Vegfest

Way back in 1944, when the Vegan Society was born, they dabbled with different names and ended up with “Vegan’ the letters of which were ‘the beginning and end of veg-etari-an.’  Hard to imagine that they were being that prophetic all those decades ago, but boy, are they gaining traction now.  These days, vegetarianism is the gateway food choice to veganism.

In the 70s the Vegan Society began publishing a printed list of vegan foods.  This was in the days when ingredient lists on food products were optional.  Of particular interest was crisps: the only flavour listed as acceptable to vegans was “Prawn Cocktail Flavour”.  All the other crisps had milk powder or derivatives in their flavour coatings.   It wasn’t easy being a vegan then, well now it is…and much more fun.

Anybody who was at the vegan mega-festival “VegFest UK” in Brighton in the last week of March could be forgiven for thinking the battle was over and that vegan militancy could lighten its stance.   No way, vegans are on a roll.  There was seminar after seminar on activism. 

There is a dynamism about Veganism that warms my heart.  None of the friendly compromise between vegetarians and meat eaters, no common ground.   The consumer of eggs and milk is complicit in shortening the lives (I could’ve said ‘murder’ but I’m trying to walk the middle ground here) of chickens and calves.  Vegans’ hands are clean.  

The Hunt Saboteurs Association were handing out copies of their magazine ‘Howl,’ which contained an erudite article dismissing the stereotype that hunt sabs are really about class war and ‘sticking it to the toffs’.  This critique diminishes the seriousness of the passionate and militant wing of veganism.  But what is clear to any vegan is that all activity that involves taking food away from animals or killing them for their meat (or for fun) has got to stop. 

The Brighton Centre was rammed.  At any given time there were up to half a dozen well-attended workshops, lectures, discussions and musical events - this wasn’t just about looking at lots of interesting vegan products, this was about conferring, debating and consolidating the thinking of the movement.   Plenty of beards and dreadlocks but also plenty of mainstream middle-class people who had come along to get with the programme.  The youth of the attendees bodes well for the future of veganism over the next few decades.   Speakers were armed with the facts: if we were all vegan then climate change anxiety would disappear, the countryside would be more biodiverse, badgers would sleep in peace and the pressure on the NHS would disappear. 

Vegans understand nutrition much better nowadays and there were lots of products that contained the kind of concentrated nutrients that are important to athletes and active vegan lifestyles.   I chatted to one particularly muscular guy and his very fit wife Zoe.  He said the guys at the gym can’t quite believe he really is vegan, thinking he must be sneaking meat somewhere to keep those pecs so well defined.   “Protein is protein,” he commented.  “It’s the iron you pump with it that counts.”

Junk food has its place in veganism too.  There was a burger stall with proud signage: “Vegan Junk Food.”  And CBD was all over the place, in food, in remedies and in skincare.  All you have to do is call it ‘medicinal’ and low-grade cannabis fetches a better price than skunk.  The Hempen Cooperative were selling hemp leaf tea, hemp seed oil and CBD oil.  I suppose you could smoke the tea if you were so inclined.  

Although many of the speakers extolled the environmental virtues of veganism, I was surprised at how many products on display were not organic.  My first reaction was that vegans were less concerned about organic provenance than about being animal product-free.  However, it soon became evident that there is an opportunistic element - many food processors make vegan products anyway, could care less about vegan or organic principles but see a fast-growing market and were out in force to capture the loyalty of this very committed constituency.   

I sampled and bought a jar of yummy vegan pesto - it was indistinguishable from (I hesitate to use the adjective), the ‘real’ thing.

All you need is love and brown rice

Shifting the perspective - animal welfare or veganism?

Click on the covers of the books to purchase

Time to break the prescription drug addiction cycle

Craig Sams offers an alternative perspective on the culture of prescription drug addiction, saying a natural solution could be more effective in treating depression

A conversation took place three years ago between a good friend of mine and her doctor. Her husband had left her and she was extremely depressed. She went to see her doctor.

The doctor gave her a prescription for a very addictive 30mg pill that she would have to take every day for the rest of her life. She would sometimes be more prone to suicidal thoughts and less inhibited about acting on them. If she ever tried to stop taking them because she couldn’t stand the side effects, the doctor would not be able or willing to help. She eventually went cold turkey and now experiences periodic electric shocks in her head; which other people who have given up call ‘the zapps.’ Some people reduce the level of addiction by gradually reducing the dose level from 30mg to 26mg to 24mg to 22mg, right down to 6mg or 4mg, at which point it is much easier to get off. But no drug company provides that means of escape. If you go on the internet, there are some people in Holland who will provide you with reduced dose pills that make it a lot easier and safer to give up, but neither the NHS nor any drug company or doctor will help you with that.

What the doctor could have said: “Go out to a field and select half a dozen psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and eat them. Sit down in a comfortable spot and let them take effect and enjoy the journey. If that doesn’t do the trick completely, repeat after five weeks and you should be fine.”

