No place to hide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GM - Dream or nightmare

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

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

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

It’s war!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civilising influences

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

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

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

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

– the cocoa beans would be organic and sustainably produced;

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

– no exposure to toxic pesticides or fungicides

– the environment would be protected and ecosystems kept intact.

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

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

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

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

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

1. Help farmers improve yields and increase incomes

2. Create positive communities and promote gender equality

3. Eliminate child labour by attacking its root causes

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

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

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

Fetishist? No, just enjoying food and having fun

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

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

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

So I Kindled this book with high anticipation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 What’s stopping us?

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

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

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

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

The song’s lyrics set out the argument:

“The weather round the world is getting very strange

As the Amazon rain forest turns into a cattle range

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

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

Eat Organic – Save the Planet”

And

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

And

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

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

If we didn’t spray so many toxic pesticides

All those different species never would’ve died”

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

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

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

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

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

Do As I Say, Not as I Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice a pattern here?  

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

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

These bio-fools are killing us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to save the economy

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

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

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

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

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

SHORT DATED MONEY

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

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

GREEN JOBS

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

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

Achievement Award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agroecology – The new Organic?

Over the past few decades the gap between organic food and the rest has narrowed.  Not that long ago, if you wanted to be sure you were avoiding pesticide residues, artificial colourings and flavourings and preservatives, animal cruelty, human exploitation, soil degradation, hydrogenated fat and GMOs, the only safe haven was to look for the word ‘organic’ on the label, or at the very least, ‘natural.’

In March 2 2012 Nestle announced they were removing artificial ingredients from their entire range.  That’s 80 formerly ‘safe’ additives that are now disappearing in ‘response to customer demand’ (and possibly also due to legal advice).  The RSCPA Freedom Food label and ‘free range’ are nearly organic.  Fairtrade reassures on exploitation.  Hydrogenated fat is finally out of most of our food, though the fast food industry need to pull their socks up.   The US is pushing for GMO labelling, which will be a nail in its coffin

Nestle’s announcement coincided with the Soil Association conference.  Farming is moving towards organic as well.  For a long time the Soil Association maintained clear blue water between organic and the rest by raising its own standards.  But under Helen Browning’s leadership a more pragmatic and outward-looking approach is emerging.  The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Agroecology.’  What is agroecology?  Well it’s organic, with knobs on - but also with more flexibility.  So it considers things that go beyond organic, such as air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions,  social and economic and political impacts. It looks at food from a global holistic aspect, not just from the view of the farmer and the food processor.   And it’s on a roll.

A big driver has been the 2010 IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development) report, where 400 of the world’s top agricultural experts agreed that there was no future for more intensification of agriculture; that the Green Revolution was a disaster; that GM foods won’t help; that we have to look to small farmers for the wisdom and the resilient technologies of the future if we are to feed the world and prevent climate change.   Download a copy and read the executive summary of this influential document. Monsanto and Syngenta, who helped choose those experts, dismissed it grumpily the week before it was published.

When Lady Eve Balfour founded the Soil Association in 1946 nobody was worried about greenhouse gas and global warming. 

The day before the conference I visited 2 Soil Association licensees.  One creates remarkably effective organic fertilisers. He criticised Soil Association policy of restricting external farm inputs.  The other said that, as a propagator of vegetable plugs that go out to most of the country’s organic vegetable growers, there was no way he could operate without external inputs.  He has no livestock and no need of them.  He uses peat (with Soil Association blessing) to get seeds off to a good start.  At the conference’s agroecology workshop 4 of the speakers guiltily commented that they had to buy in some inputs.  Who cares?  If you have a farm of a certain size, and you raise animals for meat or milk, then you can create a system that is a self-contained island or productivity.  But what if you just grow vegetables, or cereals?  What if you’re vegetarian?  Agroecology says we have to reduce meat and dairy consumption if we are to get the right balance in food production.  It encourages agroforestry, where you use trees and shrubs as part of food production, to increase tree cover, improve soil quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Organic encourages dependence on cows and other methane-emitting animals as part of a mixed farm system.  That means more pasture and fewer trees.

