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?

Is More Research Really Needed?

Stop the presses!  Amazing news from researchers!

The British Journal of Cancer recently published a report funded by Cancer Research UK .  The report says that 40% 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 girl friend 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 macrobiotic (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 AMA.  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 Britich 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% 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 tons 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 education in sex 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.

Go Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior 3

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.

Conford Book Review

Imagine you were writing a history of radio and television.  You cover the main actors, the writers, the producers, the programmes and the critics. You cover the impact on competing media such as newspapers and movies.  But, very carefully, your book avoids any mention of BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, Discovery Channel.  You don’t mention the broadcasters

Some years ago I gift aided £10k for the Soil Association to be able to help Philip Conford write a history of the organic network.  It was high time the deeds of the organic pioneers of the 60s and 70s were memorialised.  He thanks me in his introduction for never  seeking to influence his writing.   I wish now I had shackled him hand and foot.

His new book “The Development of the Organic Network, Linking People and Themes 1945-1995” sets out to be a history of the development of the organic network from its earliest philosophical beginnings.  But it ignores the broadcasters completely.  No mention of Harmony Foods, Community Foods, Infinity Foods, Green City Wholefoods, Edinburgh Real Foods, Essential, Harvest,  Marigold Foods.  No mention of the Natural Products Shows, no mention of Robin Bines, Peter Deadman, John Law or any of the many other founding fathers of the organic food phenomenon.  These people and companies were true revolutionaries but, as if in some Stalinist rewrite, they have been airbrushed out of the story in which they were the main activists.

Here’s what Conford’s book left out.  My brother Gregory and I started the Harmony organic brand in 1970 and introduced the first organic brown rice. Ivan Seruya and Herbie Girardet visited organic growers in the Home Counties sourcing organic vegetables and fruit in season that they delivered to the new generation of whole food shops popping up all over. We bought all Organic Farmers & Growers organic barley, rye wheat and oats and turned it into flakes for organic muesli.  Farmers could plant crops with confidence they'd be sold as organic. Community Foods and European counterparts developed organic dried fruit from Turkey.  Infinity Foods introduced Ecover and a wide range of European organic products, seeding the market for UK processors.  You could buy a full range of organic products, so people took organic food seriously.  The conversion of farm output to consumer products and the retailing and distribution of those products, was the work of these early pioneers, of whom I am proud to be one.   I told all of this to Philip Conford, he made notes, but none of this story made it into his book.

Even more irritatingly Conford decries the lack of spiritual values compared to the early Christian organic philosophers of the 1930s. What about Goodness Foods and Community, where Christian values were paramount?  The organic movement was also driven by the Buddhism and Taoism of macrobiotics, the Hindu influences on vegetarianism and veganism, the Jewish Vegetarian Society and the humanist animal rights movement. These are ignored completely.  Then he mentions a few cooperatives but only ones that failed.  What about successful cooperatives like Essential. Infinity, Suma, Harvest and Green City?.

Conford's book covers every detail of the writers and producers, but it completely ignores the vital mechanism that helped transform their ideals into a reality. Deeds speak louder than words.

The true history remains to be written.  It should be written while the memories of the pioneers are still fresh.  It will be the people's history of the organic movement, the real story of how we got where we are.

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.

Getting the Lead Out

Why were the Sixties so much fun? Could it be that we were all high on lead? Sure there was acid and grass and purple hearts, but what really got everyone loose as a goose was the lead. There is no level below which lead doesn’t have an effect. A little goes a long way. And it rots your brain, makes you prone to take risks and forgetful, while eating away at your kidneys and your liver. Kids get it worst: adults store it in their bones, but kids have it circulating in their bloodstream.

In the 60s A Day In The Life would start with a pot of tea made from water that had been sitting in lead pipes all night long. All the time you’re inhaling house dust that contains particles of lead that have flaked off the walls, painted with lead-based paints. Then the paper hits the doormat and you read it, the lead in the print coming off as a greyish smudge on your fingers that is absorbed directly through the skin into the bloodstream. Then breakfast of baked beans on toast, from a tin that was soldered together at the seam with a lead/tin compound. Out on the street, take a deep breath of fresh air, nicely spiced with airborne lead from the tetraethyl lead that was in all petrol until the mid ‘90s. Then roast pheasant for lunch, with atomised lead particles from the shotgun that brought it down. Now lead’s been phased out – you can only get unleaded petrol, lead pipes have mostly been replaced with plastic or copper, newspapers no longer use lead-based ink, house paints are all lead-free and tinned foods now no longer use solder – all the cans are welded seams. When I first went to pack Whole Earth baked beans back in 1983 the canners were appalled that I was appalled at the lead solder on the cans. They warned me that having welded seam cans would cost me an extra 10p per dozen, expecting me to drop my resistance. We were the first baked beans to use lead-free cans but Heinz and the rest followed suit over the next decade. Or so. And swan populations are recovering as hunters and fishermen switch over to lead-free shot.