Of people who take psilocybe just once, 94% experience a dramatic remission of anxiety and depression. The New Scientist recently called on the government to allow mental health researchers to study psilocybin. They do now, but the subjects have to buy it on the black market which invalidates the clinical results. If everybody who was depressed just took a few mushrooms the drug companies would be out of business.

Patrick Holford, the nutritionist, therapist and columnist in NPN, has just released a compelling rap called ‘Big Pharma Man: it’s a grand scam – he don’t give a damn’. It describes the criminality, fines, fraudulent research and cover-ups that have led to millions of lives being ruined by drugs that don’t work and are addictive. Just Google ‘Drug rap Patrick Holford’ and enjoy.

President Trump didn’t get any money from Big Pharma to get elected and so he has dared to say he’ll take action to deal with America’s opioid epidemic, where four out of five heroin addicts started on prescription opiods; drugs that are more addictive, expensive and dangerous than heroin. Meanwhile, Americans will continue to die at a rate of more than 1,000 a week from opioid overdoses. The makers of the drugs keep a database of doctors. Special attention goes to the ones who run ‘pill mills’, dispensing drugs at huge profit for themselves. These are doctors who swore the Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm. Hah! When Purdue, manufacturers of the opiod medication, ended up in court it paid $600 million in fines, and the executives who were found guilty of the criminal charge of selling OxyContin ‘with the intent to defraud or mislead’ paid $35 million. If someone sold $50 worth of heroin they would go to jail for a few years. These pharma guys get off light; the fines are insignificant compared to the billions of dollars they continue to make.

In my view it’s time to legalize all drugs, make them all available on the NHS, then let informed people choose how they want to get well instead of spending lives of misery hooked on drugs that have terrible side effects, which are treated with more drugs that also have terrible side effects. The alternatives are safer and cheaper.

Is it any wonder that I haven’t been to a doctor since 1965? I just say no to prescription drugs.

WWOOF

A couple of young women pitched up at our place recently. We fed them, gave them a twin-bed room and they worked for us for six hours every day, mostly weeding and cutting back brambles on the edge of the orchard. If they had to pay for a B&B it would cost them £700 a week at this time of year so they’re earning, for a 30-hour week, nearly £10 an hour.

And they’re not tourists; they’re immediately part of the community. That’s ‘wwoofing’ for you.

WWOOF was founded in 1971 by the wonderful Sue Coppard, who was also the editor of Seed Magazine, the Journal of Organic Living that we Samses published from 1971-1977. She wrote to an organic farmer in Sussex and asked if she could come and help out for a weekend. She had a transformative and exciting time and friends said they’d like to do it too, so she took them on a second visit. That was the beginning of an organisation called Weekend Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Then people started staying for weeks, not just weekends, so it became Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Now people in 61 countries are wwoofing. Globally there are more than 10,000 organic farms and gardens that are WWOOF hosts, so now it is Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (still WWOOF). A person who ‘wwoofs’ is known as a ‘wwoofer.’

Wwoofers can be any age or nationality. It is refreshing to reflect on the people we have met who we would never otherwise have encountered: the American honeymoon couple wwoofing round England on a tandem bicycle; Andre, the French engineer in his fifties who got all our generators, strimmers, brushcutters, rotovators and everything else electromechanical running perfectly; the Italians and the dinners of pasta and brown rice risotto they would prepare for us. Then there is Chris from Oxfordshire who is happiest working alone in the woods, clearing brambles, creating nice spaces among the trees and making charcoal. He’s a regular now.

Every time a wwoofer stays with a host they get a cultural immersion. An organic farmer or grower is living a lifestyle and a philosophy; that’s why they’re organic. Living with them for a few weeks helps the wwoofer to absorb the ethical rationale for farming in harmony with nature. It’s a rationale that infuses one’s whole life. It’s ‘ecotherapy’. So, after a season of wwoofing they will return to their regular lives with an irreversible change in their attitude to all the environmental and social issues that have their roots in the way we produce our food. When they go shopping they will unhesitatingly choose the organic option when it is available. They have become part of the movement.

When Attlee’s Labour Government in 1947 passed the Agriculture Act an important part of it was subsidies on mechanisation, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, aimed at moving agricultural labour off the land and into factories. Farmers who didn’t comply could have their land confiscated by the State, so small farms and rural employment crashed. Growers became dependent on casual labour from abroad, weed killers instead of hand-weeding and chemical fertilisers instead of manure and compost. This commitment to industrial agriculture was cemented into Britain’s farming and has been a burden on the taxpayer and on the environment ever since. Organic farmers were left at a permanent disadvantage, as chemical pesticides are cheaper than manual labour and there are few controls on the resulting poisoning of the environment. Nobody really measures the cost to the NHS of farm pollution. Nobody really measures the impact on biodiversity. Nobody measures the carbon footprint. So when a farmer has a steady supply of wwoofers to help with their labour-intensive chores it is economically
transformative and makes organic food much more competitive. Readers of my column know that carbon pricing would tip the pricing balance in favour of organic. That, plus wwoofers, would mean organic food would be consistently less expensive than non-organic.

Once a wwoofer always a wwoofer. The global community of wwoofers is ever-expanding and is an important pillar of the organic movement.