It’s time to lighten up and to embrace the ‘opposition’ and bring them towards a holistic and environmentally sound system that is truly organic…and agroecological.   They’re already moving in our direction and the Soil Association conference was a historic step toward embracing them and bringing them into the fold before it’s too late.  Look out Monsanto – the ground is starting to slip away from you.

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.

Can I get my NHS no-claims bonus?

Isn’t it amazing that the ‘hippy diet’ the authorities once warned would corrupt a generation is now officially endorsed by the medical establishment, says Craig Sams

Your NHS No Claims Bonus is just one click away!

In 1965 I had the misfortune to be quite low in cash and lying by a roadside in Delhi unable to walk because of the debilitating pain and exhaustion of hepati- tis. The Holy Family Catholic hospital doctor told me I was in urgent need of hospitalisation, but their reception told me there were no beds. Maybe I should have tried a bit of baksheesh.

So, half walking, half crawl- ing, I ended up in Delhi General. After a day I knew I had to move on. I ended up in Peshawar, then Kabul, where a diet of unleavened wholemeal naan and unsweetened tea finally brought success. Within 3 or 4 days I was back on my feet and functional.

Since then I haven’t messed with my health — when you look into the abyss and realise how fragile life can be, you take more care. I never wanted to find myself in such desperate straits again — helpless, hoping someone can save you and feeling sorry for your parents who might never know what happened to their beloved son.

Since 1967 I have dutifully paid, like every good citizen, my National Insurance contributions which, in today’s money, amounts to about £400,000 over 44 years. During that time I have never cost the NHS one penny and haven’t taken up one minute of a doctor’s time with my health problems. That’s partly down to luck, but I cite diet as the main factor.

The experience in India trig- gered my interest in macrobi- otics and led to a career deci- sion to spread the word about healthy diet. This was the foun- dation on which my brother Gregory and I built Whole Earth Foods and which led, indirectly, to the founding of Green & Black’s. I’ve been OK almost all of the time, despite setbacks, bereavements, financial anxieties and stress from business competition. Sometimes I thought I was going mad, but I had seen enough of the dam- age anti-depressants can cause to know that I would never go down that route.

“IF I WERE A CAREFUL DRIVER I’D GET AN ANNUAL REDUCTION IN MY INSURANCE TO REFLECT MY CLEAN CLAIMS HISTORY. WHY NOT HEALTH?”

When Beveridge mapped out the NHS in 1942 his budget projections confidently predict- ed a steep decline in healthcare costs through the 1950s as indoor sanitation, better nutri- tion, clean water and health education would all reduce dis- ease and its treatment costs. Instead there has been a steady increase in sickness and chron- ic illness, triggered by obesity, environmental toxins, sedentary lifestyles and junk food. How disappointing it would have been for him.

Sir Jack Drummond was the man who named Vitamin A and B and who mapped out Britain’s healthy wartime diet that led to record levels of health, despite all the stress and strain of wartime life. Sir Jack was mysteriously murdered in 1953, or he would have been kicking ass at the DOH to make them do something about the Brits’ abysmal post-war dietary choices once they were free to choose.

If I were a careful driver I’d get an annual reduction in my insurance to reflect my clean claims history. Why not health? If a reduced level of claims reflects a saving in expenditure, what’s wrong with the principle extending to National Insurance? Charging people higher contributions/premiums for being sick all the time might be going too far, but rewarding people for conscientiously look- ing after their health shouldn’t be seen as reprehensible. I’d settle for a ‘cashback’ — or perhaps the money saved could be tagged onto my pension on retirement? Good national health policy should include carrots as well as sticks. The state offers no material incen- tive to look after one’s health, just confusing exhortations. A no claims discount would address this. I’m sure Beveridge would approve. And Sir Jack.