Of course there is still lead residue in the world’s soils in which we grow our food. Green & Black’s test every batch of cocoa beans to make sure there is no residue. Dagoba, in the US, had to recall all their chocolate 2 years ago when it was found to have high levels of lead residue. It broke the company and they sold to Hershey a few months later.

When General Motors and Standard Oil developed tetraethyl lead as a petrol additive in the 1920s there was an outcry. It was banned. Everyone knew it was a poison and the opposition was led by top professors from Harvard and Yale. But Standard Oil likened lead to a ‘Gift from God’ as it would make such a difference to automobile performance. They acted in cahoots with DuPont (“Better Living Through Chemistry”) and General Motors to put pressure on the politicians. The ban on leaded gasoline was lifted and the world got a lot more toxic. Then it was banned again in the 1980s. Rick Nevin, of the National Center for Healthy Housing, has shown that crime levels fall when unleaded petrol is introduced. All the claims of tough guy mayors and police chiefs to have cut crime rates are so much fluff, the real culprit was lead all along. Has lead been phased out around the world? No. In Mexico City cars pump 32 tons of lead into the atmosphere every day. The crime rate went up by 69 % from 2005 to 2009. Researchers said maybe it was criminals acting under the influence of drugs. I blame the lead

But all is not doom and gloom – it only took 60 years for common sense to prevail, so there’s hope for us all that it might do so again with our modern poisons.

Epigenetics - We control our future, not genes

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 - epigeneticsEpigenomes 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?

Chocolate Wars (Financial Times book review)

CHOCOLATE WARS by Deborah Cadbury

It wasn’t easy being Quaker. Banned from careers in government, the church or law and with their pacifism barring a military career, they were forced into commerce. Their high ethical standards meant they couldn't be involved with alcohol, gambling or making armaments. The grocery trade became a natural outlet for their energies.All the great English chocolate dynasties: Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree, were Quakers. Their belief in the brotherhood of man led to paternalistic employment practices. They build garden towns for their employees with creches, sporting facilities and healthcare. Cameron's 'Big Society’ was second nature - they believed that cooperation and social provision were a necessary and natural adjunct to making money. They encouraged cooperation, volunteering and debt avoidance as fundamentals of behaviour - until competition from the State made their efforts redundant. Deborah Cadbury approvingly quotes Andrew Carnegie: "I can conceive of no greater mistake...than of trying to make charity do the work of justice." If the welfare state encourages dependency, the socially inclusive world of the chocolate industry encouraged self-reliance, hard work and abstemiousness. No pubs in Bournville and no tolerance for slackers in a tight-knit community, but generous provision for those who repaid the firm's confidence.

These straitlaced kindhearted pioneers built great chocolate empires and successfully fended off 100 years of assaults on the British market from Van Houten in Holland and Nestle, Suchard and Peter from Switzerland, while building market domination wherever the globe was coloured pink. Chocolate Wars is much more than a story of a few family businesses - it covers the worldwide growth of the now near-universal addiction to chocolate from the rather unappealing greasy chocolate drinks that prevailed at the beginning of the Victorian age. The role of innovation, war and new technology on business development are all clearly and cleverly interleaved to make this book a gripping overview of the evolution from tiny beginnings to what is now a $500 billion industry.

The book dwells in detail on the ethical dilemma faced by the early Quaker chocolatiers when they discovered that their cocoa bean supply came from plantations that relied on slave labour and tells how the Ghana cocoa industry was fostered to provide a smallholder-owned alternative. Yes there is just a fleeting mention of Fairtrade and not a word about Green & Black’s, the pioneer brand in both the organic and Fairtrade categories and a Cadbury acquisition in 2005.

One question that is unanswered in the book was "Why Switzerland?" The chocolate making season is longer at cooler heights and latitudes - chocolate doesn't set at high temperatures. Swiss watchmakers are good at precision technology. Switzerland had the first structural dairy surpluses in Europe, providing cheap milk for processors. But the fact that non-Swiss companies house their European HQ in Switzerland points to another factor: taxation. The lamentation about job losses in Bristol (which Cadbury's had already irreversibly exported to Poland) overlooked the real loss; Cadbury's annual contribution from its global activities to HM Treasury.