Harmony in food and farming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Old Order is crumbling – great news for health freedom

The big conflict of our age is between Big Government and the MAAFIA (Microsoft Apple Alphabet Facebook Instagram Amazon), says Craig Sams. The implications for health freedom are profound.

Recently Theresa May has been making threatening noises about needing to control the internet and social media for ‘national security’ reasons. The press, including the erstwhile freedom-loving Guardian, are full of articles somberly bemoaning the hazards of allowing the free-for-all of viewpoints that the internet allows.

This new transparency is driving our rulers crazy. It used to be that you could do what you liked in the corridors of power. You could cut deals with drug companies to prohibit alternatives to their products that sell with 1000% (at least) markups via the NHS You could declare war on innocent countries in order to bring them democracy, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents while sustaining the market for the bombs and missiles that create profits. Whenever I read an argument for nuclear power, military expenditure or protection of pharmaceutical makers and see the word ‘jobs’ I see red. Claiming ‘jobs’ is the last refuge of the scoundrel, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson (on patriotism).

Google was recently fined €2.3 billion for stacking the deck on price comparison. Big deal. Nobody uses those sites anymore – just go to Amazon and you can see it all. This is just an EU way of taxing a company that is making the world a more efficient and economically smarter place.

The big conflict of our age is between Big Government and the MAAFIA (Microsoft Apple Alphabet Facebook Instagram Amazon). Big Government rules us by force, with a momentary opportunity every four or five years, to consent to more rule by force. The MAAFIA rules us by consent. We voluntarily let them have our personal data because we trust them in a way that we would never trust a government. They give us something back: convenience; money saving; time saving; instant access to massive amounts of knowledge; safety; social networking. They let competing ideas fight it out on their platforms. If you want insights into how to be healthy you don’t look on a government website, you go to Google or ask your Facebook friends. If you want to know what the Government thinks just study the lobbyists from FOWAP (Finance, Oil, War, Agribusiness, Pharma). They set the Government agenda and the mainstream media dutifully tell us it’s for our own good.

The Government takes our money, as taxes, then insists that our ‘free’ medical system revolves around addictive overpriced drugs with horrific side effects. If you try to offer a herbal remedy for illness, or other natural treatments that don’t have side effects, you could end up in jail. The Government taxes soft drinks to raise £500 million a year and then blows £250 million a year on subsidies to sugar producers. And we elect them!

The MAAFIA is here to stay. Of course, the mainstream media will egg on the Government to control it while still defending themselves against press censorship. The Guardian and The Times are both watching helplessly as their readership defects to online forums. How frustrating it must be for a journalist who has worked their way up the pecking order at a newspaper and then finds that some kid with a three million following on Instagram is being courted by advertisers because their followers trust them more than the recycled press releases they can read in a newspaper.
Hands off the MAAFIA! It has been created in our image and carefully reflects our every thought and deed to make sure that it is a true manifestation of what we most care about. It is immune to lobbyists and political bribes. It is our gateway to true freedom.

Hydroponics

Back in the 1940s, Eve Balfour wrote a book called The Living Soil that became, along with Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament, the bible of the organic movement.  Albert and Eve were going to call farming in harmony with nature ‘Biological’ farming, but J.I.Rodale, Eve’s pal in the US, persuaded her that ‘Organic’ was a better name.  Organic farming is biological’  farming in that the carbohydrate produced by plants fuels the biological engine of microbes, worms and other creatures in the soil that converts soil nutrients into food for the plant.

So…what happens when there’s no soil involved?

When hydroponic farming came along, the organic movement was divided.  How could we not grow things in soil and call them ‘organic?’  The proponents said that hydroponics mimicked soil by using peat or coir as the growing medium, infused with water and organic nutrients.  The Soil Association allows peat and coir, but only for starting plants out or to improve soil, but not as a growing medium on its own. So as hydroponics wasn’t ‘soil’ it wasn’t approved. The EU organic regulations also prohibit hydroponic growing.  However, the US organic regulations do allow hydroponic growing. They require that the nutrients are organically approved and no pesticides or other prohibited inputs are used.  It’s what they call ‘bioponic’ – in other words as long as the biological activity is the same as in organic growing, where microbes in the soil interact with nutrients and plants, it is the same, functionally, as growing in soil.

We have an equivalence agreement with the US that allows the import and export of organic foods even where there may be some differences in regulations.  This is one of those differences and it’s now being reviewed on both sides.

I should declare my interest.  Our company Carbon Gold sells soil improver to organic greenhouse growers who benefit from the benificial biological impact of enriched biochar which encourages the active microorganisms that typify healthy soil.  It does it by providing a huge surface area that enables them to flourish.  With it they can grow tomatoes avoid suffering from soil-borne diseases.  But we also sell much more to non-organic growers who value the fact that, whether combined with coir or peat, biochar’s biological boost enables them to reduce or eliminate pesticide use and enjoy higher yields, by plugging in to the ‘soil food web.’   So I’m walking both sides of the street and ‘conventional’ growers are reducing their dependency on pesticides and inputs.