Hippy days are here again

Isn’t it amazing that the ‘hippy diet’ the authorities once warned would corrupt a generation is now officially endorsed by the medical establishment, says Craig Sams

Stop the press! Amazing news from researchers…

The British Journal of Cancer recently published a report funded by Cancer Research UK. The report says that 40 per cent of cancers arise from lifestyle factors including poor diet and obesity. Specifically: not enough fibre, not enough vegetables, too much meat and too much alcohol.

In 1966, full of the joys of discovering good health and vitality through macrobiotic diet, my girlfriend and I visited the macrobiotic bookshop in New York. Irma Paul, the owner, sat behind the counter looking morose, not at all the happy image of macrobiotics (Greek for ‘long life’ or ‘big life’) that I expected. She allowed us to look at the books but said that we could not purchase anything.

Her reason? The American Medical Association had recently urged the FBI to bust the bookshop for selling illegal books. The FBI took the books away and went over them with expert advisors from the American Medical Association. The result? The bookshop closed a few days later and the books were taken away, condemned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and burned. Reader’s Digest later ran a cover story calling macrobiotics ‘The Hippie Diet That’s Killing Our Kids.”

What was the evil message that brought such a fate?  Kiddie porn? Bomb-making instructions? No, much worse as far as the AMA was concerned: these books contained statements that too much meat, not enough fibre, not enough vegetables and too much meat and alcohol could lead to cancer. Exactly what the British Journal of Cancer article now states.

At the time the medical orthodoxy was that cancer was in the genes or just bad luck. Prof Max Parkin, a Cancer Research epidemiologist, commented on the new report: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’…it’s clear that 40 per cent of cancers are caused by things we have the power to change.” I wonder where ‘many people’ got that wacky idea? Perhaps from listening to all the medical experts who told them for decades they couldn’t do anything to prevent cancer.

In the 1950s American magazines ran ads extolling the preference of doctors for Camel brand cigarettes. Oh dear. I wonder how many people took up smoking because of these role models…and died?

In the 50s Wilhelm Reich talked about the ‘Emotional Plague’ – a disease that parents gave to their children by beating them and abusing them, passing on sick behaviour from one generation to the next. He argued for sexual liberation and advocated condom use and economic independence for women. Several tonnes of his books were burned by the FDA and he died in prison in 1956.  Now it’s illegal to beat kids, women are liberated and child abuse condemned.

So, two pioneers of sensible thinking went to their graves bitter and disillusioned and didn’t live to see their ideas become accepted in the mainstream.

What about me? After discovering that the FBI, the AMA and the FDA were hysterically alarmed about macrobiotics, I figured it was at least as powerful as I had thought.

I went to the newly-opened Paradox macrobiotic restaurant that evening and decided then and there that my future would lay in bringing awareness of the joys of healthy eating to as many people as possible. It fulfilled my do-goodism and my revolutionary instincts.

What about the authorities? The same governments that burned books and chucked their authors in jail now support sex education and condom use and urge their citizens to eat more vegetables and wholegrains and to cut down on meat and booze.

Can you imagine any MPs or doctors nowadays plugging cigarettes or urging people to eat junk food and beat their kids?

Still making waves

As Rainbow Warrior III sets sail Craig Sams congratulates Greenpeace on being a pain in the bum for evildoers the world over

In 1977 Greenpeace organised a ‘Save the Whales’ rally in Kensington Gardens.  Spike Milligan came over to rally the troops with a quirky but passionate speech.  We sat on the grass to listen and many people ended up soiled by dogshit. This was just inside the park gates where dogs would dump as soon as they were let loose on the grass.  In those days people never cleaned up their dog mess. What’s more dog food was usually made with whale meat.  The irony of the moment was not lost on us and I couldn’t help thinking, darkly, that ‘what goes round comes round.’

A few months later in a debate against Jilly Cooper on LBC Radio I said that people should clean up after their dogs.  The call-in hot lines nearly melted with outraged dog owners saying I should go back where I came from and generally questioning my sanity. Yet over time cleaning up after one’s dog became normal behaviour.

