage from Hurricane Iris and at the same time they learned a great deal about how cacao can be grown without chemicals and by small farmers rather than on plantations.   In 2008 Cadbury announced their Cocoa Partnership, a £45 million fund to help improve living conditions among farmers in Ghana and to help improve declining yields.  And they took Dairy Milk Fairtrade.

Then Kraft took over Cadbury.  More weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. More angry emails in my inbox.

Recently Kraft, amoeba-like, divided and the new chocolate entity is called Mondelez International.  At the International Cocoa Organisation conference last month in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Tim Cofer, CEO of Mondelez announced an upgrade to the £45 million Cadbury Cocoa Partnership.  It’s now a $400 million “Cocoa Life” programme, working with UNDP, WWF and Anti-Slavery International to improve the lives of cocoa farmers.  It has 4 main targets

1. Help farmers improve yields and increase incomes

2. Create positive communities and promote gender equality

3. Eliminate child labour by attacking its root causes

4. Protect the environment so that cocoa farming is viable for future generations

Sounds familiar?   It’s uncannily similar to the founding principles of Green & Black’s.  OK, it’s 20,000 times as much money as we invested, but we’re talking a major initiative to transform the lives of a million cocoa growers and ensure that the next generation would rather grow cacao than go and drive taxicabs in Accra or Abidjan.

The cynic in me says this is naked self-interest.  The average age of a cocoa farmer is 60 and you can’t make chocolate (or money) without cocoa beans.  But it’s kinda nice that it is happening in 2012, when the Maya calendar says we are going to embark on a new, more spiritually enlightened age of connectedness and shared mutual interest in each other’s well-being.

Fetishist? No, just enjoying food and having fun

You Aren’t What You Eat takes pot shots at fetishistic ‘foodists’ while eulogising genetic engineeringists. I can only despair at its author’s warped logic.

Stephen Poole writes for The Guardian and has authored a fascinating book on video games in which he explores and describes video games as ‘semiotic systems that provoke aesthetic wonder.’

Time to confess.  Not many people know this, but I am in the very highest rank globally of players of the Raw Thrills arcade game ‘The Fast and the Furious.’ I am also (blush, blush) the world’s number one in Namco’s classic Propcycle game.  So I am well into the aesthetic wonder of arcade games, in the true Clive Bell sense of emotional immersive aesthetic experience. I get the buzz. Poole articulates what gamers like me feel when they play and gives intellectual backbone to what shallower souls would condemn as adolescent time-wasting.

So I Kindled this book with high anticipation.

His new book You Aren’t What You Eat sets out to debunk wide swathes of food culture.  Its basic premise is that we have ponced up food ridiculously, taking something as boring and fundamental as keeping alive and turned it into a recreational obsession.

With a title like that you’d think that he might have a proper go at Gillian McKeith. Indeed, he does, but she is a small player: he’s after much bigger game in his shooting gallery of culinary and gastronomic targets. In fact the people who get put down in this book are so admirable that I feel somewhat humbled to have been elevated to their company. Gwyneth Paltrow, the Prince of Wales, Heston Blumenthal, the Soil Association, Nigella, even the saintly Delia, all wither before his fire.  Even Elizabeth David gets a barb or two. But, when he finally gets to the subject matter of his title, it is Craig Sams that gets the kicking.

In this book the starving poor are dying because rich middle class liberal ‘foodists’ won’t let them enjoy the abundance and benefits of GM crops that will resist drought, insects and grow like billy-o.    There is a several page paean to Monsanto and the wonders of genetic engineering that could have been written in 1996, so naïve and credulous does it read.  The Soil Association care more about a ‘hunk of rock’ in space than they do about the people on it.  If vegetarians care so much about living things, why do they chop up innocent carrots?  Don’t look for logic or rationality here, this is a fogeyish rant.