Farmers who grow hydroponically and using biology are getting yields and quality up, too. It’s reached a point where a grower in Holland can get 80 tonnes of vine tomatoes per hectare, a 10-15% increase, by working with biology.  It would be unfortunate if branding such as ‘pesticide-free’ or ‘LEAF’ were to predominate with consumers who just want a ‘clean’ product that is free of pesticide residues.  Most aren’t bothered if the roots of the plant were in soil or instead in some kind of soil-like mixture off the ground.  They just don’t want to eat pesticides.  Strawberries, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce and salad crops all perform brilliantly in controlled situations. Performance equals competitiveness.

 Organic growers use peat in greenhouses and also steam sterilise their soil between growing seasons.  This raises ecological and biological questions that are uncomfortable to answer.  With ‘bioponics’ you recreate the biological conditions of growing in soil, but in troughs that allow at least 180 litres of soil per square metre – this means ‘feeding the soil’ rather than ‘feeding the plant’ and looks like it may be the compromise way forward.  For the past 5 years I have been growing vegetables (for my own use) in my greenhouse in troughs 2 feet off the ground that contain 400 litres of homemade soil per square metre.  I use the same troughs in the spring to propagate healthy plants that are then planted out and sold as Soil Association certified.  And I’ve never had to steam sterilise or use peat.

This affects everyone.  When you go into a supermarket the first thing you see is fresh vegetables.  In Denmark fresh fruit and vegetables are 30% of the organic market. The same proportions apply in the UK.  25 years ago, when organic was first making headway the only organic products supermarkets bothered with were fresh produce. That’s because people are most passionate about organic when they are buying fresh fruit and vegetables.   If organic vegetable growers lose ground because they can’t take full advantage of the clean growing breakthroughs in biological technologies and pest controls then they’re not the only ones who will suffer.  The entire organic marketplace will be weakened if consumers start to choose non-organic ‘clean’ fruit and vegetables.  Once consumers have weakened their commitment to the organic ‘brand’ it can have unwanted repercussions on all their other purchasing. 

So the transatlantic debate about hydroponics, bioponics and earth affects us all, not just vegetable growers. 

A Gut Feeling

Some time ago I sent off a poo sample to the British Gut Project, to profile my gut flora.

I just got the result and it makes gripping reading.  In our age of gluten sensitivity, wheat allergy, coeliac disease, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis it’s good to see that it is now possible to find out, at a microbial level, what’s going on. 

 I realise this is the second time I’ve mentioned the ‘poo’ in a column, but the only other way to find out what’s going on in your intestines is to submit to deeply invasive surgery.  Not worth it for someone who is casually interested to see what those little microbes are up to down in the depths.

 The results were gratifying:  I have a higher level of firmicutes than average – these are the lactobacilli that are so important to the digestion of carbohydrates and that produce the lactate that fuels the brain.  I also have a stonking level of bacteroidetes – these are the bifidobacteria that love to convert fibre into butyric acid, the backbone of our immune system.  Not so good on the proteobacteria, which you find in decomposing meat, because meat very infrequently gets a chance to decompose in my digestive system. 

Those are the headlines.  Then the chart compares your results to the average, people who eat a similar diet and are of the same sex, age and BMI.  Then comes the final comparison: they compare your gut flora profile to that of Michael Pollan, the esteemed New York Times food writer and author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.

Outcome?  My gut flora profile exactly matches that of Michael Pollan.  Result! 

 Pollan is the author of several memorable quotes that describe his view of diet and health.  The best known one is his all-encompassing dietary advice: “Eat food.  Not too much. Mostly plants.”   That’s how I eat.  2 meals a day, mostly whole grains and vegetables. 

His other advice includes: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food” and ‘Shake the hand that feeds you” (in support of local food). 

 The natural food industry has always been on this page – while the ‘experts’ have been busy batting on about one nutrient after another without noticing that the nutritional factor that makes a huge difference is the invisible mass of 10,000 different microbes (mostly lactobacilli and bifidobacteria), weighing more than a human brain, that have to deal with the processed stuff we throw at them.  

I’ll always remember a 1972 BBC Panorama programme in which they sat the experts on a panel and kept us natural food nuts in a small audience.  The leading expert was Dr. Arnold Bender, Professor of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College.  At the time 100% wholemeal bread was the iconic healthy food.  We were put down sharply when the worthy professor announced that white bread was far superior to wholemeal bread because it had more protein and carbohydrate per slice thanks to the absence of all that bulky non-nutritious bran. This reductionist approach to food was set out in his 1985 book ‘Health or Hoax’ where he assured his readers that ‘there is no such thing as health food’ and that the health food industry is a fraudulent, non science-based, industry that takes advantage of consumer gullibility and fear.  The continuing rule of white bread, hydrogenated fat and processed food was underpinned by experts like Bender and the Institute of Food Science and Technology, which he co-founded.

So it was refreshing when Michael Pollan used his position of influence and wide readership at the New York Times to set out the opposite case.   The argument for natural foods is proudly unscientific: if your gut flora are in good shape they will drive you instinctively towards the whole, natural foods that you need.  Far better to trust their judgement than some professors who tell you to stop eating butter and eat margarine (in those days typically 30% hydrogenated fat), then change their mind about butter after a few million have died of hydrogenated fat-induced heart attacks.  Nature knows best – keep it simple.

