Lord Northbourne - the first ‘organic’ farmer

80 years of ‘Organic’ food and farming

While since earliest times farmers have understood the importance of giving back to the land in return for the food that it provides us, the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming was first used by Lord Northbourne in his book ‘Look to the Land’ published in 1940.  It came out at a time when industrial farming had relentlessly destroyed the accumulated fertility of millennia and sparked a debate for sustainable farming that continues to this day.  But where did the inspiration come for Northbourne’s ideas?  The trail leads back to the late 18th C and to the ideas of the poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1790 book, An Attempt to Interpret the Metamorphosis of Plants, laid the foundations for modern plant biology.

Two hundred years ago Goethe propounded the idea that there was a life force in plants. He saw that plants were driven by an ongoing intensification and that a ‘cycle of expansions and contractions’ shaped the plant, making either leaf, flower or seed depending on the degree of the ‘dynamic and creative interplay of opposites’. This is what underpins the harmony of the universe and the harmony of life on earth down to the tiniest life forms.

Rudolf Steiner wrote extensively on Goethe and developed Anthroposophy on the foundation of what he called Goethe’s ‘spiritual-scientific basis’ of thinking.

Goethe’s doctor was Christoph Hufeland, author of  Makrobiotik oder Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796),  (Macrobiotics: the Art of Living Long). He was a naturopath who was also doctor to the King of Prussia Frederick Wilhelm lll, Schiller and Goethe, all part of the Weimar set. His ideas on human health and vitality mirrored Goethe’s observations on plant health and vitality and he was a close friend of Samuel Hahnemann, creator of homeopathy. Goethe hosted a Freitagsgesellschaft (‘Friday Society’) at which Hufeland would read from his drafts of Makrobiotik.  Hufeland’s medicine envisaged a life force that should be nourished - the Hufelandist movement was largely vegetarian and inspired the Lebensreform (“Life Reform”) movement in the rest of Germany over the next century. 

Steiner was an active proponent of this Lebensreform movement which sought a ‘back to nature’ way of living, with an emphasis on healthy diet and alternative medicine. In 1924 Steiner gave an agriculture course that was organised by biodynamic farming researcher Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer then went on to found the 800-acre biodynamic research farm at Loverendale In the Netherlands that provided the practical proof of Steiner’s theory. So in 1939 when Lord Northbourne decided to set up Britain’s first biodynamics conference he invited Pfeiffer to run it. The resulting Betteshanger Summer School and Conference brought together a wide range of proponents of biodynamic farming. It was a seminal event in the history of the organic farming movement. A few months later Germany invaded Poland, World War ll broke out, making further collaboration difficult. A year later, in 1940, inspired by the visionary 9 days of the Betteshanger Summer School, Lord Northbourne’s book ‘Look to the Land’ was published.   

It was a best seller. In it Northbourne identifies debt and ‘exhaustive’ farming as having the potential to lead to ‘the extermination of much of the earth’s population by war or pestilence.’  He points out that if the land is sick, then farming is sick and that people will be sick. That Nature ‘is imbued above all with the power of love; by love she can after all be conquered but in no other way.”  In ‘Look to the Land’ Northbourne coins the term ‘organic’ to describe farming that sees the farm as an organism. “The mechanism of life is a continuous flow of matter through the architectural forms we know as organisms. The form alone has any life or any organic identity.” In this he mirrors Goethe’s writing on botany.

He wrote that to quarrel with nature makes no more sense than a ‘quarrel between a man’s head and his feet.’  He described ‘organic’ farming as “having a complex but necessary interrelationship of parts, similar to that in living things”. Although nobody had previously used the word ‘organic’ to describe this way of farming, ‘Organic’ became, in English,  the accepted descriptor.

