Which is cheaper – human life or chicken breasts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real change is coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't wreck our soil

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

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

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

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

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

the ones that convert nitrogen into nitrate fertiliser;

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

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

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

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

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

Hoppy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seed Magazine 1975

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future is meat less

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nordic thriller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

War of the world

After a century of destructive conflict a new battle is about the begin – the one to save Planet Earth. It’s the war we really can’t afford to lose, writes Craig Sams.

“I’m the King of the castle – and you’re a dirty rascal”

Every since my playground days I’ve been aware of who holds the high ground and who is a serf. In the olden days it was the legacy of your birth that determined your future chances. In our corporate world ‘legacy industries’ cling to their power in the face of change.

Economists bat on about ‘creative destruction’ in capitalism, but there are still way too many gigantic corporations that are dinosaurs; fat and obsolete but refusing to just lie down and be creatively destroyed. They’re the ‘kings of the castle’ and they’re not about to let any perceived ‘dirty rascals’ impinge on their power.  Sometimes creative destruction does work. A disruptive technology like a smartphone can instantly make obsolete regular cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, cameras, wrist watches, calculators, voice recorders and game boxes. Apple nearly destroyed IBM.

In Victorian times Britain and France went on a colony-building binge, demolishing the Ottoman Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire in order to take over their territory.  This led in 1914 to the ‘War to end all Wars’ that we commemorate.  Hindsight shows it was the start of a 100 Years War…WWI was followed by a lot of mini wars, then WWII, then the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Lebanon invasion, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, to name a few.  NATO is at the heart of most of these wars

The NATO conference agenda recently called for increased military expenditure now that the EU economy seems to be finally.  Where would the money go?  To arms manufacturers in the US and Britain and to terrorists who we train and arm before they go over to the other side, creating new conflicts.

War of course isn’t the only legacy industry that made all its money out of a situation and can’t move on. .

Adam Smith nailed it in The Wealth of Nations when he wrote:  “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Who are the other dinosaurs that have sunk their fangs into the taxpayer’s neck and are sucking out our hard earned money to pay their salaries and remunerate their shareholders?

The pharmaceutical industry depends on widespread disease.  Many diseases arise from environmental reasons: lead in petrol, hormones in meat, pesticide residues in food and water, side effects of drugs, additives in food and toiletries and poor quality food grown in depleted soils. Prevention is the best cure, but where’s the profit in that?  If everyone was healthy Pharma would be in a very bad place.

Agribusiness depends on depleted soils.  Once you’ve knocked the life out of soil with nitrates, fungicides, insecticides, nematicides and other toxic material the only way a farmer can get a crop is by buying in ever more chemicals.  Farmers have to do what the government pays them to do, so Big Ag leans on government to make sure that the subsidy system encourages farmers to grow biofuels instead of food and to farm for production rather than sustainable productivity. They spend a lot of money fighting off real progress.

The ‘disruptive technology’ in agriculture is organic farming – like the smartphone it delivers a number of products in one package: sustainable yields, healthier soils, lower pollution, healthier people, reduced global warming, more biodiversity and far less expenditure on subsidies for expensive poisons and chemical fertilisers.

The oil industry get massive subsidies masked as exploration grants to make them seem more competitive than they really are. Private energy generation is discouraged, but it’s more resilient and cheaper.

But the biggest legacy industry of all is government – not only does it collaborate with the other legacy industries to protect their obsolete positions, the legacy industries collaborate with government to keep them dishing out the dosh and keeping their upstart competitors at bay.

Silicon Valley blew a hole in a number of legacy industries: big computers, expensive telephony, monopolised media and communications, to name a few. Now the Silicon Valley investors are investing big time in what they call ‘AgriTech.’ These investors don’t care for heavy-handed government regulation and can see an opportunity to cash in on food production in a world where daft ideas like biofuels, GMOs, subsidies and chemicals are making less and less sense. Organic farming and agroecological systems are where the smart investment money is heading. Backed by technology, organic farming can wipe the floor with the dinosaurs like Monsanto – they’ll fight back but there is a tidal wave of smart money that is betting against them

World War Three will be the war to save planet Earth. This is one we can’t afford to lose.

By Craig Sams

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

Say it Loud, I’m Blob and I’m Proud

Oh, dearie me. In a bitter article in the Sunday Telegraph just a few days after Cameron sacked him as Environment Minister, Owen Paterson lashed out at “the ‘Green Blob’ of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy groups and public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape.”