Find out how you compare to Michael Pollan at   http://britishgut.org/

Gregory Sams, my brother

50 years ago I opened a little restaurant and macrobiotic study centre in Notting Hill.  People filled in their own bills, based on what they ate and paid on an honour system.  Then Graham Bond brought his Hammond organ down for a party one evening and played until 2 a.m.  The neighbourhood erupted in rage and I was chucked out.  I found ideal new premises: two big rooms in a hotel basement between Paddington and Notting Hill. I got it ready to open.  Then a complication about my right to stay in the U.K led me to have to leave the country.  That's when my brother Gregory, who had been a wheelchair user since an accident 8 months earlier at University of California Berkeley, rose to the occasion.  He completed the restaurant project, supported by our mother Margaret and my girl friend Ann. Seed Restaurant opened in early 1968.   It was an instant success, with great macrobiotic food and a loyal customer base that included John and Yoko, Terence Stamp and everyone else who understood that organic wholesome food was the way  of the future.  Gregory published a magazine called 'Harmony' that neatly set out the basics of the macrobiotic philosophy.   He then opened the first ever natural foods store called Ceres Grain Shop.  It had all the grains, beans, seeds and organic vegetables. There were no products containing sugar, honey, refined cereals and no supplements.   Ceres was the model for the new natural food stores, distinctly different from health food shops. 

I rejoined him in 1969 and we went on to create Harmony Foods, with an offering of hitherto unknown foods like organic brown rice, miso, tamari, aduki beans, seaweeds and (because of our customer base) patchouli oil.  Ceres Grain Shop moved to Portobello Road where the manager in 1971 was Pamela Donaldson. Pam represented us in setting up the first Glastonbury Fayre.  She became ill so I took over running the shop, working with Gregory at Harmony Foods.  We did the food at that legendary Glastonbury.  In 1972 the premises next door became available and we opened Ceres Bakery, pioneering sourdough and wholemeal sugar-free baking. There was little or no competition in those days. Most people were still wondering how long this natural organic food fad would last.

Gregory liaised with committed organic farmers who grew cereals and bought their wheat, oats, rye and barley, milled it at Harmony Foods and supplied it to Ceres bakery.  He organised flaking of cereals that led to British cereal flakes being the mainstay of German organic mueslis.  He sat on the Soil Association committee that drafted the first organic standards: 2 pages, would you believe?  When the Soil Association expressed a lack of interest in 'trade' he and David Stickland set up Organic Farmers and Growers to certify and market homegrown organic cereals.  Harmony Foods went from strength to strength and we moved to a huge warehouse/factory in Willesden. We had a big cash 'n' carry area and manufactured our Whole Earth branded jams, peanut butter, packed cereals and macrobiotic specialties.   We grew too fast and in 1982 found ourselves overstocked and with cash flow problems.  Gregory had just created the world's first 'Vegeburger' and trademarked it because nobody had used the word before. Yes, true. His Realeat food company marketed the VegeBurger. and I concentrated on downsizing Harmony Foods and focussing on peanut butter and jam.   He instigated the Gallup polls that highlighted the trend to vegetarianism.  The Vegeburger was a massive success, Gregory cashed out and retired.  For a few months.  Then in 1989 he created the world's first fractal art shop and created stunning posters based on the Mandelbrot set and Chaos Theory.  Since then he has written two ground-breaking books:  The State is out of Date and Sun of God, two books that will change your perspective on everything. 

I am honoured to have known this remarkable guy for 68 years and to acknowledge his seminal contribution over 50 years to this wonderful world of natural and organic food we take for granted nowadays.

Let bodily fluids and solids (and food) be thy medicine

Craig Sams imagines the health farms of the future where ‘super healthy’ humans are raised.

Until just over a decade ago the missus and I would go to Shrubland Hall Health Clinic up in Suffolk, where we’d enjoy vegetarian food, bracing country walks, massage, pilates and other healthful activities and return refreshed and invigorated. They closed in 2006 and more recently we go to Amchara in Somerset, which offers a vegetable juice fast, yoga, massage and colonics. Amchara are big on probiotics, which you have, with psyllium, with every liquid ‘meal.’ Their therapy is designed to break your bad dietary habits and restore your gut flora. But is this enough? What if your gut flora are too degraded to be restored? What if candida or other ‘bad bugs’ are in control? What if the ‘good bugs’ have been wiped out and can’t re-establish?

The average kid has 17 courses of antibiotics before they reach maturity. Doctors carelessly prescribe them to adults too for minor problems like runny noses or tummyache, problems that could be cured by a day or two of bed rest or fasting. Antibiotics destroy your gut flora. So do steroids, some vaccines, stress, alcohol and low fibre diet. The resulting gut dysbiosis is associated with colitis, IBS, multiple sclerosis,autism,anorexia, depression, OCD, migraines and Parkinson’s disease.