What triggered Cadbury's loss of independence? Selling Hershey the US rights to the Cadbury brand in 1988 meant Cadbury could never become a truly global chocolate company. When Cadbury sought to take over Rowntree and become the world's largest chocolate company the Thatcher government blocked it with a referral to the Monopolies Commission, then allowed a Nestle takeover that handed the Swiss firm global dominion. The disposal of Schweppes soft drinks in 2007 reduced debt but made the company smaller, making it just about affordable for Kraft - they still had to make a $3 billion asset disposal to fund the purchase. It may be presumptuous to disagree with my fellow Omahan, Warren Buffett, but Kraft CEO Irene Rosenfeld saw a window of opportunity and seized the moment before it could close. For that Kraft’s shareholders can be eternally grateful - she got a great deal that will amplify their fortunes going forward. The hedge funds dealt the final hand, but the vulnerability was already there and she went straight for it.

Roll on $200 a barrel oil prices

Much as I hate what Gaddafi is up to and much as I dread any threat to the stability of the Saudi regime, I can’t help hoping that the oil price goes up and stays up.

There are a lot of reasons for this.

Cheap oil is what drives industrial farming. 7 years ago in The Little Food Book I calculated that when the oil price hit $70 a barrel organic food would be cheaper than non-organic. That’s because it take twice as much fossil fuel for an industrial farmer to produce a calorie of food as it does for an organic farmer. Broadly speaking, an industrial farmer uses 12 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food. Then it takes more fossil fuel to convey the food to the supermarket distribution depot, then to the store, including refrigeration costs. An organic farmer uses 6 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food and is more likely to sell it at a farmer’s market or to local outlets.

Industrial farming replaces jobs with chemicals. Instead of people planting, weeding and composting chemicals do the job. Nitrate fertilisers are made using natural gas. Gas prices follow oil prices upwards – energy is energy. So nitrates are getting a lot more expensive, but still not expensive enough. They’re killing us by releasing nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas 310 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in causing global warming. Nitrates are responsible for the equivalent of 1 billion tonnes of CO2 every year, about 1/6 of the total excess emissions that are turning up the heat on dear old Planet Earth. And farmers need to use more and more as underlying soil fertility dies out, making a bad problem worse. At $200 barrel, even with the current extravagant level of subsidies, farmers would switch to organic in droves. If you can grow your own fertiliser by leaving fields fallow, composting and growing green manures, why pay for a bunch of horrendously expensive chemicals? The price of food will go up as the price of oil goes up, but the impact per calorie on organic food will be half that on industrial.

A lacto-ovo vegetarian consumes half the energy resources for the same nutrition as a non-vegetarian meat-eater. A vegan consumes just one quarter. An organic vegan will consume just 1/8 the fossil fuel inputs of a non-organic non-vegetarian.

The price of carbon offsets goes up with rising oil prices. Companies have to pay for EU carbon emission allowances. They are currently priced at around £12 per tonne. Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the last government’s report on climate change and of the book Blueprint for a Safer Planet, said the real price should be £70 per tonne. (Then he said “I was wrong – the real figure is £140 per tonne”). The higher the price of oil, the higher the price of carbon offsets and the more attractive it is to invest in energy-saving and renewables. A tonne of oil produces more than 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide, so just to offset the cost to the future of this planet, it should cost £140 times 3 or £420. A barrel is 1/5 tonne, so the carbon cost of a barrel should be priced in at about £80, or $120 per barrel. Then the producers need to make a small profit, too, after all it costs anything from $3 (Kuwait) to $9 (Texas) to extract a barrel of oil from the ground. They’ve got used to making $90/barrel profit, add that to the $120 carbon cost and you’re over $200.

When you see the taxis with their engines running queuing up outside railway stations, vans parked with their engines running and people whizzing along at inefficient speeds you can’t help wondering if they would be so wasteful if petrol cost 3 times as much.

Think of the jobs that high oil prices would bring, too. Every time an out of town supermarket opens local employment suffers. Yeah, yeah, I know they claim they are creating jobs but James Lowman of the Association of Convenience Stores did a check last year. Supermarkets created an extra 2.75 million extra square feet of store space and cut their staff levels by 426. So we are gutting the high streets of our towns and putting more people on the unemployment register and forcing people to drive to the supermarket to buy a week’s worth of food, 1/3 of which goes off and ends up being wasted.

When oil prices go up people will shop locally, on an ‘as needed’ basis. They’ll eat organic. They’ll eat less meat. They’ll walk more and drive less. They’ll pay lower insurance premiums as adverse climate events reduce the impact on insurers. They’ll breathe cleaner air as people switch to less polluting transportation. They’ll drink cleaner water as pesticides and

Belize - the birthplace of Fairtrade

November 2008, Belize. I am with a small group of journalists, taking them to meet the growers of organic cocoa beans. We go back 15 years - I first bought their cacao when Green & Black’s chocolate was just a baby.