In 1943 Eve Balfour’s ‘The Living Soil’ began by quoting across several pages in her first chapter directly from ‘Look to the Land’  She founded the Soil Association 3 years later in 1946, with support from Northbourne. Her book and Northbourne’s informed the debate about the future of farming in Britain, a debate that was closed off by the Agriculture Act of 1947 where ‘exhaustive’ agriculture to maximise production prevailed. Subsidies were given to farmers who used ICI’s chemical fertilisers and farmers who refused to ‘modernise’ were threatened with land confiscation. Farming was nationalised and the organic movement was marginalised. 

In Japan, Sagen Ishizuka, doctor to the Japanese imperial family, followed up on Hufeland’s macrobiotic ideas and developed “shokuiku” (“Food Study”) and in 1907 created the Shokuyo (Food for Health) movement.   A shokuiku follower, George Ohsawa, subsequently published a book in 1960 setting out the principles of healthy living and called it ‘Zen Macrobiotics’.

Ohsawa knew of Christophe Hufeland and freely adopted Hufeland’s term ‘Macrobiotik’ to describe his diet based on similar principles, embodying a yin and yang approach to food. He sought out and met a descendant of Hufeland in 1958. Ohsawa’s seminal book was adopted by the emerging alternative society and inspired the natural foods movement of the 1960s that supported whole food and organic farming. The natural foods stores adhered to macrobiotic principles, selling only whole grains, eschewing sugar and artificial ingredients and supporting organic food.

So it was that Goethe’s doctor Christophe Hufeland coined the term “Makrobiotik” that drove the Lebensreform movement and inspired Rudolf Steiner to develop the anthroposophical farming principles known as ‘biodynamic, which were proven in practice by Steiner’s follower Pfeiffer. Lord Northbourne’s book gave the movement momentum and the name ‘organic.’ A Zen version of the same principles emerged in the 1960s and helped drive the natural and organic transformation of farming, diet and medicine that will ultimately restore our soils and thereby underpin the health and vitality of us all.

"Who knows himself and others well / No longer may ignore: / Orient and Occident dwell / Separately no more”  Goethe

Rhythm 'n' Bliss - Thomas Cohen Single

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

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

Food and friendship without frontiers

Craig Sams celebrates the role of the natural food industry in helping to nourish refugees in Calais camps

In 1911 Karim Aboud Saba faced a dilemma – stay at home in his Christian hillside village in Syria or go to an uncertain future in America? He had a wife and 2 kids. The Turks were in the throes of the run up to World War 1 and were rounding up men up to the age of 55 to be cannon fodder for their Ottoman Army. The French and the British were already squabbling about who’d get which parts of Syria and Palestine after the coming war. It was most definitely not his fight. So Aboud left his home behind and took his family to America. At Immigration they took one look at his name, written unintelligibly in Arabic, and handed him a piece of paper marked ‘SAM.’ ‘That’s your American name, buddy.’ If you had asked him for an opinion about organic food or the stuff called chocolate his grandson would be marketing he wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. If you would have told him that his great-great grandson Mars Aboud Sams 100 years later would be in a place called Calais in France working 12 hours a day feeding Syrian and Kurdish refugees he would have smiled ruefully – it was the vision of such endless chaos that had driven him to emigrate.

The refugees in Calais and Dunkerque are just a small fraction of the millions that have died or been displaced by the manipulation and exploitation that started in the 1900s with the British, French, Turks, Russians and Germans manoeuvring over who would control the lucrative oil wells of Iraq. Now these lucky survivors are just across the water and living in dreadful conditions in the hope of finding a new life in Britain or joining their relatives here.   Many are starving, having spent all their money to pay smugglers to get them this far.

Mars Aboud Sams, my 18-year old grandson, is on his way back to the Refugee Community Kitchen in Calais after a stint in December. He’s now experienced in field kitchen catering and able to supervise the many volunteers who come over with vans and cars laden with food, willing to work for a few days or weeks cooking, cleaning, serving and washing dishes to keep the canteen going.