Then he got personal:

He criticised a ‘rich pop star’ (Brian May) for standing up for badgers, saying that May had ‘never been faced with having to cull a pregnant heifer.’

A gratuitous and most unchivalrous pop followed at national treasure Vivienne Westwood for opposing fracking. He called her ‘a dress designer for whom energy bills are trivial concerns.’

George Monbiot got it in the neck as ‘a public school journalist who thinks the solution to environmental problems…is Back to the Stone Age, but Glastonbury style.’

And he couldn’t resist a blob job on me, either: ‘a luxury chocolate tycoon uninterested in the demonstrable environmental and humanitarian benefits of GM crops’.

For the record: I have been interested in those demonstrable benefits every since they were first promised in 1996. I’m still waiting. Things are getting worse, not better. Herbicide resistant weeds are forcing farmers to use herbicides that were banned for very good reason more than a decade ago. Why should anyone want this in Britain?

Paterson should have saved his venom for Cameron, who realised that having someone like him on the front bench was electoral suicide.   In their parting row Paterson was overheard saying: “You can’t sack me, it’s a smash in the face for 12 million people who live in the countryside.” Then he stuck the knife in and twisted the blade: “I can out-ukip UKIP” he is said to have shouted. If anything, that probably confirmed Cameron that he’d made the right decision.

But what if Gove and Paterson, as George Monbiot has suggested, set up a British ‘Tea Party?’ In the USA ‘Tea Party’ has connotations of freedom-loving Bostonians dumping tea in the sea as a protest against tax-grabbing government. In Britain ‘Tea Party’ just conjures up images of mad hatters and people who have ‘believed six impossible things before breakfast.’ Hmmm. Funnily enough it was an earlier manifestation of the Green Blob in Britain that pushed for the 1898 ban on the use of mercury in hat making, while in the US the hatters unions failed to get similar protection. In 1945 80% of American felt hat makers had mercurial tremors, the dreaded ‘hatters shakes.’ In Britain the same disease had become a rarity by 1910. Go figure.

I feel honoured to have been celebrated as being one of the influential forces that made Paterson’s job such a struggle of imagined good against perceived evil. The trouble with being honoured in a newspaper article is that it is too ephemeral – tomorrow’s fish and chips. How about making it official? I’d love to be able to put the initials O.G.B after my name, marking my elevation to the Most Noble Order of the Green Blob. Otherwise next year nobody will remember that I was ranked with Brian May, Vivienne Westwood and George Monbiot as an enemy of the industrialised countryside of Paterson’s dreams. No fracking, no GM crops, no badger massacres. I doubt that Paterson’s 12 million country dwellers are sorry about that.

Back in 1958 my girl friend cuddled a little closer when we watched a new horror movie called The Blob.  The Blob came from outer space and slowly changed from green to pink as it got bigger and bigger by eating the inhabitants of a small town. Then a clever kid noticed it hated freezing temperatures so they sprayed it with cold air from CO2 fire extinguishers.  Frozen almost solid it was flown to the North Pole where it was dropped in a place where the ice would never melt. Oops! Let’s keep it there by not fracking, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not overstocking cows, and planting trees instead of GMO biofuel crops.

By Craig Sams

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

How to decarbonize a planet

Making the switch to organic agriculture on a global scale and turning waste biomass into biochar offers the real prospect of being able to reverse global warming, says Craig Sams

What’s happening out there? Is the world quietly going sane? A leading US Republican, Henry Paulsen, has come out strongly for action on climate change in the New York Times. For a political party that refuses to acknowledge burning fossil fuels can have anything to do with global warming, this is a tectonic event. Americans aren’t as stupid as their leaders think and are wising up to the fact that Hurricane Sandy was not God punishing us but to do with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The explosion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started around 1850 with the coal and steam-driven Industrial Revolution and the massive expansion of farmed land that was formerly wilderness or forest. My ancestors were part of this damage to the planet – great great grandpa Lars ploughed virgin prairie in Wisconsin, great grandpa Ole ploughed virgin prairie in Nebraska and grandpa Louis bought a tractor in 1926 so he could plough even deeper.

Every year the land they farmed gave up more of its life – losing ten tonnes of soil per hectare per year and as it decomposed, pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They cut down a lot of trees too – which mostly went up in smoke. The same thing happened in Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Manchuria and the Punjab. We destroyed the soil that feeds us and filled the atmosphere with the gases that are cooking the planet.