When I first made contact with the Toledo Cacao Growers Association, the Maya Indians faced abject poverty after throwing in their lot with US chocolate giant Hershey. A classic old-development paradigm: the aid workers had encouraged the growers to sign up to intensive farming and the break-up of their communal reservation land. The private land deeds were used as collateral for bank loans to buy hybrid seeds and agrichemicals. Then the aid workers left, Hershey pulled out and prices dropped from $1.75 a pound of beans to a catastrophic 55¢ a pound. The bank was readying to foreclose and confiscate farmers’ land. That’s when Josephine and I turned up, prepared to pay decently, with a five-year rolling contract and cash up-front for organic cocoa beans. I blame the ‘kukuh’. That’s what turned me and Josephine on to the beauty of Belize Maya cocoa and led to Maya Gold, the first product in the UK to be certified Fairtrade. Now I am sitting with Eladio Pop and his wife after a dinner of tortilla, spicy stew and pumpkin, and it’s kukuh time again. It’s all home-grown and homemade. After harvesting his cacao, Eladio ferments it, dries it, roasts it, winnows the husks and grinds them, then shapes the resulting paste into balls. He grates some, blending it with warm water, vanilla, ground allspice and honey or sugar to make kukuh. After several delicious calabash cups-full, we are bouncing off the walls. Later I bump into an old friend, Cirila Cho when she is picking up a cheque for her home-made chocolate bars. A new grandmother, she’s now a businesswoman in her own right, with a small-scale grinding and conching set-up. Organic cocoa is good for women. After the men bring back the pods to the village, the women ferment the beans in boxes for five days. Then they sun-dry them, turn them as needed, and bring them in if it starts to rain. Controlling these operations gives women a share in the wealth, conferring domestic and community power. The Maya-run cacao cooperative is doing well. I attend its AGM, where everyone gets a bar of ‘their’ chocolate, and hears the accountant report another profitable year. Asset-rich, the coop now has enough reserves in the bank for a disaster reserve fund (hurricanes and fire) and high school scholarships. The number of kids at secondary school has grown from 10% to over 70%, thanks to our paying fair-trade and organic prices. The Minister of Foreign Affairs is speaking now, praising the farmers. Thanks to their vision, he says, Belize, the birthplace of fair trade, is a beacon to the world. It sounds grand but it wasn’t all plain sailing. Back in 1993, British and UN aid workers strongly advised the cacao growers against signing-up to produce for Green & Black’s Maya Gold. They especially counselled against going organic, predicting disease and crop failure. However, since we were offering three times the price and a return to traditional Maya farming practices without expensive chemicals, it was a no-brainer. Nevertheless I will always be grateful to Justino Peck, the then - and just re-elected - Chairman of the association, for listening to my scheme and trusting me to deliver. I visit a three-generation farm, the Bols, Grandad Reyes, son Justiniano and grandson Justiniano Junior, where we eat ripe cacao fruit, with just the right au point balance of sweetness and acidity. We eat greedily, our sticky fingers pulling out the seeds, sucking off the pulp and spitting out the beans. This is a rare treat, a fruit that can never be commercialised – take an eco-cacao holiday in Belize and this pleasure can be yours! You can’t produce organic cocoa beans on a big plantation paying slave wages. The only way is on small family farms paying a decent price to get the commitment and care required for a high-quality product. Shoppers often agonise: organic or fair-trade? Support organic farmers and you get both.

Bio-Fools

Biofuels are causing environmental disaster. Let’s not be biofools...