“The role of the natural food industry in supporting this field kitchen is admirable”

The role of the natural food industry in supporting this field kitchen is admirable. Wholesalers willingly act as aggregation and distribution hubs for food. Riverford Farms have sent several van loads of fresh organic vegetables to be prepped and cooked by the chefs there. Abel & Cole are offering milk and ongoing support. Infinity Foods have sent over quinoa, Brazil nuts, rice and other dry goods. Suma have supplied a pallet of washing up liquid, rice, oats and catering tins of tomatoes. Gusto have sent over a pallet of Gusto Cola. Organic Lea have come up with a palletload of kale, cabbages, leeks, rocket and other green vegetables. Zaytoun, the distributors of Fairtrade organic food from Palestine, have sent medjool dates. This is just a snapshot of what’s going on.

Most of the volunteers are the kind of people who are committed to eating organic food, to eating less meat and emitting less carbon dioxide. They understand the deep humane connection between the food they choose and the kind of world they’d like to live in. That’s a world where our shared humanity is more important than the opportunistic manouevring that is the most we can expect from politicians. The destruction of stable communities of Christians, Muslims, Jews and other minorities that had lived together in peace for a thousand or more years drove my grandfather to America 100 years ago. It is still going on. The only difference is that America is now part of the problem where, after WW1, people idealistically hoped it would be part of the solution.

We are all people with a shared interest in prosperity, good health and well-being.

The words of Marianne Satrap sum it up perfectly and explain the deep instinct of common humanity, sharing and caring that drives so many people from the organic movement to try to help relieve the suffering of their fellow human beings:

"The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same."
Marianne Satrap, author of Iranian graphic novel Persepolis, now a film.

https://www.youcaring.com/refugee-community-kitchen-474904

Is Agribusiness a 'stranded asset' class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about the  industrial farmer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

$20,500 + $ 4,500  =  $25,000

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

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

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

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

Carbon sinks will tip the market balance in favour of sustainable agriculture

Sugar - All They Want is the Tax, Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Salad Breakfast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And here are their green cousins, the Green Frills Mustard

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The land cress is easily as peppery as its aquatic cousin

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

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

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

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

YUM!

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Room for profits in organic shopping baskets

End of the road for Monsanto?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panic over?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The French National Institute for Agronomical Research states that

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

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

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

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

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

Bitter Sweet Insanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is cheaper – human life or chicken breasts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real change is coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't wreck our soil

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

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

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

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

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

the ones that convert nitrogen into nitrate fertiliser;

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

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

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

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

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

Hoppy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seed Magazine 1975

It's anything but dirt

The soil is a vast living organism, stretching across continents with an interconnected ‘mind’ – a consciousness that spans countless numbers of tiny living beings. All those living things have an energy field. A healthy soil has the combined energy field of thousands of different organisms. We are part of that energy field – when we disrupt it we disrupt our own spirit and consciousness.

Ploughing the soil breaks up this social community and forces it to rebuild, with many participants dying and decomposing during recovery. Adding artificial fertilisers to soil breaks the cycle of mutual nourishment between plants and the living soil, and the soil dies. Fungicides and pesticides also kill the life in the soil. When the living organisms in the soil die, the soil dies and disintegrates. To kill soil, therefore, is a slow form of suicide by humankind.

When life on Earth began 500 million years or so ago there was just a small population of fungi living on rock. The fungi would erode the rock, squeezing out small amounts of carbon, breaking it down into small pieces of sand, smaller ones of silt and the smallest particles of clay. There were minerals, but they had no life in them.

Then blue-green single-celled organisms called ‘cyanobacteria’ (‘blue bacteria’) harnessed sunlight in order to turn carbon dioxide and water into a simple carbohydrate, glucose sugar. These bacteria had invented photosynthesis and a new way to make carbohydrate. The fungi locked these cyanobacteria into cells so they could take control of their sugar output. They then created green ‘chain gangs’ – the earliest plants – by joining the cells together and surrounding their roots. These chain gangs of cyanobacteria got bigger and bigger, organised into fan shapes and leaf shapes to maximise capture of carbon dioxide. Internal tubes in the plants served as veins to deliver the sugar to the fungi in the soil and take up water and nutrients in return. Plants have been the food source of ‘mycorrhizal’ (‘root fungus’) fungi ever since.