Up to 1980 farming and fossil fuels were equally responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases; now fossil fuels are in the lead. But farming still emits more than ever. Every year 125,000,000 hectares of food-producing land give up the ghost – that’s 1.8% of the available land used up, farmed-out, lifeless.

The way forward is a carbon tax. How would it work? Every time you emit a tonne of carbon dioxide you pay the price – at the moment it’s around $15 per tonne. But once there’s a global market the price will go up. What does this mean for organic food? It will become cheaper than industrially-farmed food as organic farming uses half the fossil fuels to produce a given amount of food. Year after year it increases the carbon content of soil while industrial farms deplete it. The recent Rodale white paper (see story opposite) shows that if the world’s arable land and pasture was farmed organically the reduction in carbon emissions would be enough to cancel out ALL the annual increase in greenhouse gases. Rebuilding soils with biochar increases soil carbon and stimulates increased growth and extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere by crops. By farming organically and turning waste biomass into biochar instead of burning it we could reverse global warming. We would also eat less meat as it will cost a lot more when you include the carbon cost (vegetarians have a lower carbon footprint and vegans emit about a fifth of the CO2 per year of meat-eaters).

Add in the reductions in emissions from a transition to wind and solar and we can face the future with confidence and look our grandchildren in the eye instead of looking away guiltily because our shortsighted greed has robbed them of a secure future.

California has a carbon tax which has equivalence with Quebec’s; China has opened eight carbon exchanges in its key industrial regions; Europe has its Emissions Trading Scheme. Unilever and Pepsi have created the Cool Farm Calculator so the whole carbon footprint of a tub of Flora or a packet of crisps can be calculated precisely, and the food industry is picking up on it. The 2015 climate conference in Paris won’t be another failure – there are too many stakeholders who are determined to make it happen and have already achieved broad agreement on principles.

If the whole world farmed organically and ate organic food, reduced fossil fuel emissions, produced and shopped locally as much as possible, insulated houses, ate less meat and planted more trees, we could possibly face a global cooling crisis caused by sucking too much CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that’s a long way off, so let’s just put carbon back in the soil, where it does nothing but good.

By Craig Sams

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

Soil Carbon: Where Life Begins

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Back in 1967 my brother and I ran an organic macrobiotic restaurant and food store – we followed macrobiotics, the way of eating described in the book Zen Macrobiotics by Georges Ohsawa. The restaurant bought as much as possible from organic producers around London so we built strong links with the Soil Association, which was founded by Lady Eve Balfour in 1946.   In order to talk about biochar I will first talk about soil, because that is the context into which biochar fits.   Satish Kumar also spoke about soil last year in his excellent magazine Resurgence.

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What is soil? Where did it come from? When life on earth began there was no soil, just rock. On and in that rock lived fungi that eked out a precarious living extracting carbon from the calcium carbonate of limestone. The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide and when it rained the rain became a weak carbonic acid solution that helped fungi to extract carbon from rock.

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The rock slowly broke down to sand, silt and the finest particles - clay. But there was no ‘soil’, no humus, none of the decomposing plants, organic matter and living organisms that define soil.

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Then a miracle happened

Tiny single celled organisms, ‘cyanobacteria’ (Latin for ‘blue bacteria’) developed the ability to take carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of sunshine, convert CO2 and H2O into simple carbohydrate: C6H12O6, or sugar. This was and is the fuel that powers all life on earth. The fungi saw their opportunity and locked the cyanobacteria into cells and strung them together in chain gangs.

Then they started to bundle them together in a form that we would recognise as plants

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 These strands of cyanobacteria became the earliest plants, such as horsetail

Plants were an efficient way to comb CO2 out of the air. The original plants didn't even have roots, the fungi had their own root system inside the plant to extract the sugar as soon as it was made. The plants were the root extensions of the fungi, not the other way round, which is how it appears today. Plants evolved with root systems and the fungi continued to keep their root network in the plant's root system. These fungi are called 'vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi'   ‘Arbuscular’ means 'tree-shaped' and reflects the form they take when the occupy the root system of a plant. 'Myco' means 'mushroom' and 'rhizzal' comes from rhizome and means 'root' - so they are ‘tree-shaped root mushrooms’. ‘Vesicular’ refers to the vesicles that are the storage areas where the mycorrhizae hold a stock of nutrients and sugar.

mycorrhizae

A plant will deliver in its sap from 10-20% of the sugar it makes in its leaves to the mycorrhizae, retaining the rest for its own growth. The mycorrhizae increase the reach of the plant’s roots by up to 10 times, penetrating soil that plant roots can’t access.