I wondered at first what this book reminded me of and then I remembered: Kraft-Ebbing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis.  This was a 19th Century tract that pruriently described case histories of sexual antics of all kinds and then condemned them one by one as deviant and perverse.  In the days before freely available internet porn, i.e. back in the 50s when I was a lad, this sort of stuff was where adolescents got their sex education. We’d just skip that last tedious moralising bit at the end of each of the 238 case histories. You Aren’t What You Eat is the gastronomic equivalent.  There are lurid case histories of every aspect of ‘gastroporn,’ covering everything from the gluttony of ancient Rome and Mesopotamia right through to the latest blow-torched culinary excesses of Heston Blumenthal.   Each drooling description of foodie antics concludes with a sharp moralistic condemnation.  As with Kraft Ebbing, you get the voyeuristic thrill, then the shutters close and you get the moralistic lecture about the evils of letting things get out of hand.

This book is scatological and jizzological. The book is peppered with unattractive images of bulging fat gourmands dribbling over their food while people starve in the developing world.  We read of dung adulterating food in Victorian England, film scenes where poo featured (“Brazil”).  We see Nigella Lawson compared to a bukkake star with globs of glutinous caramel dripping from her lips onto her breasts.   Then, just when he gets you going, the cold water of moralisation puts out the fire. Again.  And again.  Sheesh!

I’m not sure that Poole gets the point of foodiesm.  He tries to take it too seriously. Food is fun. We love it.  It’s a chance for us to let our hair down and get a bit frisky and to get out of our ruts.  We eat to live and we live to reproduce.  We love food and we love sex.   We love them because they are F-U-N.  Serious fun. As long as nobody gets hurt, what’s the problem?

Perhaps the answer lies in his attack on me.  Like every faithful reader of NPN, he has read my article on Epigenetics, which sets out the diametrically opposite argument to the title of his book.   You remember, the one where I wrote about the recent discoveries by molecular biologists that your DNA changes in response to dietary and environmental factors and that these changes become ingrained in your children and grandchildren.   So I wrote

“There is a responsibility here, too – we owe it to future generations to do right by them.  We may have bankrupted their financial future, but we shouldn’t plunder their piggybank of health as well.”

Sorry, I know this review is about Poole’s book, not about me, but you’ll see where I’m going with this.

He goes on to acknowledge (he must have read the same Guardian article last year that I did) that this food-changes-your-DNA thing does make sense.  So…you are what you eat.  Ah, but the trials were with rats, Poole writes, so let’s not jump to any premature conclusions abjout whether food will change human DNA. Well, I’m as sensitive as the next anti-vivisectionist, but if you believe the science then what happens to lab rats is a pretty good indicator of what happens to people.  He knows he’s on weak ground here, so he changes tack and goes after me for guilt-tripping parents to make them enjoy delicious wholesome food instead of whatever Poole would have them eat.   Nobody likes a blackmailer and Poole’s response to my  ‘moral blackmail’ is presumably to eat a Mega Mac and chips just to show his grandkids that they can’t intimidate him about their heredity.

But this is the heart of the matter. Either you are or you are not what you eat. You can’t be both. Poole admits that you indeed are what you eat but then says that we shouldn’t feel morally blackmailed by future generations to pass healthy DNA to them. OK, screw future generations, but I still want my DNA to be pretty healthy. If there are genetic causes of disease and food changes your genes for good or for bad then food can be a cause of disease. This is the ‘You are what you eat’ argument proved by the science of epigenetics, begrudgingly agreed by the author of a book that has a title that states the opposite.

Confused? Just keep eating the GMOs and for goodness sakes, don’t have any fun while you’re at it!

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

If I had a penny for every Daily Mail headline that screams ‘New Hope for Cancer Cure’ and then goes on to say that some scientist discovered a gene that causes cancer, I’d be a very rich man.  Little ever comes of this - all scientists did was discover a gene that they found in someone with cancer.   When I hear people say diabetes is hereditary I want to scream.  Even if every British diabetic in 1900 and their descendants had been confined to breeding farms and forced to produce a baby a year their hereditary diabetic offspring would represent a miniscule fraction of the 2.5 million diabetics, and rising, in the UK.  Diabetes, like heart disease and cancer, largely comes from environmental causes like overeating, underexercising, eating denatured food and being surrounded by a sea of manmade chemicals.  There may be some genetic history that delays disease onset in some people, but genes are not the cause of diseases of affluence.