A particular dangerous side effect of taking antibiotics is Clostridium difficile. It’s a disease that was practically unknown until the advent of antibiotics. Now 30,000 Americans a year die from it and about 5000 in the UK. Clostridium takes over your gut flora after the 10,000 different bacteria, fungi and archaea in your gut are wiped out by a dose of antibiotics. Some of the good bugs survive, mainly by hiding in your appendix until the antibiotics are stopped. Then they can try to combat the Clostridium. If they fail the triumphant Clostridium leads to diarrhea, abdominal pain and in about 6% of cases, death. The conventional cure is more and stronger antibiotics. This works in about 25% of the cases but has a 50% relapse rate. There is another cure that has a 90% success rate, though. That’s faecal transplantation, also known as stool transplantation. It works for colitis, IBS, candida and other gut diseases, not just Clostridium. Only one hospital in Britain offers it as it’s a bit complicated. First you have to find a ‘donor.’ This is a person who has a completely healthy gut flora with no traces of infectious diseases such as AIDS or malaria. These aren’t easy to find. What’s more, faecal transplantation is a messier business than popping pills. A typical treatment programme would require 10 days of daily transplantation. But when it is done properly it can prevent a lifetime of misery and pain.

What about other person-to-person transfers from the healthy to the unwell? At the Society for Neuroscience convention in November 2016 researchers reported on trials that show an injection of blood from a young healthy person can reverse Alzheimer’s and senile dementia, improve cognition and strengthen the heart and liver.

“Could the health farms of the future be real farms? Farms where the farmer is raising healthy humans? What a lovely way to make a living if you’re the one being farmed”

Could the health farms of the future be real farms? Farms where the farmer is raising healthy humans? What a lovely way to make a living if you’re the one being farmed. All you have to do is live in a stress-free and happy environment, eat a balanced diet of organic food, avoid antibiotics, alcohol and risky sex and earn your living by providing a ‘donation’ 2 or 3 times a day. Sure beats mining coal or driving a mini cab.

Imagine: “Welcome to Poucura Health Clinic, Mrs. Jones. We have diagnosed your problem and advise that your donor is Marlene, an extremely fit young woman who has a 100% success rate in curing Clostridium difficile in her donatees. You will stay with us for 10 days and have 2 treatments a day. If you are having forgetfulness issues (we note that you are in your mid 60s and missed an earlier appointment) we can also provide you with a memory-enhancing transfusion from Arthur, whose IQ of 155 reflects his mental acuity. Your diet during your stay will include high-fibre foods, probiotics and inulin to help accelerate the repopulation of your gut with immune-boosting flora.”

Exchanging bodily fluids has been a big no-no and the years of AIDS have made everyone even more cautious. But the war against diseases of modern diet is being lost and doctors are running out of weapons. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said “all disease begins in the gut, ” adding “let food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.” To fast track this we can pay people to be really healthy and then let their bodily fluids and solids be our medicine, along with food. Cures like this only last if they are followed by lifestyle changes. But it’s a lot easier to change your lifestyle when the gut flora that are telling your brain what to eat are the good ones that are always urging healthy choices.

Dear President Trump

Dear President Trump

Now that you have been elected on a platform of freeing the world from the grip of monopolies, lobbyists, bankers and their ilk I submit herewith my 7 proposals on how you can come good on your promises to make America great again

1.   Make America Healthy Again.  This will save you a fortune on whatever modified form of Obamacare you come up with.  It will upset Big Pharma and the American Medical Association, but so what?  Stop autism by honouring your promise to give people freedom to choose vaccination or not, or do it slowly, like you did with Baron.  Scrap restrictions on alternative therapies and nutrient supplementation and let people engage fully with preventive medicine. “Prevention is better than cure”. 

2.   Legalise all Drugs and Medicines – now more than half of US states allow marijuana use, why not go all the way?  Bayer marketed heroin in the 1900s as the non-addictive alternative to opium.  Now the epidemic of legally prescribed opioid addiction is killing far more Americans than heroin.  2 million Americans are addicted to opioids prescribed through Obamacare and it costs them twice as much money as less addictive heroin.  Let the free market prevail over which painkillers people use.

3.   Make America’s Soils Great Again. Stop the ethanol racket.  It was encouraging to see biofuel shares dropping and staying down after your election.  Why on earth is half of America’s corn crop subsidised and forcibly converted to ethanol to be burned? Our pioneer ancestors plowed the rich fertile soils of the Midwest and trashed them.  You are a builder.  Help America rebuild its soils by stopping the huge waste of resources involved in growing corn and then burning it.  If you took away the subsidies then farmers would diversity and grow real food for real people.  They could grow trees for the new technologies of wood-based architecture.

4.   Get Independent Advice on Climate.  The French proposal of ‘4 per 1000’ says that if you rebuild soil organic matter by 0.04% each year that is enough to completely offset the annual increase in greenhouse gas.  Organic farmers increase soil organic matter by 7 per 1000.  Let the carbon markets pay farmers to rebuild soil for future generations and use farm subsidy money to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure.  You can keep on burning oil and gas and still see greenhouse gas levels drop.