The ‘arbuscular’ shape of the fungus is shown in a root cell – this tree-like shape is a mirror of a root system – the fungus has its roots in the plant, the plant has its roots in the soil.

fungus

There are other organisms in the soil that live symbiotically with the mycorrizae. Most notable are the actinomycetes bacteria – originally they were thought to be fungi because they copied the form of fungal hyphae, with filamentous threads. With the advent of electron microscopes they turned out to be bacteria that had strung themselves together in chains in order to efficiently ferry nutrients to the mycorrhizae in exchange for sugar.   Most of our antibiotics come from soil bacteria. Streptomycin When a plant needs medicine, the mycorrhizae can farm it by feeding sugar to the bacteria that can produce that particular antidote – most commonly jasmonic acid, salicylic acid (aspirin) or ethylene. These medicines are sent up with the sap of the plant to provide it with immunity to fungal and insect attack.

One example of how mycorrhizae are used in farming is the French practice of ‘alley cropping’ where rows of fruit trees keep the fungal network going and enable crops planted in between to flourish rapidly thanks to the existing network of mycorrhizae supported by the trees. In Windsor Great Park an oak nursery accelerates the growth of oak saplings by raising them in ground surrounded by mature oaks – the big oaks provide the sugar to support a large mycorrhizal population. The baby oaks get sugar and nutrients from the mycorrhizae and grow away rapidly and healthily.

Soil is fascinating. It’s wonderful stuff. So what do humans do with it? Since the dawn of agriculture we mostly just kill it. Ploughing breaks up the neural network within the soil, though it reconnects fairly quickly but with a lot of casualties. Adding chemical fertilisers breaks up the symbiosis – the mycorrhizae no longer can exchange mineral nutrients for sugars because the farmers is providing them for free. The plant cuts off the sugar supply to the mycrorrhizae clustered around its roots and the mycorrhizae die off. Their 10,000 or so co-dependent microbial species also die off. The plant is then exposed to the challenge of fungi and other pests that give it nothing and just want to consume it. This creates the need for pesticides including fungicides, which further deplete the microbial population of the soil.

I have several generations of form in the area. My great great grandfather farmed virgin soil on the Koshkonong Prairie in 1842, cutting down trees and raising crops of grain and grazing cattle. My great grandfather farmed virgin prairie in Nebraska. These Norwegian farmers were notoriously stingy. They were frugal people in everything they did, they wasted nothing and recycled everything. Here’s an example:

Frugalism-Less is More

My grandfather would deliver eggs from his chicken houses to the Safeway supermarket and other stores in Sioux City. He would then purchase tools, sugar, flour, salt, paper and other essentials that could not be produced on the farm. The flour sacks were made of calico, so the farmer’s wives would recycle the bags to make overalls for their boys and dresses for the girls.

Nell Rose flour company bags

Flour is a commodity – one bag of white dusty flour is just like the next. So the Nell Rose flour company marketing people got clever and printed nice floral patterns on their flour bags.

This appealed to people like my grandmother and she used Nell Rose flour to make the dresses for my mother (on the right) with her sister Thelma and their cousins.

Margie on the farm

This remarkable frugalism and avoidance of waste stands in stark contrast to the way that the soils of the Midwest were relentlessly wasted, often beyond recovery. Here there was no recycling, just relentless ploughing and harvesting, breaking down the soil. The farmer’s wives wasted nothing, their husbands wasted the fertile heritage of millennia. When land was ‘farmed out’ people would just move further west.

The original Louisiana Territory and adjacent territories embraced the great river network of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers, a 2000 mile wide water system draining into the Gulf of Mexico.

Original Louisiana

By 1925 more than 80% of the trees in this great river network had been cut down in order to create productive farmland.

trees cut down

Floods

The result was inevitable – the Mississippi Floods of 1927 were devastating – 27,000 square miles were inundated, up to depths of 30 feet. It triggered huge migrations of Afro-American farmers to Northern cities. Below Memphis Tennessee the Mississippi was 60 miles wide, 3 times the width of the Straits of Dover. The land was flooded from April to June.

This great flood was followed by further devastation. The weakened fractured soils of the prairie began to turn to dust and the winds blew up vast clouds of dust that reached as far as Washington DC, prompting Congressional action.   President Roosevelt created the Civil Conservation Corps and 3 million recruits planted 10 billion trees from Mexico to Canada to try to hold down the soil.