Greenpeace fought much tougher battles. They were trying to stop nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean and whaling in the Atlantic.  At the end of 1977 I went along to Surrey Docks to see a rust bucket trawler that Greenpeace had acquired which they planned to refurbish and rename the Rainbow Warrior. (I had the chance to go on the maiden voyage to Iceland to challenge whaling, but I had court appearances scheduled over Whole Earth jam illegally sweetened with apple juice).

The Rainbow Warrior was sunk  in Auckland, New Zealand, on the orders of France’s President Mitterand in 1985. During ‘Opération Satanique’ French secret agents attached explosives to its hull to blow it up before it could lead a flotilla to oppose nuclear testing in Pacific island atolls.  This act of terrorist sabotage killed Fernando Pereira, a photographer. The culprits were sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter but released when France threatened to block New Zealand’s agricultural exports to the EU.

Greenpeace converted another ship, Rainbow Warrior ll, and carried on being a pain in the bum for evildoers in the whaling, bombing and oil rig industry.  It’s retired and is now a hospital ship in Bangladesh.

When Monsanto’s GM soybeans started flooding the market  in 1996 the Soil Association lobbied hard to protect organic food and had desperate meetings with tin-eared ministers of agriculture and environment.  While we talked Greenpeace took action.  First they sailed up the Mississippi to block the export of soybeans at source. Later, led by Lord Peter Melchett, Greenpeace activists pulled up a GM maize crop in Norfolk, ‘decontaminating’ the field.   Arrested and jailed, they were exonerated in court and set free.   They had stopped the GM tide, protecting organic farming from extinction.

On November 10 we attended the launch of Rainbow Warrior lll near Tower Bridge. No rustbucket of a trawler this one but a brand new ship that will travel mostly by sail, with engines powering it for perhaps 10% of the time. Its €16 million cost was funded entirely by contributions from tens of thousands of supporters.

Damon Albarn re-formed The Good The Bad and The Queen and played on deck to spectators lining the shore at Butler’s Wharf.  Michael Eavis (Glastonbury Festival, £400,000 a year contribution to Greenpeace) had driven the ship on the last leg of its trip.  We toured the ship and learned about its revolutionary design – soon container ships could be using its advanced wind-capture principles to cut the emissions from seaborne trade.

Greenpeace has been on the front lines stopping the destructive greed that makes the world a worse place, thereby providing cover for organisations like the Soil Association, Garden Organic, Slow Food and Fairtrade that are working to build a better world. We all owe them a tremendous debt. Joining Greenpeace and supporting their work is the least we can do to repay their efforts.

Artisan Food

You could be forgiven for thinking I was sometimes a bit of a grump grumbling about salt fascism, obesity, subsidies, GM, industrialised food, chemical farming, global warming and the rest.  But I'm really an optimist - with a vision of how things could be if only they weren't the way they are.  If I didn't have that vision I wouldn't see all the crap that spoils the vision.

So when I went to the School of Artisan Food near Nottingham I saw my dream of a better world of food and farming coming closer.  It was the venue for the Slow Food AGM (I now chair this wonderful organisation - please join as a corporate supporter or as a member).  The School of Artisan Food just opened last year.  It teaches aspiring food producers how to bake great bread, make brilliant cheeses, brew beer, pickle, preserve and be a butcher.   Traditional skills have a reason - they make food taste better and bring out the best in ingredients that have been produced by farmers and growers who also care about quality. This school is where the people who put values before 'value' can learn how to make small incremental changes in the way food is produced and consumed.

Nearby is the Stichelton creamery - where Joe Snyder, formerly of Daylesford makes a Stilton-style cheese from unpasteurised organic milk and is now struggling to keep up with demand.  Head of the baking department is Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, formerly of Daylesford and more recently head of production at our own Judges Bakery in Hastings.  His first crop of graduates went out into the world this summer, armed with the ability to make yeasted and sourdough breads using the finest organic ingredients.   Emmanuel's new book How To Make Bread is, quite frankly, the best book on baking that I have ever seen, a must-have for any kitchen bookshelf.   I've read them all over the years: from Sunday Times Book of Real Bread (featuring me and Ceres Bakery way back in 1976) to Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery. None of them combine the clarity of method, the detailed illustrations and great recipes in the way the Emmanuel's book does. After a one year course his students are already working in artisan bakeries or opening their own.