5.   Crush ISIS.  This monster was created by an unholy alliance of the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to fulfil Hillary’s stated goal of supporting Israel by weakening Iranian influence in Syria. It has backfired. The easiest way to stop ISIS is to stop financing them.  In the debates you were clear that your priority is to stop ISIS, while Hillary prevaricated.  Make sure that no more American money or NATO money goes to fund terrorist organisations.  Let people of the Middle East get back to normal life. The refugees from this meaningless conflict would rather go home.

6.   Make Nice with Russia.  Gorbachev opened the doors to a new era of peaceful relations with the United States but now they’re the enemy again. President Putin has banned GMOs and announced that he plans to make Russia the world’s most organic nation.  He’s no dummy.   Ask him why he’s doing this. We don’t need to create more enemies, best to make friends, as you said in your victory speech.

7.   Make War on Poverty and Decay.  You promised to rebuild America’s infrastructure, its highways, bridges, tunnels, airports and schools.  You have 2 million men and women in the armed forces who aren’t particularly busy making America great.  Put them to work rebuilding infrastructure. That’s what China’s 2.3 million army do.  President Roosevelt created the 3 million-man Civilian Conservation Corps that built America’s dams and highways in the 1930s and planted 10 billion trees that helped restore the Dust Bowl land.  Get the missile and bomb factories to reconfigure to make something that people want instead of picking fights with faraway countries in order to use up their output. Make forests not deserts.

You are the only politician who can give the finger to the lobbyists from the military, pharmaceutical, oil and financial industries who called you a jerk and your supporters ‘morons’ and ‘deplorables.’ They all supported your opponent.   You owe them nothing.  You owe it to the American people to cast off the baleful influence of these parasites and let people freely choose if they want peace, good health, clean air and economic stability.

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.

Let’s hear it for the Jimi Hendrix (and brown rice rissoles) experience

It’s 1967. The Summer of Love. Jimi Hendrix is blaring from the speakers – and Craig Sams is serving up brown rice rissoles to his sensorily-enhanced patrons

The other day someone posted on my facebook page: You hippies have a lot to answer for. My response was: You’re absolutely right and the answer is ‘you’re welcome’.

The belated recognition of how, in 1967, society moved from dull, grey post-war monotony to the bright, enlightened world we now inhabit is becoming a bit overwhelming. When everyone from Atom Retro fashions to the V&A is pumping my memory for details about 1966/1967. I begin to wonder what’s going on … oh, yes, it’s 50 years since All You Need Is Love came out of the speakers of a record shop on the King’s Road and me and my hippie pals all dashed in to buy the single.

Victoria Broackes, curator at the V&A, is putting together a new show called You Say You Want a Revolution. With a series of ‘immersive experiences’ she aims to recreate the heady atmosphere of those times. With your Sennheiser headphones GPS-sensing where you are in the exhibition hall, you’ll get the sound to go with the sights and environment. Imagine being in the UFO Club with Pink Floyd jamming Interstellar Overdrive while patrons munch on my brown rice rissoles and the light show blobs illuminate a Larry Smart mandala painting, and you might get a sense of one of the seven spaces.

The message of the V&A show is that the fundamentals of our culture were irreversibly changed by the revolution in consciousness that happened in the 1967 Summer of Love, mostly in London, San Francisco and Amsterdam, but anywhere LSD was legally available. The way people thought about everything changed. Music reached parts of the brain it had never previously dared to. Exhibit A: Jimi Hendrix. Artists popularized Art Nouveau and Aubrey Beardsley and went all wishy washy – you had to study a gig poster to find out who was playing when and where. People realized that we were delicate human beings that should not be living in a deteriorating environment, and Friends of The Earth, Greenpeace and the Brundtland report all came from that awareness. Fashion broke out of the mould – I imported Afghan coats, kaftans, Tibetan bags and other ethnic fashion and, with Aedan Kelly, produced blobby dyed silks that were used for shirts and dresses. Everybody wanted one of my Afghan coats when The Beatles walked out of Granny Takes a Trip boutique on Kings Road wearing them.

“Everybody wanted one of my Afghan coats when The Beatles walked out of Granny Takes a Trip boutique on Kings Road wearing them”

We realized that war was an ineffective way of resolving differences. The Vietnam War was an entirely stupid and unjustifiable massacre of innocent people on all sides, but it sharpened awareness that peace, love and understanding were the key to a better world. ‘Normal’ sexual barriers dissolved. The pill helped, but repressed gays discovered their inner selves, inhibited women became sexual dynamos and polyamorous relationships were just one example of the resulting experimentation. People who grew up with alienation in soulless suburbs sought community and shared experience.

Religion was rediscovered as a seeking of a spiritual state of consciousness and energy flows that manifested in yoga, meditation and Buddhism, particularly the Zen variety. So we got Zen Macrobiotics, which married a libertarian oriental philosophy with a way of eating that supported the unity of mind, body and spirit.