Dust bowl

This destruction of soil happened also in Argentina, Manchuria, Ukraine, and other fertile breadbaskets around the world as tractors and chemical fertilizer accelerated the rate of soil destruction.

The greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane that were emitted accounted for half of all the increase in greenhouse gas levels between 1850 and 1980. Since then agriculture’s annual rate of emissions has continued to grow, but has fallen behind the astronomic rate of emissions growth from manufacturing, energy and transport.  But it is still responsible for at least one third of our excess emissions.

Emissions

From 1850-1980:

Total CO2 from Farming:      160 Billion Tonnes

Total CO2 from Fossil Fuels: 165 Billion Tonnes

How can we stop this wasteful and environmentally damaging activity?

Part of the answer lies in a discover that was made nearly 500 years ago. When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzarro was buy looting the silver and gold of the Incas he heard about cities of gold with even greater wealth. He deputed his brother and Francisco de Orellana to find these cities and to bring back their gold.

Orellano

The parties were separated and Orellana could not return up river. The chaplain on his boat kept records of their travels. They encountered wealthy populations but were repelled by armed natives, led by fierce women warriors. These natives knew already that if you came close to a white man you would break out in red spots of measles or smallpox and then, because they had no immunity, die. They attacked and drove them away – Orellana described his boat as looking like a porcupine after one such attack. They called this region the Land of the Amazons and this is how the river got its name. When explorers sailed up the Amazon about 30 years later the wealthy civilisations Orellana had described were gone – wiped out by disease. People questioned whether the ‘El Dorado’ he had described ever really existed.

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Within the past 50 years archaeologists have found that the areas he described as populated coincide with areas where the soil is black to a depth of several metres - the ‘Terra Preta’ of the Amazon river settlements. Farmers who have Terra Preta have little need for fertilizer and even sell their soil to less fortunate farmers who are on the typical infertile jungle soils. The Terra Preta was made by the Amazons by taking all their waste, including animal bones and forest waste and domestic waste, piling it into pits, covering it with clay and setting fire to it. Once it was burning hot they’d cut off the supply of air and the material became charcoal and provided the growing medium for the next season’s crop.   The contrast between Terra Preta and soils of the forest is apparent when the land is cut away.

Terra Petra

Brazilian farmers who farm on Terra Preta benefit from its fertility and crops like corn grow vigorously when planted in black earth. They sell it to other farmers and bag it up for sale in garden centres. It is what we now call ‘Biochar’ – charcoal for use in the soil rather than charcoal for use for barbecuing sausages.

So what is Biochar? What does it do?

Biochar provides a supportive environment for mycorrhizae and their associated microorganisms. This leads to a doubling or more of the microbial population that is the living essence of soil.

Biochar had a high surface area – a single gram of biochar can have twice the surface area of 2 tennis courts – this means there are lots of points where minerals can stick, each point has a negative charge, so it sticks to minerals with a positive charge – this stops the leaching of nutrients from soil, keeping it in the zone where it can reach the plant.

Biochar also helps retain moisture. The result is healthier plants, more nutrient availability, more water availability and better soil structure.

Biochar also reduces soil emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

Biochar stays in the soil, too, for anything from 10 years to 4000 years, depending on the type of biochar, the soil type and the farming system. The scientific consensus settles around 1000 years. This represents carbon dioxide that is kept out of the atmosphere – most woody biomass ends up returning to the atmosphere by rotting or being burned. Thus biochar can be an important tool for reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. It is estimated that recycling woody waste as biochar could remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2 annually from the atmosphere. Instead we burn it.

Biochar cell structure

Biochar retains the cell structure of the original feedstock. So biochar from bamboo has larger pores, biochar from chestnut has small pores. But all those pores provide a refuge for mycorrhizae and a base from which they can expand even if they are disturbed by ploughing or by predators such as mites, protozoa or nematodes that feed on them.

Imagine the pieces of biochar as a ‘five star hotel’ for mycorrhizae or, even as Norman castles in the English countryside. Each biochar particle is a base for a contingent of mycorrhizae, helping them to weather the stresses and pressures of life in the soil.