Billions were spent mapping the human genome so that we could find cures for all our so-called hereditary diseases and in the end they found 25,000 genes, a humbling 5000 less than the 30,000 you’ll find in a mosquito.  The genetic bonanza has failed to materialise but something useful did come of all that research - epigenetics

Epigenomes are the software that runs genes.  Think of your genes as a computer, you never use the whole thing, but you activate different bits at different times.  Epigenomes are the software that runs those bits - and you only use a few programmes at a time and then only a few bits of those programmes.  They’ve just begun to count epigenomes and estimate they run into the millions.  And they change all the time, depending on circumstances.

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

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

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

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

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

Epigenetics has proved that we can be masters of our own fates. 

 What’s stopping us?

Who gives a toss about tiny differences in vitamins and minerals?

The fixation with tiny nutritional differences between organic and non-organic is a silly distraction from the real issues, writes Craig Sams.

I’m having a bit of a ‘Duh’ moment I’m afraid.]

20 years ago, way back in 1992 I wrote and recorded a song called “Eat Organic Save the Planet.”  It was part of a promotion by Whole Earth Foods that created the model that has been applied for September organic promotions ever since.  We produced ‘Eat Organic’ leaflets, badges for kids, shelf talkers offering 10% off , printed window posters and gave a prize to the retailer who had the best organic window display with Cheryl Thallon as the judge. The song was on a cassette tape and we gave one to every participating shop to play on their music system. Our job was to push retailers to switch from our ‘natural’ products to the new organic versions we had developed, despite the price differences.

The song’s lyrics set out the argument:

“The weather round the world is getting very strange

As the Amazon rain forest turns into a cattle range

But still you keep on buying all those products that they sell

Eating burgers, drinking coffee, let the Indians go to hell

Eat Organic – Save the Planet”

And

“If you’re part of the problem then you’re holding us back

We’re fighting for survival put the world back on the track

Clean your act up, eat organic and be part of the solution

It’s time to take the next step in the planet’s evolution”

And

“One day we’ll lose the land that our lives are built upon

Then the next thing has to be that we will all be gone”

And

“If we really want to save this planet of our birth

We’ve got to place some value on what life on Earth is worth

If we didn’t spray so many toxic pesticides

All those different species never would’ve died”

So when some monomaniac academics at Stanford say organic is no better than non-organic because it has the same level of vitamin content I can’t take it seriously. They don’t get it. They probably never will.  They are part of the problem and are accessories after the fact (to use the correct legal terminology) to the murder of our beloved planet, which in effect is the murder of all of us.

Organic farming protects biodiversity; it helps get carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil via composting; it combats global warming by not using nitrate fertilisers (responsible for 1/7 of the annual increase in greenhouse gases); it doesn’t produce sick animals or milk from cows that die when they’re three years old; it helps restore soils that were built up over thousands of years and have been horribly degraded in the past 50 years; it encourages wildlife, birds and bees and other vital pollinators instead of killing them with sprayed poisons; it doesn’t use pesticides that are proven causes of birth defects – defects that are intergenerational and where your grandchildren get the hardest hit from them. Organic farming uses half the fossil fuels of non-organic; organic farmers are younger and prettier (they are 30% younger and six times more likely to be female) than non-organic farmers; organic farming never uses genetically modified seeds or hormonal milk drugs which have never been properly tested for human safety; organic farming never uses sex hormones to build up layers of muscle and fat; organic farmers don’t routinely give antibiotics to their animals just to make them grow a little faster, not least because this breeds antibiotic-resistant diseases that cross-infect and kill humans. Organic food never contains hydrogenated fat, named or disguised as mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids; or artificial flavourings, colourings, preservatives.

Jeez, I’m exhausted just running through this list.

So who really gives a toss about tiny differences in vitamins and minerals? It’s one thing (along with ‘it tastes better’) that I’ve always felt is totally irrelevant. We make food choices using our better judgement and if we eat a lot of junk food, sugar, alcohol, hydrogenated fat and hormones and antibiotics and pesticides then no amount of extra vitamins will make much difference.