Last year the average price of a food basket rose by 12%. There are legitimate reasons for this including rising oil prices and more demand for meat. Another cause, which concerns me here, is biofuels - the so-called ‘green’ saviour. The rush into biofuels is a scam to get rid of food surpluses by burning them. Instead of downsizing our cars, we are burning food for oil. Ethanol plants are taking one third of the entire US corn crop and turning it into alcohol for mixing with gasoline. It’s terribly inefficient, but the government gives ethanol plants a $1 gallon subsidy and charges less tax on biofuels at the service station. Many US states now require 15% ethanol to be added to gasoline at service station pumps. It’s another scam to waste taxpayers’ money on inefficient GM and industrial farming, this time under the guise of doing something to fight climate change. The US and the EU are both promoting biofuels as an eco-solution. Don’t be fooled. Two recently published groups of US research found that farming biofuels actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. Clearing carbon-rich peatland and rainforests to plant fuel crops releases even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The industrial manufacturing process only adds to biofuels’ carbon footprint. Grown on an industrial scale, biofuels end up accelerating climate change, not reducing it. Worst of all, the fundamental principle is flawed. If you put £1 million in the bank in July and then withdrew it in August and burned it, would you say you were £1 million better off? Of course not, but the crazy economics of biofuels do just that. When biofuels are burnt, carbon that has just been taken out of the atmosphere in the summer goes right back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, later in the autumn. How on earth is that doing something good for the planet? If we really want to reduce greenhouse gases, then we need to put carbon into the soil and keep it there by farming organically. Carbon does far more good in the soil then it does harm in the air (as carbon dioxide). The soil on organic farms contains up to 6 times as much carbon (as humus) as on non-organic farms. Humus fertilises the soil naturally, retaining moisture and nutrients. But instead of turning land into carbon-rich stores, the EU Commission is calling for energy-intensive, greenhouse gas-forming biofuels. It has recently made new targets: 10% biofuels by 2010 at a pump near you. This will exhaust what little carbon remains in our once humus-rich fertiles soils, all to keep agribusiness going.If the US and EU paid farmers to turn their farms into carbon-capturing meadows and forests, we could add billions of tonnes of carbon to the soil carbon bank annually. But agribusiness doesn’t make money out of set-aside land – no market for chemicals, equipment or fertilisers - it makes money out of land relentlessly farmed to destruction. So we pay more for food as well as, through our taxes, for biofuels. And global warming gets worse.This has terrible social consequences as well as environmental ones. Most of Europe’s palm oil bio-diesel is imported from Indonesia, destroying the orangutan’s habitat and precious rain forest and its human inhabitants. Ethanol from Brazil comes from sugar cane that replaces Brazilian rainforest. We are converting other people’s land and food into fuel for us. EU policies subsidise the theft of land from forest-dwelling people. Nobody, not even Parliament, ever asked for or voted for this.Not in my name, please.

Subsidies - who really needs them?

Every year the governments of the world back winners in Big War, Big Ag, Big Energy and Big Pharma. The total bill to taxpayers? A stonking $3500 billion! Yes, $3.5 trillion. How much of this do you get? Nothing. You just get to pay for it. Unless you’re Big.

You can't blame the poor despised bankers for this one, this is our elected representatives doing what they are told by unelected powers and their well-connected lobbyists.

How does it break down? Big Agriculture gets $350bn a year to degrade our soils with chemical fertilisers, kill off our wildlife and living soil with pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Big War uses up $1500 bn a year on wars of aggression. Direct and indirect subsidies to Big Pharma cost $1000 bn. And Big Energy gets $550 bn - mostly subsidies to help struggling oil companies discover more oil.

See the pattern? Tax the little guys and subsidise the big and powerful. Then they 'optimise' taxation to make sure they pay as little tax as possible in a place like Britain.

How does it feel to know that the tax on the money you've diligently earned without any help from the government is being spent to help powerful competitors drive you out of business?

Then there's the non-governmental subsidies, harder to measure but with the same effect. Supermarkets subsidise industrialised bread to lure customers to their stores. This is ruinous for small bakers who have to make their profit from baked goods.

Ocado - a direct competitor of many readers, has managed to lose £300,000,000 over the past 10 years and managed to lose £25 million last year, but in so doing it undermines retailers that have to make a profit or go under. This is a subsidy from private equity to gain future profit but its impact is to drive honest traders out of business and clear the field for another monster. Their investors probably include your pension fund.

Every £1 of subsidy from the EU costs us £2. How so? The administration, policing, storage and fraud inherent in running the CAP swallows half the money that goes to farmers. It would be cheaper to give every food shopper a 'CAP tax back’ at the checkout and dismantle this unwieldy system. They claim subsidies help small farmers but the fact is that smallholdings and small farms began to disappear as soon as we joined the CAP.

The Common Agricultural Policy is up for reform in 2013. They've been ‘reforming’ it ever since the 1970s. Because of our subsidies, farmers in other countries can only compete by exploiting slave labour, degrading soil, destroying rain forests and poisoning themselves and the environment with nasty chemicals. Activists campaign to support the forests and indigenous people and to ban slavery, but would freak out if we had to pay the real cost of food at the supermarket. The average dairy cow in Europe gets over £600 a year in subsidy - no wonder milk is cheaper than bottled water! (And there’s still surplus cheap milk to dump to Russia, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria)

Will the CAP be reformed? What happened last time, ten years ago? While negotiators from the UK attempted to inject some sanity into the discussions the heads of state of Germany and France excused themselves and stepped out of the room for half an hour. They returned and announced that there would be no reform of the CAP until 2013. And that was that. Since then they’ve instituted a 10% Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation that keeps the countryside full of rapeseed and pays for deforestation of the last habitats of orangutans to grow palm oil to burn in buses.