Nothing has changed today. An oak tree is a collection of tubes that carry water and minerals up to the sugar factories in the leaves and carry sugar down to the mycorrhizae clustered around the roots. The mycorrhizae produce superfine filaments (‘hyphae’) – there can be 10 miles of these superfine threads in just a tiny handful of soil. Fungi communicate with each other and with other soil microorganisms through chemical signaling, electric pulses, smell and touch. They control the sugar supply to all the other organisms in the soil – without sugar nothing can live. The fungi rule, deciding which bacteria to nourish and therefore which shall flourish. If an emerging plant needs more sugar than it can produce, the mycelial network of fungi will deliver extra amounts to the plant to help nurture its growth. The mycorrhizal community of the soil has been described as “associations for mutual aid and the promotion of common interests.” We think that plants compete with each other for nutrients, but it is the fungi that regulate their diversity and growth rate. The soil, undisturbed, is a mutual support network with sugar as the common currency. Every time a fungus or a plant dies it is recycled to become the organic matter that holds together the living soil of tiny rock particles.

At least 10,000 different bacteria and fungi dwell in the soil. They all need sugar. They all get it from the mycorrhizae. Some, like the omnipresent actinomycetes bacteria, mimic fungi in shape, joining up to form long filaments similar to the hyphae. Those filaments are tubes that channel mineral nutrients and water to the fungi. Every time an earthworm consumes actinomycetes it excretes six times as many as it ingested. Actinomycetes give off the characteristic smell we associate with fresh good soil.

Some root-eating nematodes, tiny worms, don’t cooperate – they prefer just to eat plant tissue. Mycorrhizae entrap these nematodes with lassoes or sticky exudates from their hyphae and then digest them for their protein while protecting the plant roots. Some fungi are parasitic and are seen as disease on plants. The antidote to them comes from the soil. Soil bacteria produce salicylic acid, jasmonic acid and ethylene – natural antibiotics that kill or repel parasitic organisms. If a fungal spore lands on a plant’s leaf, the plant is ready with its defences because the soil community’s underground internet has already forewarned of approaching threats.

Mycorrhizae produce glomalin, a sticky substance that helps keep the particles of sand, silt and clay aggregated together. This gives soil its structure. Throughout this structure there are pathways of varying dimensions, whether made by fungal and bacterial threads or by worms. These passages aerate the soil and help the absorption and the retention of water and nutrients.

Without mycorrhizae the glomalin level drops, the network of life that glues it all together falls apart, and the soil washes or blows away as dust. As a result of modern agriculture, this erosion of the world’s soils causes losses annually of 10 to 80 tonnes of soil per hectare. This represents a loss of 1.8% of the world’s useable farmland every year. Some lost soil is replaced by deforestation – but we’re running out of forests. Organic farming can bring dead ‘farmed-out’ soils back to life after a few years of fallowing and regular additions of compost. This regeneration can be accelerated with the addition of biochar: finely ground charcoal. Zeolite performs a similar function, but is less durable. When biochar is present in soil at between 5% and 10% by volume, the population of mycorrhizae and bacteria increases by anything from 2 to 100 times. This increase in life generated delivers more glomalin and more vitality. This supports the creation of healthy, fertile soil.

The soil’s living community provides an example to our society of how a cooperative community of plants and microorganisms can maximise and efficiently share the production of food derived from the abundance of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide with which our planet is blessed. It is a model of efficient use of resources that our farming systems should corroborate and emulate.

Soil is the soul of society. It is where life began – it is where life begins. We treat it like dirt at our peril.

Craig Sams will be speaking at Restoring the Soil, Schumacher College, 2–6 February, 2015. 