It seems so bleedin’ obvious and it is. People worldwide are going organic.  Farming in the developing world is rejecting GM and going for organic solutions. The black arts of PR-backed ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’ and ‘authorities’ can’t turn back the tide.

Do As I Say, Not as I Do

We are all used to voting for politicians on the basis of promises that are based on market research into what people would like to see happen. Once elected, the politicians shamelessly break those promises.  Why don’t they just do as they say?  Our elected leaders have power, but it is limited. The highest and mightiest Presidents and Prime Ministers must still kneel before higher authorities: the barons of the press, industry, agribusiness, oil, war, drugs and finance.

This is the corruption that makes democracy so disappointing.  We elect our leaders so they can create the society we want, but they have to support interests that clash with what is best for society.  The result is climate change, pollution, war, banksterism and disease. 

The organic movement was founded on selfish but noble ideals.  If we look after the soil on this planet, then we can enjoy the fruits of that soil in a balanced healthy diet without fear.  The Soil Association, the founding organisation of the global organic movement, built this philosophy into its name.  Sounds obvious, but if you are an agrichemical company or if you just want to rape the land and move on then such high-minded idealism can be an obstacle to enriching the bottom line.  Short-termism is where the money lies.  Externalising costs equals more profit to the bottom line.

We have suffered inexplicable stupidity from successive governments when it comes to the food supply. Whether it’s permitting toxic pesticides, GM or subsidising biofuels, rational behaviour is absent. Organic farming has been treated by our governments as a troublesome and marginal activity that is for middle class eccentrics and hippies who refuse to grow up.   

So let’s take a look at some of these freaks:

David Cameron – Tory Farming Minister Jim Paice tells the 2012 Oxford Farming Conference we can’t go on ignoring the benefits of GM foods.   But at home in the Cotswolds, Samantha Cameron sensibly shops at Daylesford Farm Shop, a resolutely organic store that proudly never stocks GM foods and sells organic vegetables, meat, baked goods and dairy products produced on the farm.

Barack Obama – promised GM foods would be labelled if he got elected. Now he opposes labelling.  He brutally overrode the Supreme Court to allow GM alfalfa and sugar beets.  But at home his wife Michelle turns the White House garden organic so that the Obama family have a safe local food supply

Mitt Romney – steered Monsanto onto the GM track in the 70s; his Agricultural Advisory Committee is headed by Monsanto lobbyist Randy Russel and packed with other Monsanto supporters.  But at home Mitt himself only eats organic, (especially his favourite peanut butter and honey sandwiches). In 1998 Romney’s wife Ann got off intravenous steroids for her multiple sclerosis and successfully restored her health with organic food and acupuncture, which she now sticks to religiously.

Bill and Hillary Clinton – Bill strongarmed the EU to accept GM when he was President.  Hillary still pushes GM worldwide.  But at home, according to their executive chef at the White House, the food they ate was organic and Hillary had a pesticide-free roof garden.

George W Bush – Promoted GM and tried to weaken organic standards.  But at home Laura Bush insisted that all food in the White House was organic

Tony Blair – expressed ‘frustration’ with people who opposed GM and called opposition a ‘flash in the pan.’  But at home his wife Cherie told me: “I can’t wait to tell my husband that I met the man who makes his favourite chocolate!”

Notice a pattern here?  

In China – the Special Food Supply Center supplies China’s political elite with organic, strictly non-GM food including hormone- and antibiotic-free meat. However, recent government incentives have led to 40% annual organic market growth in the past 5 years, so there is a trickle down effect

What on earth is the point of democracy if all it achieves is a healthy natural lifestyle for a handful of our rulers while they impose dangerous, untested GM foods and carcinogenic pesticides on the rest of us? 

These bio-fools are killing us

Bio-fuel subsidies cost the US taxpayer $6 billion – for an end product that uses 70% more energy from fossil fuels to produce than it delivers. These bio-fools are killing us, warns Craig Sams

I spent mid-July in the withering heat of Nebraska and Iowa, in America’s Midwest. My grandchildren, who were on their first visit to the US to meet their farming relatives, were gobsmacked at the endless rows of corn, viewed from the train from Pittsburgh to Omaha.  You have to travel overland in the US to appreciate the scale. It helps that Amtrak trains are so slow, lumbering along at a pace that barely exceeds that of the covered wagon my great-grandparents rode when they went west more than a century ago.