These people couldn’t reform a piece of plasticine.

Meat Free Mondays

In mid June 2009 I went to the launch of Meat Free Mondays. Frontman Paul McCartney gave a straightforward and inspiring speech stating the obvious – meat eating is responsible for about one quarter of the world’s increase in greenhouse gas levels each year. If we all gave up meat just one day a week, this could make a significant difference to our headlong rush towards extinction on an overheated planet. Not particularly challenging you might think – one day a week without meat isn’t going to have anyone in the developed world turning up at the doctor’s with kwashiorkor or some other protein deficiency disease, is it? In fact, a little less protein might help with the obesity boom – could be win – win: we end up healthier and our grandchildren inherit a planet that is still habitable.

But the press took it badly. Even the Guardian, which I doggedly continue to read despite the increasingly snide and snotty articles against organic food, environment campaigners and alternative medicine they publish nowadays, couldn’t play it straight.The Telegraph’s Liz Hunt said the idea made her want to ‘club a seal’ and vowed to eat bacon for breakfast, chicken for lunch and hamburger for dinner in order to express her revulsion at the concept.Worst of all was the Grocer, quoting 2 anonymous ‘sources’ and one named one. One ‘source’ described the initiative as ‘crass’ and said ‘I think it’s bonkers.’ Then the Chairman of the NFU’s livestock board, Alistair MacKintosh pointed out that farmers were waiting for innovation and science to sort out the cow farts and burps, concluding ‘I’d rather listen to science than some hippified vegetarian.’Errr... the science of global warming is pretty clear on this one:- Cows emit methane, methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times worse than CO2. - Sir David King, the former Government Chief Scientist says: ‘easting less meat will help the environment’ citing beef’s carbon footprint as 20 times higher than that of whole grains. - The Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges a meat-free day to help reduce emissions.These hippies are everywhere!With Hilary Benn, a vegetarian, the new Secretary of State at Defra and Jim Fitzpatrick, another veggie, the Minister for Food, Farming and Environment, let’s hope that the NFU’s legendary control over this important Ministry is balanced by rationality and that science, not subsidy, dictates future policy.Meanwhile it’s all happening on the film front. ‘End of the Line’ documents the corruption of governments by big fish interests and shows how this is leading to the end of abundant fish in the oceans.‘Food Inc’ shows how a handful of multinationals have seized control of our food supply and driven down safety standards for both workers and consumer health.Former Soil Association trustee Tracy Worcester’s film ‘Pig Business’ will be screened on More4 on June 30 2009 at 10 p.m – giving an insight into how the same practices that brought you Swine Flu are now being replicated in Poland.The industrial meat industry is killing us and liquidating any decent future for the planet. If Meat Free Mondays can mark the start of a reversal of this awful situation then it deserves everyone’s support.Recently Greenpeace researched the double whammy source of greenhouse gas in the Amazon forest. Forest is cleared and burned – lots of CO2 into the atmosphere -then it’s stocked with methane-emitting cows that end up being sneaked past the controls that buyers like Tesco, Asda and M&S have established to prevent just this sort of thing. If reputable companies can’t control this what can a person do?Well, cutting out meat one day of the week seems a reasonable start.

Brussels

Just came from a meeting in Brussels July 19 2009

The reason? A jury of 4 people from the organic sector and 4 people who are designers foregathered to consider 1000 or so submissions for the new EU logo for organic food. (The 9th juror was Miguel Indurain the winner for the Tour de France 5 years running from 1991 to 1995)

The old logo was not widely adopted. Most countries and regions already had a national logo so didn't change to it. However, the EU Commission, during the negotiations for the revised organic regulations, decided to make it mandatory, displayed as well as existing marks of organic certification. From 2010 all organic packaging will be required to have it added on the label somewhere as a second reassurance that the product complies with the EU standard for organic food.

So we foregather, we 9 jurors, to consider designs submitted by art students for a logo to encompass all the products of this €22 billion industry. The brief was challenging: no words such as 'bio' or 'organic' - should show Europe in some way (most likely an artistic letter 'e' or a circlet of stars) - should be memorable. We turn a long list into a short list and then rank the logos. There are a lot of very clever designs, some rather trite, many that were not a logo - more a brand or a 'storyboard.' In the end we jurors settled on a ranked top 10.

Next step? Fix them up with refinements of the designs, then post them on the internet and let the public vote for them.

The organic movement and market has gotten so big that Directorate General Agri, the EU Commission's agriculture executive, seem to need to move from a bystander role to more central control. Requiring food products to bear the new mark will help imprint its authority on the rapidly growing organic market.