We have an image of mushrooms as passive softies but they are much more than that. When nematodes that threaten a plant enter mycorrhizal territory they get more than they bargained for. The mycorrhizae attach to them with sticky substances that hold them fast, then insert their filamentous hyphae into the tiny worm and suck out its amino acids, providing protein for more mycorrhizal growth and nitrogen for ‘their’ plants. Some mycorrhizae form lassoes that are scented with fragrances that attract nematodes – the nematode pokes through the lasso that then snaps tight, holding the nematode while it is digested.

nematode

Mycorrhizae also oversee the production of insecticides and fungicides. When there is a threatening insect or fungal pest the news travels fast through the underground internet – the mycelial network. The appropriate preventive medicine such as jasmonic acid, salicylic acid or ethylene is produced and delivered via the plant’s sap to the threatened area. How is this done? We don’t really know but it is likely that the mycorrhizae simply feed more sugar to the bacteria that produce these defensive chemicals and then pass them over to the plant.

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It may be that the plant produces the defensive chemical itself or that it produces it in conjunction with the soil microbes. Both the plant and its supportive microbial community have a shared interest in defeating any disease threats quickly, before they have time to weaken the plant.

Biochar, by providing a resilient and abundant network of soil fungi and bacteria, is the framework of the plant’s immune system and helps it with nourishment and water.

So what have we done at Carbon Gold to turn this theoretical ideal situation into a reality?

biochar kiln

The first thing we discovered was that the production method for charcoal was expensive, slow and inefficient – we wanted to reduce our carbon footprint in biochar production as much as possible and make it available cheaply to small farmers. We developed the Superchar 100 kiln.

It makes a 100 Kg batch of biochar in 8 hours instead of the usual 3 days. It delivers double the yield of traditional ring kilns. It has greatly reduced emissions – we recycle the gases emitted by the wood and burn them to heat the kiln contents instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. They’re now hard at work in Belize, Botswana, Turkmenistan, Fiji, Brazil and the UK, with orders for more in the pipeline.

We also make a double-barrelled kiln that will produce 2 x 400 kg batches of biochar in a 12 hour day.

This one is part of a marshland regeneration project north of Perth, in Scotland

double barrelled kiln

Whitmuir Organics, just south of Edinburgh, are making biochar for their horticultural operation and are experimenting with it in pig feed, where a small amount makes a big difference to pig health and feed conversion.

The first UK field trials of biochar were on my smallholding near Hastings in September 2010. We planted cabbages and winter lettuce in late September, some with biochar and some without. In November we had heavy snows and the lettuces were covered in snow for 3 days. When the snow melted the winter lettuces without biochar had died. Those with biochar were intact. I think this could be that a high microbiological population in the soil acts as underfloor central heating, biological activity generates heat and this is probably what saved the plants. We also discovered that biochar has no repellent effect on hungry pigeons, which destroyed the cabbage crop completely.

biochar field trials

We work closely with Rijk Zwaan, the world’s 5th largest seed company and one that regards GMOs as an obsolete technology – they are world leaders at using natural breeding methods harnessed to genomic data. Their Field Trials Manager, Martin Kyte, stopped a comparative trial of Carbon Gold seed compost and peat compost after a few months because the results were so obviously in favour of our seed compost.

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And Fergus Garrett, head gardener at the marvelous Great Dixter gardens in Sussex, has switched to biochar.

Stephanie Donaldson, Gardening Editor of Country Living magazine, trialled Carbon Gold with lettuces. After one month the difference was significant:

In Belize one of our shareholders took 3 Maya cacao farmers to Cornell University in 2008. We studied biochar production and its use with Johannes Lehmann, the world’s leading authority on biochar and founder of the International Biochar Initiative. After that we helped the farmers build a simple kiln. They did trials and found that cacao tree seedlings raised with biochar outperformed those without biochar in the nursery. A $50,000 UNDP grant helped them expand production and recently the Inter American Development Bank funded the establishment of 9 new nurseries with a target of producing 45, 000 cacao trees to really expand cacao production. It normally takes 6 or 7 years for a cacao tree to begin to produce, with biochar it starts in 3 years – that makes a huge economic difference to a farmer who has invested in establishing a cacao orchard.

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Belize: Biochar + Cacao = fruit within 3 years

Normal maturation time: 6-7 years

We’re also working with farmers in Africa.

In Ghana, where tomatoes retail at $12 per kilo, Sunshine Organic Farms are starting to grow tomatoes near the capital, Accra. Biochar will help ensure healthy abundant cropping.

In Ivory Coast cashew nut waste will provide a feedstock that can then be used on cashew trees and in Senegal it will be rice husks that provide the feedstock.

We have just shipped a kiln to Botswana. Farmers in Fiji are now making biochar with our kilns to improve their fertility and cropping.