40% of US corn is planted in order to be burned for energy. The most efficient way would be mix it with coal and co-fire it in power plants. Instead it is expensively fermented, then distilled, then shipped to gasoline companies who are obliged by law to blend it at 15% with gasoline. The idea is that the US isn’t dependent on those pesky A-rabs for their energy supplies. Only of course they are. The Middle East not only continues to supply most of America’s oil, they now supply most of the nitrate fertiliser that grows the Midwest corn that gets converted into ethanol to reduce dependency on the troubled Middle East. You couldn’t make it up.

Professor David Pimentel has done the maths.  Every gallon of ethanol costs $1.74 per gallon to produce (compared to $1.00/gallon for gasoline) and uses up 70% more energy from fossil fuels to produce than it delivers. The cost to the US taxpayer is $6 billion a year in ethanol subsidies. And all that corn that is burned up only supplies 1.3% of America’s gasoline supply.

Now global warming is coming to bite the whole thing firmly in the backside.  The US, with 6% of the world’s population, emits 25% of its greenhouse gases. The corn crop is failing as a prolonged drought takes its toll.  Never mind that Monsanto and the GM brigade have been promising drought-resistant crops for nearly 20 years. Throughout our journey we saw entire fields where the corn was yellow and shrivelled, not worth harvesting even for a few meagre ears.  Many more, planted confidently in expectation of 200 bushels (5 tonnes) per acre are unlikely to yield even half that much.   At the beginning of the year corn was priced at $4.80 a bushel, now it’s trading at over $8.

Cousin John in Nebraska, who raises hogs and buys in corn over and above what he can grow on 2000 acres, will have to pay more for his feed and will need to charge more for his hogs. Cousin Dan raises corn on 1800 acres for the local ethanol plant.  The oil companies have to buy the ethanol, by law.  All Dan has to do is get the crop in. Other farmers have sold their crops in advance when the price was up to $6 a bushel and will have to fulfil those contracts by buying corn in at $8 a bushel or will go bust. God is overwhelmed with prayers for rain. Keeping his religious options open, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said “I get on my knees every day and I’m saying an extra prayer right now,” Vilsack said. “If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.”

The devastating combination of crazy legislation and global warming is reaching the end game.  Pity the poor US farmers caught in the middle on this one, but what about the rest of the world?  Earlier this year I met with Ashraf Hamouda of the World Food Programme.  The price of grain is set in Chicago on the basis of US corn prices. This also sets grain prices worldwide. So farmers who are getting good crops everywhere (including the UK) are raking it in while people who have to buy food are wondering where they will get the money to feed their families. Millions will starve to death and the world’s climate will go on getting worse.  All for a deluded subsidy scheme that benefits nobody.

How to save the economy

As usual, when things go wrong, nobody asks me for help until it’s too late.  And Natural Products News seems a funny place to solve the UK’s financial problems, but here goes anyway:

Every day we all pour money into banks and take money out.

Every year HM Treasury collects our taxes and pours it into the banks and it never comes out.  The banks are in a precarious position, so they borrow money at ½% interest and lend it out at 5-29% interest and this helps them to recover their gambling debts and rebuild their balance sheets.cra

We can’t let the banks go down because they’d drag us all down with them.  If a bank goes bust, someone will pick up your debt to the bank from the receiver, there’s no escape

So how on earth can we rebuild the economy and put our banks on a solid footing?  I have 2 ideas: short-dated cash and green jobs

SHORT DATED MONEY

Instead of giving the banks the estimated £325 billion that they needed to stay afloat -  just put the money into the public domain.  There are 50 million adults in the UK.  If the Treasury gave every adult £6500 that would be equivalent to what they’ve done by creating money out of thin air to bail out the banks by ‘quantitative easing.’ 

They could give out £1000 every other month for 12 months.  Give it out in short dated £50 notes that expire 2 months from the date of issue.  That would force every person in the UK to go out and spend money on something.  It would be like a rush of adrenalin to the economy.  It would all end up in the banks eventually, but at least on the way it would have made a lot of businesses profitable and helped people pay off their mortgages.   You could restrict the expenditure to UK produced goods and services, to really keep the money local. 