I met Elisabeth Mercier, the head of L'Agence Bio, the French multisector quango that is now promoting organic food and farming in France. Her organisation has brought order out of organised chaos in the French organic movement and marketplace. L'Agence Bio's profile has strong resonances with the Soil Association's role in the world of UK organic food and farming. France is showing rapid growth in organic farmiong, , helped by the way L'Agence Bio has brought together all the stakeholders for gatherings of mutual interest and benefit. We talked about the FFL Partnership, how independent schools will give it extra weight, how effective it is at creating the infrastructure that can underpin local food economies.

Poznan prattle

Arrived Saturday 5th to be in the midst of a mad runaround

Dan and Debbie are rushing around to get the submission in by 6 p.m. We find out who the key player is and head for his office and meet a guard with a pistol on his hip. We blag and beg to get through security to the high temple: the UNFCCC office and found Martin ??? who is the controller/gatekeeper on this and he gave us the precise wording which Debbie then emailed to the UNFCCC but also printed out a copy and put it through the door of UNCCD, who are the official sponsors of the submission. They need to stamp it with their seal and then, as long as it gets to the UNFCCC by close of play on Monday, it's on the main agenda, not the NGO 'tail' agenda that future negotiations can look at but don't have to properly consider. Whew! But needs chasing on Monday as the UNCCD (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNFCCC=United Nations Framework Committee on Climate Change - do keep up!)

We went for a cup of tea and met Margaret Leinen from Climos, who are working on seeding the sea in expanded trials for carbon sequestration. They put 20 Kgs of iron sulfite (via propwash of boad) per square Km of sea surface and say this sequesters 25 Tonnes of C which falls to the ocean bottom (not CO2, but definitely C)

I leave her talking to Jim Fournier while we go off to the press room and collar odd journalists. One is from a group of environmental journalists and we give him the story and a press release.

Then we restock the press release stand, which is a messy table, with more of our releases.

Then we visit Reuters to thank them for the article (not that good) they sent out on their wires and clarified that we are not looking for funding but are funded and on the way. He was more interested and we gave him 5 minutes of quality information.

Then we passed around the various displays, picking up literature on REDD

Then back to the restaurant where Jim, Lopa and Debbie are still talking to the Climos ocean seeding folks.

They head off to a party and Dan and I go to the REDD meeting at 1930 in the White Tailed Eagle room where a NZ researcher is setting out the economics of different approaches: free approach, restrictions on supply, restrictions on demand. Very technical but gives an insight into how the ‘market’ economics of climate change are influenced by how much people think governments are willing to pay. What’s clear is that everyone is committed in principle but nobody wants to pay the true cost of carbon (£70 a tonne, at least, according to Nick Stern, who since said it’s probably double that.)

After the lecture we talk to Linda Krueger, Director of Global Conservation Policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (formerly known as Bronx Zoo) She knows about Golden Stream Corridor Reserve, her predecessor, Al Rabinowitz, is a jaguar expert, has written several books about them and other big cats. We invite her to dinner but she is going to the party at Tuba and says she might catch up with us later.

Then we go to the market square where we have arranged to meet the others for dinner. Dan has booked a table for 10 at the Baizanteicie, which means, the Pheasant. Nobody’s there so we stroll around the square, which is very Christmassy with ice sculptures, amber sellers, pretty gifty stuff. Geoffrey Lean calls me to say the article is in tomorrow’s Independent on Sunday. A huge ice sculpture collapses in front of us, I thank Geoffrey for slowing my pace with his call as otherwise I’d have had huge chunks of ice on my foot. He also thanks us for the invite to Poznan but says he’d be compromised if he accepted. We wait at the restaurant and down a couple of ice cold vodkas. Then everyone arrives and we have a full table of 10. Traditional but well presented Polish food, I have Poznan duck with red cabbage, dumplings and gravy. The borshe they serve is a clear, rich beet extract with cumin and dill spicing, very delicious and clean on the palate.

There are 2 journalists from a newsletter ready by environmentalists on the Hill, Debbie’s husband who is a political worker, former aide to a Delaware senator, a gy from NRDC and then Lopa, Jim, Dan, me and Debbie. I can’t really speak to the Wash DC guys as they are at the other end of the table and there’s a lot of background noise, much of it from us.

I leave them carousing and head back for some healing sleep.