Tesco announced its worst year in 20 years with like for like sales flat.   Aldi and Lidl are scooping the bottom feeders of the food market while independents are providing a haven of quality for people who appreciate good food, freshly made, using the finest natural ingredients.   Our own Judges Bakery is up year on year, like for like, after a couple of years in the doldrums.

More and more producers want to hang their own beef, sell their chickens and turkeys direct to customers, make their own cheese and mill and bake their own grain.  This is a deep trend that has been gathering momentum for decades and is now gaining tidal wave proportions (exaggerate? Moi?). The diehards who have protected food quality traditions are finally being vindicated.  Dear Henrietta Green, whose Food Lovers Guide to Britain back in 1989 helped to save the last of the dying breed of small producers, now has an army of 60 or more members of her Food Lovers Approved scheme who form a phalanx of quality offerings in their own dedicated section at the BBC Good Food Show and other events. 

"Who'd a thunk it?"  as my old friend Gary Hirshberg once said about his amazing success at Stonyfield Farm and our luck at being in the right place at the right time with Green & Black's.   This is the kind of stuff that could never have happened before. The experts predicted that all food would be produced on a massive industrial scale.  Now artisan production is almost commonplace and there is a school that teaches you how to turn back the enveloping tide of monotony and nutritional emptiness that once swept all before it from its path. 

Legal, decent, truthful and honest? Oh, come off it!

Major airlines and detergent brands runs rings round the ASA while the small guys get hauled up on pedantic points of detail, writes Craig Sams.

Which ads do you think would upset the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)?  Their brief is to crack down on advertising that is not ‘legal, decent, truthful and honest.’  They do it by putting pressure on the media not to accept offending ads.

1 .“New Improved Organic Wildcat shower gel – the cleaner you are, the dirtier you get.”

2.  Fly Murphyair to Nice for £2

3. “Avoid unhealthy Transfats – Eat Whole Earth non-hydrogenated margarine”

4. “Organic means fewer drugs or antibiotics, it also means better conditions for animals so they get to thrive and grow more naturally.

It’s 3 and 4, of course

From 1997 until the ASA finally took action last year you could call a completely non-organic shower product ‘organic’ or ‘Organics.‘  Despite frequent complaints they refused to act. That the ads defied any reasonable definition of organic was neither here nor there.   The EU lawmakers had not yet roped in bodycare or textiles to their legal definition of ‘organic.’ So shower products and shampoos misleadingly benefited from being described as ‘organic’ for a decade due to a fine legalistic point.

But what if an ad indecently suggests, in adverts seen at bus stops by 7 year-olds, that gorgeous girls will be queueing up to get down and dirty with you if you smear some concoction of synthetic perfumes and detergents all over it? That’s OK as it is ‘decent’ and ‘truthful’, as far as the ASA is concerned. I look at ads like that and feel sorry for the losers who believe it, but we live in a world where a lot of guys are so desperate for some nookie that they’ll believe anything. But I also feel sorry for the parents who have to explain this ad to their kids.

You can advertise the cost of a flight without any of the add-ons that most people will end up paying (online check-in fees, credit card fees, airport charges etc). Airlines complain to the ASA about each other and the ASA steps in but they have been doing it for 10 years and the ASA can’t really stop them.  They have huge advertising budgets so the media run the ads and then the ads are out of date anyway and a new, more imaginatively untruthful ad appears. It’s makes a mockery of the ASA.

But the ASA can flex its muscles when it faces up to the little guys.

When Whole Earth advertised Superspread in 1993 it had a rather longwinded educational advertisement explaining the latest research on hydrogenated fats and urging people to choose a non-hydrogenated alternative. The folks who make Flora complained to the ASA – (their product was 21% hydrogenated fat in those days).  We gave all the information to the ASA but they still refused to let us advertise. We appealed. They said it wasn’t about truthfulness, they didn’t like us appealing to fear. Flora had been appealing to fear for a decade, with pictures of pretty housewives resolving to keep their hubby healthy and heart attack-free by cutting out butter and making his sandwiches with hydrogenated margarine. That’s when I realised the ASA had integrity issues. Recently I asked to see the records of our case and they said they hadn’t kept records from before 1994!

