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.

Achievement Award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man or machine?

When I got into macrobiotic food the American Medical Association warned it could ‘lead to death’ and Dr. Frederick Stare of Harvard University called it the ‘hippie diet that’s killing our kids.’  That’s when I was sure I was on the right track.  45 macrobiotic years later I have the last laugh, just by being alive and well. 

At Cambridge in the 1970s, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a research scientist, discovered auxin, the hormone that regulates plant growth.  He also developed a hypothesis of why and how cells age and die, which led to our understanding of apoptosis, subsequently a key to understanding cancer and to stem cell research.  But then he goofed.  Big time.  He described what he could see.  When Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life came out in 1981 Sir John Maddox, the editor of Nature, the world’s leading science magazine wrote an editorial entitled ‘A Book For Burning?’ writing: ‘his book is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years’  Later he said “…Sheldrake…can be condemned in exactly the same language that the popes used to condemn Galileo: it is heresy.”  That’s probably when Sheldrake realised he was on the right track.

What was so radical about Sheldrake’s book?

He suggested that DNA was not the be all and end all of development.  He proposed the idea of ‘morphic resonance,’ of a memory of form that guides us and that can change as we evolve.

Since then we’ve discovered that DNA is not the be all and end all of development.  DNA controls protein synthesis but most of our genes are found in mosquitoes. We don’t look like mosquitoes.

Morphic resonance is about patterns, about energy fields, about invisible forces that create the framework around which life evolves.   It also helps explain the inexplicable: why homing pigeons fly unerringly homne; why dogs know when their owner is coming back why people can sense when someone is staring at them.

The Gaia theory proposed that the Earth is a living conscious organism and that all who live on her are parts of that consciousness  This is called ‘holistic theory.’  Everywhere you look the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, on every level of existence.

My brother Gregory's book, published last year, is called Sun of God.  He shows how early religion took God everyone could see, the Sun, and made it an invisible God that could only be accessed via intermediary priests. Anyone who questioned the existence of invisible God got burned at the stake.  Gregory's book also shows that recent discoveries in physics confirm that the Sun must be a conscious entity, as the ancients believed.  There is no other way to explain what it does.  It is Gaia’s mother. The Universe itself could be alive.

So why are morphic resonance and energy fields important to health?  They explain the ‘placebo effect’ and the ‘bedside manner.’  When a sense of how things should be in a healthy organism is shared and experienced, it is easier to get there.  Acupuncture, reiki, yoga, homeopathy, massage, chakra balancing, breathwork, chanting, Chi Gong, healing sounds and many other alternative ways to health use invisible forces that embody a universal memory or resonance.

Sheldrake’s new book, The Science Delusion, shows how science has painted itself into a corner by insisting on a mechanistic and materialistic worldview.  His best selling book (which I strongly recommend) throws down the gauntlet to the people who called him ‘heretic’ 30 years ago.  By taking 10 fundamental doctrines of science and gently but penetratingly questioning them in a spirit of reason, Sheldrake takes the reader on a journey to a new understanding that understands but transcends the self-imposed restrictions on thought of establishment science.  This book could change the world.  If they don’t burn it (or him) first.