In the morning I meet Lydia Olander of the Nicholas Institute at Duke University, one of the main links between academia and Washington policy and Brian Murray, who is their Director of Economic Analysis. I’ve been talking to Francisco Ascui who is at the U of Edinburgh, knows Richard Tipper, did some analysis work for Birdlife International that probably is why Richard set up independently with support from Stephen Rumsey (Birdlife’s treasurer). We are meeting Richard in January at his request so it’s good to get a bit of background, though the report is confidential, but touches on REDD etc. Francisco is the Principal Consultant at EcoSecurities, who are the world leaders in bringing home CDM projects through the methodology process and he feels we need help at IBI if we are to get there. He would like a meeting with Debbie and me (he met Debbie a few days ago) and would like to bring along his forestry expert. It’s nearly 1 pm so I have emailed Debbie and am going to head into town to take some pictures as there’s nothing happening at the conference today, Sunday and nobody’s quite sure how the rescheduling around the muslim holiday is going to work tomorrow.

I ride into town on the tram with Bryan Murray and then wander round the square, buy some Christmas decorations for Jo that are very Polish rococo and then have Kleb, a slice of bread with lashings of fried onions and sliced dill pickles. They serve it with Kybasie too, but I pass on the sausage. A woman next to me is speaking to her husband in English and then to the server in Polish so I ask her to establish the origin of the Schmalzen (Yiddish: Schmaltz) and she says it should be goose but it’s probably pork. It’s lard. Flavoured with salt and fried onions. Too late, I down it, alienating myself from the world's Judaic, Muslim, Hindu, vegan and vegetarian populations at a stroke. When in Poland…

Then I stroll up the hill to the Poznan museum of Applied Arts – lots of ornate swords, arquebuses, blunderbusses, armour, armoires, tapestries, inlaid furniture, old leather and wood thrones, Polish chinoiserie, a range of cocktail dresses from the 1900s to the 1990’s including some 50’s ones ‘a la mode Chanel.’ I knew that East European cars were scaled down copies of Detroit's 50s monsters but hadn't realised before that the same was true of fashion, too.

Then I meet up with Debbie and Francisco at the Merkure Hotel. Francisco has brought along Till his forestry associate who also works at EcoSecurities. They explain the process to develop modules for approval by the Voluntary Carbon Standard VCS that comply with the CCB Climate Communities and Biodiversity standards that is the best you can get. They estimate a cost of $60,000 to $130,000 plus the cost of our auditor, who is a VCS approved one, the proposal goes to the VCS, who give it to another auditor, then it gets approved if it’s OK, which it will be if they do it, they say. The key is that it needs little funding as they know all the people from UN and government bodies and private foundations, who fund this sort of thing, and can help us to fast track to full funding - they want the work, need us as the hook but know where the money is, so it's potentially not much cost at all. Debbie takes copious notes and I realise that if we do this right, getting the rewards for abandoning bad practice (slash n burn, wood fire cooking, deforestation) and the rewards for good practice (Slash n char, biochar stoves, sustainable forest management) we could get a real lump of money for every tonne of C that we sequester, getting up to me dreamed-of double credits.

A very good and instructive meeting with a couple of real insiders, Debbie and I stay behind to digest, then I go off to the Sheraton to meet Tom Spencer and Icarus Moussitis, from the European Council, he’s their climate change guy. We have a beer and talk about the forthcoming events tomorrow that they’re doing, Durwood Zaelke will be doing an afternoon event with Tom and he is organising a group of 3 groups who wanted to do events and have been told they have to all squeeze into one 1 ½ hour slot, but they are compatible so it’s possibly a good thing. We’ll see, the speaking slots are very tight, 9 speakers in 60 minutes. Then we head off to dinner in the old town, with the group from tomorrow. There’s room for me and Icarus so we join them and I chat to Michiko Kainuma from the Climate Policy Assessment Research Section Center for Global Environmental Research (CGER)

Then Cornie from the Clear Air Initiative for Asian Cities tells me about the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air and their stoves, also about the Colorado State group, Bryan Wilson, who are working on this issue. These people may be able to give us an overview of what is happening with stoves. Everyone is a bit contrite because the 'clean air' stoves make for healthier households but actually are the main cause of the Himalayan snow melt and increased Asian soot - so a biochar stove could be a way that they can redeem themselves from the unintended consequences of the last big stove roll-out.

Then we leave and in the square a lovely tall brunette is singing arias. Her voice is trained, crystal clear, very relaxed and natural, standing a few feet away it vibrates every bone in your body. It turns out Icarus is also a singer, baritone, trained and used to sing in opera. We chat and it turns out that she’s from Belgium, he’s Cypriot but works at the Council offices in Brussels. “What brings you to Poznan?” he asks. “I’m a Greenpeace activist” she replies. “Were you at the demonstration outside the Council offices in Brussels in May? Did you get arrested?” Her face lights up, as do those of her three girlfriends. “Yes, they arrested us.” Icarus explained his job, said it took him several hours before he could get into his office, but assured them he supported their work and that it was a good demo.

They arrange to meet up tomorrow and sing some arias together.