The Organic Trade Board invested in advertising that stated ‘Organic means fewer drugs or antibiotics, it also means better conditions for animals so they get to thrive and grow more naturally.’ The ASA stopped this (see p ??) because somewhere there might be a lucky cow or chicken that enjoys conditions as good as on an organic farm.  Replace ‘also’ with ‘generally’ and you have an ad with the same powerful message. But what a pedantic and trivial distinction. What a pain!

I have steered clear of complementary medicine in this rant, but just think about this.  Every year 720,000 Americans are killed by adverse reactions to prescription drugs. This means ‘death by doctor’ beats heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death.  The NHS doesn’t publish similar statistics, but works hand in hand with the same drug companies. Perhaps it’s time for the ASA to take a look at the advertising of drugs.

The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In June I was invited to give the keynote speech at the Sustainable Foods Summit in Amsterdam. The conference programme was so advanced it made me blink in disbelief - here were a bunch of corporate executives and sustainability managers from the world's leading corporations all working to create real standards of sustainable growth and methods of measurement in order to comply with their corporate statements of principle. Stalwarts like Clearspring and Whole Foods were there, but the general tone was very mainstream. I spoke about taking an ethical brand mainstream later in the day but for my keynote I thought I'd give it to them with both barrels. Here’s my speech:

"Today I would like to take for my text the New Testament, Chapter 6: 1-8, the Book of Revelation of St. John the Evangelist (I'd give anything for a picture of the audience's horrified faces as they prepared for the worst). You may recall it: it's where Jesus opens the sealed scrolls and summons forth the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - War, Plague, Famine and their faithful follower, Death.To understand sustainability we must recognise that the world's economy is still governed by legacy industries who have a massive vested interest in those 4 horsemen. Without them, or the fear of them, their shareholder value would collapse.War enjoys annual capital expenditure of $1.5 trillion. with the US leading the field, devoting 5% of GDP to military spending. As you'd expect with any capital expenditure, the return on investment is many times the value of the outlay - the cost of death and destruction of property in target nations is massive. Of course the at-home social damage is pretty high too as soldiers return home with attitudes to violence that lead to high domestic cost due to healthcare, suicides, crime and psychological problems.Plague enjoys good returns, too. The Avian Flu and Swine Flu panics exposed Big Pharma’s desperate quest for new disease threats. The side effects of medical intervention create a huge subsidiary industry and new diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease and high cholesterol create an opportunities for profit. Death from medical errors in the US run at 200,000 a year, while correct intervention claims many more.Famine is perhaps most relevant to this conference. By destroying the natural fertility of the Earth with chemical fertilisers and killing off biodiversity with pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, GMOs and antibiotics agribusiness has created a global dependency on their chemicals to produce our food. 'Feed the world' is their mantra as they progressively starve the world. Now, except for organic farming, we are hooked on the drugs they sell to keep degraded land in production.We have to kick these bad habits but they are entrenched in our socioeconomic system and their proprietors will not give up without a fightSo how can sustainability triumph? It must be in all arenas, we must bring peace and prosperity, to all. It can be done, because things have changed.How have things changed?Debt - Wars, drugs and agribusiness have bankrupted our economies. First rule of a parasite is: don't kill the host. If American taxpayers had to pay for war, medicine and farm subsidies they would never have happened. Instead the Chinese, and Arabs loaned the US the money so they could continue to buy cheap consumer goods and oil. Now that the debt is dragging down our economy we wrongly blame the bankers. The rot started because our governments subsidised war/drug/ag with borrowed money because they were too cowardly to pay for it out of increased taxation.Transparency - the days of the smoke-filled room where a handful of powerful men decide the fate of the rest of us is ending. We know what’s going on.There is no future if there is not a sustainable future. A handful of companies worldwide thrive on war, sickness and a famine. Our governments bow to them. Monsanto's control of the USDA is the most obvious but it's the same everywhere, from the EU to India to Africa and Latin America.It is undeniable that peace brings more prosperity than war and avoids the burden of debtThat the creation of health is better value than the treatment of diseaseThat organic and sustainable farming gives better and more reliable yields than unsustainable petrochemical dependencyWe're right - we know we're right - they know we're right.But they won't give up without a fightIn Britain our new prime minister speaks about The Big Society - people doing it for themselves. The top down model is disintegrating everywhere. When people start doing it for themselves then different choices will be made. Companies that are ready for this seismic change will prosper. There can only be on future and by definition it must be sustainable.