Craig Sams is a former chairman of the Soil Association and co-founder of Carbon Gold, a company which develops biochar products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future is meat less

People everywhere are reducing meat consumption. Craig Sams argues that organic farmers are well placed to adjust to the coming low-meat scenario

My late great aunt Sophia was very religious and faithfully observed all the fast days of the Orthodox Church’s nearly 2000 year-old religious calendar. When you totted up every Wednesday and Friday plus Lent, Dormition and Nativity Fasts she had about 180 days as a vegan, two with no food and another 40 that were ovo-lacto vegetarian. Two thirds of the year. She would never have described herself as a vegetarian, though. She once killed, skinned and cooked a rabbit when I came to lunch.  She cooked broad beans, chickpeas and wheat for protein on meatless days. Her generation’s view was that you weren’t a proper Christian unless you adhered to the fasting rules, purely for spiritual reasons.

When Japan went Buddhist  and vegetarian 1400 years ago it was made easier by having tofu and ‘seitan’ wheat gluten and meaty-tasting miso and soya sauce – the same meat-replacing foods that help people transition to the macrobiotic diet. Michelin 3 star chefs Alain Passard and Alain Ducasse  both now have successful restaurants in Paris that are almost entirely vegan or vegetarian.

In 1981 my brother Gregory came up with an idea for a vegetarian burger mix. He registered the name ‘Vegeburger’ as a Trademark because it was such a novel term –(just imagine trying to do that today).  Set up under the Realeat brand the Vegeburger took off like a rocket and Gregory hooked up with Gallup to launch an annual survey on ‘Changing Attitudes to Meat Consumption’ that revealed the dynamic growth in the market for vegetarian food that continues to this day.   It shook off the ‘beards and sandals’ image that some backward folk still had about vegetarianism and made meat reduction hip and groovy. Pirate radio stations ran the first ever rapping food advertisement. That cemented the Vegeburger as cool.

The VegeBurger made the transition to vegetarianism much easier and more tempting for people at a time of rising food awareness in the 80s. Some people were critical – ‘Why imitate meat dishes with a veggie substitute?’ they’d ask. Why not? Most sausages are about 90% breadcrumbs.  Rissoles and patties have been around for as long as hamburgers. If putting something savoury in an appropriate roll or bun is delicious, who says it has to have been a mammal or bird previously?

Last August I attended a conference titled “Reversing The Trend” organized by Plantlife, Wildlife Trusts and Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Attendees mapped out a strategy to raise the profile of pasture-fed meat as opposed to intensive factory farmed animals.  The Prince of Wales dropped in and emphasized the arguments for biodiversity and reducing global warming.   The conclusion?  The same message that Slow Food and the Soil Association repeat: “Eat less meat, but eat better.”

People everywhere are reducing meat. There’s good reason. Eating meat is cruel to animals, in excess leads to degenerative disease, environmental degradation, accelerated climate change, the theft of food from poorer countries and widespread starvation.

What about organic vegetarian alternatives to meat? In my 25 years helping out at the Soil Association I have worked alongside conscientious meat and dairy farmers whose commitment to the environment is unchallengeable. Many, however, mistrust vegetarianism as they think organic farming systems cannot function without animals to supply manure for fertility building. But if we were vegetarian we’d need less than half the land used for food production now and if we were vegan we’d need just one fifth of the land – we could farm more extensively, and grow more clover.

Meat alternatives have never been more convincing. The Nordic countries are leading the charge in creating organic high quality alternatives to meat that convincingly satisfy the need for meaty texture, savoury flavour and concentrated protein. What’s more, they’re successfully marketing it as hip and groovy. So can organic farmers adjust to the coming low meat scenario?  With modern developments in composting, green manures and overwintered crops there’s no need to be dependent on animal manures.  The future is probably never going to be vegetarian but food processors are coming up with some very competitive alternatives to meat, lower in price and higher in flavour.

I wish my Aunt Sophia could see how far things have come, but she’d be 115 by now  – even 222 days a year as a vegetarian can’t swing that.