Wight Salads grow more than half of the organic tomatoes sold in the UK every year. They have greenhouses in Portugal and the Isle of Wight. Last year they started using biochar from us. The results:  8% higher yield, 10% higher sugar content in the fruit, less watering and fertilizer cost and, most excitingly, a dramatic fall in the population of root-eating nematodes. They had a lower level of this pest in their organic biochar production than in their conventional production where they use nematicide to kill this damaging pest.

Wight Salads tomatoes

They were considering cutting back on organic tomato production because of these nematodes, but now they are going to expand.

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Some nematodes work collaboratively with mycorrhizae, some eat them, some just eat plants and some provide food for the mycorrhizae when they venture too close to the plant the mycorrhizae are protecting. Once lassoed they are soon converted into nitrogen compounds

Biochar works wonderfully on turf as well. Forest Green Rovers Football Club trialled Carbon Gold last year and found that at the end of the season this year the treated part of the pitch had withstood the stress of weekly games and practice far better than the rest of the pitch. Last week they spread biochar over the entire pitch and their groundsman has helped initiate trialy by the groundsman at Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal. Those trials will open up new opportunities on sports grounds everywhere and help reduce the use of nitrates and other chemical treatments.

We make products for gardeners too. These are available from some garden centres, but most of our sales come from our own website, other online retailers, QVC and Amazon. This is because biochar still takes a bit of explaining and garden centre staff are not always available or able to tell a customer about it.

Last year we worked with Bartlett Tree Experts, the Queen’s tree surgeons, on trials with Carbon Gold biochar. They successfully cured honey fungus and saw accelerated growth in horse chestnut seedlings. The results of their research were published in April in the prestigious Arb Magazine, the journal for members of the Arboricultural Association. An ash dieback trial they initiated last year has so far shown no sign of infection, but they are waiting until this October before publishing any results. They have endorsed our tree growth enhancement and protection range and are now offering it to all their customers.

Biochar to CO2

We are not yet capturing the carbon offset value of using biochar, but it is now becoming available as a carbon offset of value. The conversion ratios vary – our own figure is based on making biochar in a Carbon Gold kiln and reflects the greater efficiency and lower carbon footprint of the Superchar range of kilns.

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In 2011 I visited the Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas in Brussels. She invited me back to present the biochar story to the Green Group of MEPs. In attendance were representatives from DG Agri and DG Enviro. They had a meeting after our meeting and the outcome was Eurochar. This programme funds research into biochar as a strategy for long term carbon sequestration and funds research into greenhouse gas mitigation with biochar.

Lady Eve Balfour lost the post war argument about the future direction of agriculture, but the Soil Association continued to fight the good fight while the introduction of subsidized nitrate fertilizer forced farmers into the industrial fold. The same process happened in the rest of the world and led to the Green Revolution, which is now running out of steam. Ten years ago there was a major collaboration to map out the future of agriculture in a world with diminishing resources and increasing population. WHO, FAO, UNDP, UNESCO, Defra, USDA, Monsanto and Syngenta were just a few of the global stakeholders who selected a crack team of 400 of the world’s leading agronomists to look at how we could reduce hunger, improve livelihoods and ensure social and environmental sustainability. 2 weeks before their report was published in 2009 both Monsanto and Syngenta went public by rubbishing its contents. Why? Because it said that the Green Revolution hadn’t delivered sustainable results, that genetic engineering was a dead end and that we should listen to small farmers and adopt traditional farming systems.

All of the other benefits of their proposals are summed up in rewarding farmers who prevent climate change. Whether you call it organic farming or agroecological farming, the fact is that farming in support of the living soil and its wonderful microbiological population is the only sustainable way to go. It is lower in carbon emissions and hugely effective in carbon sequestration. If only Lady Eve had lived to see this outcome that so firmly vindicated her predictions in The Living Soil published in 1943.

carbon farming

We are eating oil – it takes vast amounts of fossil fuel energy to make food energy and this is plainly unsustainable.

Farming Systems Trial

The Farming Systems Trial at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania has been growing the same crops side by side using organic methods and conventional methods. Once the health of the soil was restored, the organic crops matched conventional yields, showing greater resilience in years of drought.   Every year the organic soil added 1 tonne of carbon to the soil, while the industrial crops gradually lost it. The organic crops used 45% less energy.

Professor Pimentel at Cornell University mapped it out: organic farming could reduce atmospheric CO2 by 1.1 trillion pounds a year. That’s half a billion tonnes of CO2 – about 1/10 of the annual increase in CO2 equivalent. Add in biochar and you would get at least another half a billion tonnes, bringing down CO2 levels by 20% a year.