Treated like Animals

What is it about the meat industry? Vegans say meat is murder, what’s clear is that its production often defies morality.

A recently published inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (http://bit.ly/aKqz2U) has been pretty horrifying: women working in meat and poultry processing factories barred from going to the lavatory because it would slow down the production line. Result: urine and blood (if they’re menstruating) dripping down their legs. Angry managers pelt workers with frozen hamburgers and call them ‘you f***ing’ shit Polish.’

Press reports use terms like “Treated Like Animals.” I guess we take brutal and uncaring animal treatment for granted: cattle in Colorado feedlots up to their knees in their own shit, sick with e.Coli infections and salmonella. US poultry meat has to be washed with chlorine before it can safely be put on sale. I visited a chicken farm in West Virginia 18 months ago: the ammonia from fermenting chicken poop burned your eyes so badly that we could only stand in the shed full of 100,000 birds for a minute before we had to retreat to the fresh air outside. The country girl who assisted the manager commented that she had got used to the smell: her job entailed removing the dead birds every day. The corpses were then burned to generate heat that was helped heat the chicken barn – as recycling efforts go, probably a cut above grinding them up and feeding them to the survivors.

In the 19th Century a report from a Royal Navy vessel that intercepted a slave ship summarised conditions on that most horrendous of transatlantic voyages. “The sick, the dead and they dying were pulled up onto deck, shackled together, and thrown overboard.” The slaves were tethered in cubicles about 2 feet wide and 3 feet high for the entire voyage, which could last 4-12 weeks. The longer the trip the higher the death rate. Slave ships were ‘tight pack’ or ‘loose pack.’ ‘Tight pack’ profitably fitted more slaves into a ship, but the death rate was much higher: 10-20%. Modern pig and chicken factory farms go for ‘tight pack,’ raising the death rate to 5-14%, even with routine antibiotic use. Disease spreads in conditions where faeces cannot be cleared – even slaves above deck were chained in place for the entire voyage – otherwise they would jump overboard to escape the conditions.

I suppose when we consider the cruelty that surrounded the slave trade we shouldn’t be surprised that similar evils infest the meat industry. The trust of an animal is a wonderful thing. As pets they have a therapeutic effect that defies medical explanation. Yet if someone were to take a puppy or a kitten, smother it in its own excrement for a month or so, torture it, starve it and throw it into a furnace while it was still alive they’s be excoriated on the cover of the Daily Mail.

A new dairy ‘farm’ in Lincolnshire is planned to house 8100 dairy cows in darkened stalls, modelled on American dairy production. It is estimated that half of US dairy cows suffer from mastitis and they also suffer leukaemia, milk fever and a bovine form of AIDS. ‘Downers’ – cows that collapse - are turned into ground beef before they can die and become unsuitable for consumption.

It’s not often that Human Rights Watch take up cudgels on behalf of American workers, but they have pointed out that meat industry workers have 3 times the injury rate of other industries, with workers being asphyxiated by fumes and having their legs cut off and their hands crushed.

When you look at the cruelty we inflict on animals is it any wonder that we treat abattoir workers so badly? When you look at the kindness that typifies organic animal rearing, is it any wonder that places like the exemplary biodynamic Laverstoke Farm build their own meat processing facilities, carefully designed to keep the animals calm right up to the final moment, rather than send them off to a slaughterhouse where the people, let alone the animals are treated like…well, slaves.