People saw beyond the hamburger on their plate to the animal, its death, the hormones, antibiotics and whole horrible origin of something they once took for granted. ‘Ugh!’ They thought – ‘I’ll eat something else.’ But what was something else? That’s where we had the answers with Yin Yang Ltd and a macrobiotic restaurant that enabled people to eat in harmony with their consciousness.

Yin Yang became Harmony Foods, the first to offer organic brown rice and foods like miso, seaweed and tamari.
Renamed Whole Earth Foods it focused on healthy processed food, as brown rice and beans became commoditized. Private Eye quoted our price list direct in Pseuds Corner and its readership chuckled at our perceived pretentiousness. To paraphrase Nigel Farage and Ronnie Barker, we can now say “You laughed when we said that diet was the key to mental, spiritual and physical health, but you aren’t laughing now.”

Come and see us having the last laugh at the V&A from 11 September.

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

La Vialla - an ancient Tuscan farm that shows the way to the future of food

How to regenerate organic – privatize it

How can we free organic from its self-imposed bureaucratic box? We could always ask Brussels to privatize us, says Craig Sams

Q. What do Slow Food, LEAF, Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, Cosmos, Marine Stewardship Council, Red Tractor, Vegan, Vegetarian, Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) and Woodmark all have in common?

A. They all operate trusted authentication symbols that are 100% independent. They can decide what they can certify and how they can certify.

Q. What do the Soil Association, Ecocert, EKO, KRAV, Nature et Progres, OCIA, QAI, OFF, OF&G and 400 or so other organic symbols have in common?

A. They operate trusted authentication symbols that are 100% Government-controlled. They cannot decide what they can certify and how they can certify.

This ‘nationalisation’ of organic certification didn’t happen by accident or by force, we actually asked for it. The independent symbols have grown organically to global respect and stature while the organic ‘brands’ have been stifled in their self-imposed bureaucratic box.

“This ‘nationalisation’ of organic certification didn’t happen by accident or by force, we actually asked for it”

Back in the late 1980s I got to know key players at the Soil Association (up till then we were OF&G licensees). When I heard they were seeking to get the EU to enforce organic standards I was dismayed. Francis Blake of IFOAM and the Soil Association told me that if I wanted to have any influence I should stand for the Soil Association board. I did and didn’t get elected. Boo Hoo. But the Council wanted me anyway and appointed me Treasurer In 1990. I argued from within against letting our precious organic standards go under the control of the agricultural departments which subsidised industrial farming and were 100% behind GMOs. Regrettably the train had already left the station and, short of tying myself to the tracks, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The infant organic industry was stressed about fraudulent claims and thought calling in big brother would stop that. In fact the opposite happened. When the Soil Association sampled a licensee’s oat flakes a few years ago and found chlormequat residues at quite a high level they told the licensee to take them off the market. Defra and UKAS and the oat processor who supplied them all cried foul. The paperwork was in order, that was all that mattered to the enforcers. The Soil Association came close to being banned from certifying but luckily the horsemeat scandal broke out and the EU said lab sampling of products should be permitted.

Not long ago the most venerable players of the organic world came together, along with the new-kid-on-the-block Regeneration International, to call for “Organic 3.0,” a nice term for evolved organic standards that combine elements of Slow Food, Fairtrade and a less oppressive certification regime for small farmers or farmers who regularly perform well on inspections. It’s a great idea and just the breath of fresh air that the organic movement needs. Meanwhile the EU organic officials are mired in endless delays just to bring about a much-needed update of existing organic standards. The latest review should have been completed long ago and is still years away. The consensus of Organic 3.0 hasn’t helped move things along in Brussels.

Regeneration International and IFOAM are setting their sights on the COP 22 convention in Marrakech in November 2016. This is the follow up to the Paris COP 21 climate talks last November. More than 170 countries have signed up to the Paris agreement, but the detail is still fluffy. Marrakech will focus on how farming and sequestration of carbon in the soil can stop global warming. We are losing 39 football fields of soil every minute thanks to farming – not one of those football fields is organic. The French will be promoting ‘4 per 1000.’ They say if we could increase soil organic matter by 0.04% each year it would offset ALL of our annual global greenhouse gas emissions. Organic farming increases soil organic matter by 0.1% per year, or ’10 per 1000.’ So organic’s the easy route to compliance with the Paris agreement and it regenerates soil for future generations instead of stealing it from them for cheap food today. With composting, crop rotation, fallowing, agroforestry, permaculture, biochar and other organic inputs farming could easily be 100% of the solution to global warming instead of 30% of the problem. But the Governments that control farming are hostages to the agribusiness lobby. If we can’t beat them can we go around them?

All those other independent organisations need the organic movement to join forces with them, indeed lead them. Organic agriculture is at the heart of the drive towards our shared environmental goals. Can we just ask Brussels nicely to privatise us? It works for everything else. Might be worth a go. The existing regulations cover claims like ‘organic,’ ‘biological, ‘økologisk’ or ‘Ecological’, so if privatization was off the menu and we wanted our freedom we’d need to find a new name to break free of Brussels and Washington.

Regeneration International, born out of the Organic Consumers Association, applies organic principles to food, climate, biodiversity, small farmers and health. So, how about ‘Regenerative?’

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.