• The Nordic Organic Food Fair, the leading organic food event for the Scandinavian region, takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on 26-27 October 2014.

Nordic thriller

The Nordic Food Lab fuses the finest gastronomic traditions with cutting edge science to thrilling effect, writes Craig Sams

You have to hand it to the Danes.  They took over Britain in 1066 and have ruled it with a firm hand ever since.  Now Nordic Food is where it’s at with food technology. This isn’t the food technology that destroyed the health of a couple of generations when, back in the 60s hired liars in white coats assured us that hydrogenated fat, DDT residues and carcinogenic flavourings and colourings were good for you and that sugar was a vital source of energy. This is food technology that takes the best of past tradition and combines it with cutting edge science. The heart of this progressive movement is the Nordic Food Lab, sited atop the Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen.

Voted World’s Best Restaurant year after year, Noma is the only restaurant in the world to have 2 Michelin stars despite not having tablecloths (OMG!).  I chose the vegetarian options but with egg and dairy and paired juices.  Then the fun began.  I sipped a thyme-y herbed apple juice as we awaited the first of 20 courses. Highlights of the petite starters included rye flatbread with rose petals, crispy deep fried cabbage leaves sandwiching a filling of chopped samphire held together with a watercress puree, reindeer moss with ceps, smoked  pickled quail’s egg, a boulet of blackcurrant and roses and a lovely baked onion in walnut oil. My accompanying juices included: cucumber with yogurt whey; apple with Douglas fir pine needle; celery and seaweed; nasturtium; salted grape and lingonberry; each pairing perfectly balancing the course it accompanied.

The ‘mains’ were also superb, I haven’t eaten beechnuts in years because they’re such a fiddle, but they were perfect with butternut squash and kelp ribbons. The roasted and braised lettuce root was a revelation, served with St. John’s wort – opiates and tranquilisers in one dish.  Puddings included aronia berries with an ice cream centre. Oh, did I mention the ants?  Wood ants, of course, served on a charcoal roasted green bean.  I mentioned to our waitress Cat that I’d shove my hand into wood ants’ nests in Burnham Beeches (where I used to forage for beech nuts) just to enjoy the unique physical pleasure of ‘formication,’ where hundreds of ants’ feet run up and down your arm (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it).  She responded that was how their forager harvested them.

After a four-hour gastro-journey, a Geordie called Stu took us into the front kitchen where we saw how the person who served your food also took the final steps of preparation. Then we visited Lars, the enzymologist who makes fermented sauces out of almost anything and has bred cultures from Japanese koji that perform miracles when added to fermentable carbohydrates. We bonded when I told him about how I started using enzymes at Ceres Bakery back in 1972 – they are the key to making good sourdough breads. We also looked at his garums, savoury sauces historically made by Romans from anchovies, but his included beef and other protein sources.  We went upstairs and met Rene Redzepi, the creative force behind Noma. We chatted about Slow Food, school meals, how kids can be raised on good food at home and then be corrupted on the first day at school, cooking with burdock root and eating biochar.  I’ll send him some of my biochar oatcakes

To enlist science in the interests of human health, local integrity, artisanal quality, organic production and, above all, total and unalloyed deliciousness is a dream we’ve all dared to imagine from time to time.  At the Nordic Food Lab I have seen the future, and it’s wild, wholesome, fermented, smoked, cooked, raw and yummy. It is reinventing food culture and marking a path that anyone anywhere can follow.  You don’t have to be Danish to do it.  Noma is a university that is turning out chefs and artisan food biotechnologists who are going to change the way all of us eat.  The Nordic approach will work anywhere – it’s about building gastronomy on a foundation of local geography and protecting your natural environment by eating it.

I asked Stu if some of the people who worked there had ambitions to open their own restaurant or food business. He replied “All of them, if they don’t then they shouldn’t be working here.”

• The Nordic Organic Food Fair, the leading organic food event for the Scandinavian region, takes place in Malmo, Sweden, on 26-27 October 2014.