People somehow manage to get over their concerns about animal welfare when they buy non-organic meat in a shop or restaurant, but how easy is it to be a participant in the human degradation as well?

From Green & Black's to Blackened Greens

Here's the story of how I moved from dark chocolate to even darker materials - biochar

Back in 1995 the Prince of Wales delivered the Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture on the theme of ‘Counting the Cost of Industrial Agriculture.’ He argued that if you incorporate the externalised costs of non-organic farming, such as nitrate pollution, gender-bending herbicides in the water supply, biodiversity loss and the climate change cost of greenhouse gases (from nitrous oxides and soil carbon emissions) the real cost of non-organic food would nearly double.

A year later Dan Morrell of Future Forests (later to become the Carbon Neutral Company) encouraged me to go carbon neutral with Whole Earth’s organic wholegrain cornflakes. The whole life cycle carbon footprint of the cornflakes was calculated by independent experts who found that it was surprisingly low: because organic farmers increase rather than reduce the stored carbon in soil, this offset much of the other carbon cost of the cornflakes.

By now it was pretty obvious to me that the sooner we could get policymakers to force us to include the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the cost of food the sooner we would all be eating organic food, because it would usually be cheaper.

Roll on 14 years to 2009 – the climate negotiations in Copenhagen have soil carbon and forest carbon on the agenda. Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the Bank of England and author of the Stern Review that put the cost of every tonne of carbon we emit today at £140 for future generations (currently carbon markets value a tonne of carbon at £11) has said that any future climate agreement has to be ‘universal and equitable.’ In other words, no cheating, no get-outs, no let-outs, no sacred cows. That means that all countries and all activities, including agriculture, forestry and transportation must be included in the new climate regime that begins in 2012. Hitherto only Europe has complied and then only for the heavy industries that emit half of our greenhouse gases – farming and transport have been excluded. But no longer.

2 years ago I invited Dan Morrell to join me in a new venture: Carbon Gold. What do we do? For a start, we believe biofuels are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Every bit of biomass carbon is too precious to waste by burning it. At Carbon Gold we aim to capture woody material such as waste biomass, forestry co-products and tree prunings and convert it into charcoal. But we call it ‘biochar.’ Why? Because we don’t burn it, thereby putting the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. Once we’ve made the biochar we blend it with fertility-building clays and composts and add it to the soil. Biochar is a wonderful soil conditioner: it improves drainage but also prevents soil drying out; it reduces the leaching of nutrients from soil by rainfall; it provides 5-Star accommodation for beneficial soil fungi and bacteria, increasing their populations; it improves soil structure and aggregation; it helps suppress soil-borne diseases that are harmful to plants and biochar helps raise the pH of acid soils. Universities around the world are gearing up to do biochar research that will more precisely quantify its benefits. These vary depending on soil, climate and the amount of biochar applied to soil.

Meanwhile at Carbon Gold we are busily making biochar and selling the carbon credits from avoided emissions as well as selling the biochar as a soil improver. In Belize cacao farmers produce biochar that is blended with compost and used by banana growers to reduce their dependence on fungicides and irrigation. In East Sussex we are regenerating ancient chestnut coppice woodland and producing organic biochar which we use to produce “Gro-Char” peat-free compost which will be sold through garden centres. Garden Organic members will be trialling it in various applications during the 2010 season. In Mozambique we are partnering with a conservation organisation to help small farmers produce biochar, encouraging them to protect their forests and improve their soil fertility. On my own smallholding near Hastings there is a magnificent peach tree dripping with perfect fruit that had its base covered with biochar last February. The ones that didn’t get biochar haven’t done so well, peach leaf curl was worse for them. My biochar potatoes still show no signs of blight, while everyone else’s have suffered.

I feel like I’m still in the food business (and I have made a delicious risotto nero charbonara that delighted dinner guests recently), I’ve just moved my focus towards food security.