GREEN JOBS

In 1933 the US had record unemployment during the Great Depression.  Talk of revolution was in the air

First RC + MJ = GG where RC stands for Reduced Carbon, MJ for More Jobs and GG for Green Growth. Secondly, EC + R > NO where EC stands for Energy Conservation, R for Renewables and NO for Nuclear Option (In maths > indicates greater than). In other words if the government is planning to spend £100bn to meet our energy requirements, should it spend it on conservation and renewables or on getting Russia or China to build a new generation of nuclear reactors. In political as well as purely economic terms this is a "no brainer"

Achievement Award

Recently I was chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Natural and Organic Awards.  It was a huge privilege and for that I am grateful. 

John Donne’s poem ‘No Man is an Island’ springs to mind.  I have never been a solo pilot. My achievements were the result of the hard work, effort,   commitment and shared vision of all the people that I have worked with over the years.  Foremost among these is my brother Gregory, who moved on from the natural foods industry in the late 1980s but whose influence and impact was equal to my own. 

Our little business started in 1966 with my importing and marketing books about macrobiotics and supplying macrobiotic food at the UFO Club, where the Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and Arthur Brown played to dancing hippies every Friday night.  That created the core customer base of what was originally called Yin Yang Ltd.  Gregory had an accident at university in Berkeley California and came back to the UK on a stretcher at the beginning of 1967.  A month later I had opened a small restaurant/study centre that was the haunt of the likes of Yoko Ono and Graham Bond.  The restaurant closed and I found larger premises in Westbourne Grove.  However as an American with no permission to work in the UK I had problems that necessitated my return to the USA in late 1967.  During this time Gregory rose heroically to the challenge and opened the planned restaurant, called “Seed” - which became an instant success.  John Lennon was a personal friend of his and the alternative society regarded Seed as its own.  Our mother Margaret oversaw the food preparation, bringing her Midwestern values of hard work and competence to the scene. By 1969 I was back in the UK with full residential rights and the freedom to work .  Gregory had by then opened Ceres Grain Shop in All Saints Road, the first natural food store, (as opposed to health shop – there was a much bigger difference in those days).

In 1970 we created Harmony Foods.  Gregory learned graphic design and created labels that were clean, informative and distinctive.  They set the pattern for the natural foods design style of the 1970s.  Gregory also sat on the committee that drafted the first organic food standards at the Soil Association – 2 pages long, it seemed enough at the time.

Harmony Foods took brown rice and lentils and macrobiotic specialities from the pioneer natural food stores to the health food shop mainstream.  Gregory hooked up with organic growers all over the country in order to get UK-produced organic food.  He bought most of Britain’s organic grain and milled flour at Harmony Foods that I would bake into bread at Ceres Bakery and then distribute around London.  This led to making flakes and Harmony cereal flakes went in truckloads to Germany, where organic production was still finding its feet.  Harmony peanut butter became a leading national brand after we were seen on the 6 pm BBC news packing it into jars at the first Mind and Body exhibition, a huge show at Olympia

By the late 1970s Harmony Foods had to specialise.  We focussed on peanut butter, jam and ginseng, hiving off the other products.  But the business was too small for us both.  But by then Gregory had created the Vegeburger’  

The Realeat Vegeburger created a whole new category of foods – vegetarian equivalents of dishes normally seen in a meat format.  It was a runaway success. Gregory’s annual Realeat Gallup poll measured the growth in vegetarianism and brought it in from the margins to be a recognised category in the grocery market.  Catering packs of Vegeburger mix and vegetarian ready meals enabled pubs and restaurants to be ready and willing when a veggie customer turned up. 

Gregory sold the Vegeburger to British Arkady in the late 1980s and went on to carve out a career as a fractal artist and is now in demand as a speaker, drawing on his thought provoking books Uncommon Sense and Sun of God.   He continues to amaze and inspire – our partnership helped lay the foundations of the organic and natural movement and I will always be grateful for the important part he played.

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.