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If the cost of CO2 was factored into food production, then organic farming would deliver a € 350 per hectare cost benefit if carbon was priced at the real cost to future generations of €70 per tonne. Add in the benefit of €210 per hectare for every tonne of biochar added to the soil and agriculture could be part of the climate change solution instead of a major element of the problem. Lord Nicholas Stern quoted the figure of €70 per tonne in his book Blueprint for a Safer Future but a few months after it was published he said he was mistaken the real cost was €150 per tonne. Anyone who experience Hurricane Sandy in New York would probably agree. But even if CO2 was only priced at €35 per tonne it would deliver an economic imperative to farm organically and to use biochar universally. The Paris climate talks in 2015 will not exclude agriculture or transportation, the fatal mistake of the Kyoto protocols back in 1993. That will be when farming has to face reality and get a grip on its emissions.

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And not a moment too soon. Every year 125 million hectares of land become so degraded they can no longer reliably produce crops. That’s nearly 2% of the world’s arable land. We have replaced that lost land by cutting down forests, but that is no longer an option. We have to live within the means of our natural capital of soil and that means not spending it but saving it and building on it.

Public health will benefit too. Antibiotics saved millions of lives – they were derived from soil bacteria. Now, due to overuse in agriculture they have created resilient disease pathogens that can no longer be treated effectively with antibiotics. 80% of all antibiotic use is in agriculture, to keep animals alive that could not survive in the filthy conditions in which they are raised, on beef feedlots where they wallow in their own excrement or in pig and chicken farms where antibiotics are the only thing that keeps the animals alive during their brief lifespan.

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The sad thing is that industrial farming isn’t feeding the world. The world is feeding itself despite the waste and inefficiency of industrial farms.

70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares

NO SUBSIDIES

30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms

$350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES

No wonder the IAASTD was so adamant that small farmers using agroecological and traditional methods were the only way to feed the world. They can produce up to six times as much per hectare as industrial farms, using fewer fossil fuel-based inputs and more human labour. Our taxes are being wasted on subsidising the destruction of our soils and dangerous increases in greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Only a carbon tax can reverse this.

As this is a Slow Food Eire event it would be remiss of me not to touch on the similarities between the microbiological health of the soil and the microbiology of its counterpart in us, the gut flora, whose product is often referred to as ‘night soil.’ One third by weight of what we excrete is the offspring of the gut flora that have multiplied on our food in our digestive system and pass out along with the digested food. There are clear parallels in function between mycorrhizae and actinomycetes bacteria in the soil and the lactobacilli and bifidobacteria and associated microbial forms in the gut.

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We know that babies born by C section are likely to lack the microbial flora that are part of a healthy immune system. It’s now established that stool transplants in patients with clostridium difficile can save lives – 110,000 Americans a year die of this infection, which arises after antibiotic use.

In the soil, worms are a sign of good health. The emerging medical treatment of helminthic therapy reflects the finding that the absence of worms in the human gut is associated with diminished immune function. When an earthworm consumes soil containing actinomycetes bacteria, an important part of the soil’s immune system that produces antibiotic substances, it excretes six times as many as it ingests. Roundworms in the human gut consume food we eat and excrete cytokine, an immune booster.

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In Chinese tradition, Kwan Yin is the Goddess of Mercy and ‘mercy clay’ has saved millions from famine – it is rich in humus, minerals and microbial activity and can sustain a person when no other food is available.

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In Haiti the production of clay cakes is commonplace. Made with clay, salt and oil, they aren’t consumed to keep hunger at bay, they nourish and have special benefits for pregnant women as it prevents morning sickness. Clay helps eliminate toxins and infections.

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When one’s tummy is upset, particularly if traveling in foreign lands where a combination of different prevalent bacteria and different hygiene standards can lead to digestive disorders, charcoal tablets have the same beneficial effect on our digestive night soil as it does in the soil in which we grow our food.

I began this talk by quoting three people who have deeply influenced my thinking about soil and about its fundamental importance to our lives.

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I would like to close by quoting an even higher authority:

Genesis 3:19

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

The soil’s living community provides an example to our society of how a cooperative community of plants and microorganisms can maximise and efficiently share the production of food derived from the abundance of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide with which our planet is blessed. We come from the soil and we return to the soil, we owe all life on earth to the soil.

We should never treat it like dirt

Imagine for a moment

Just imagine for a moment that a politician spoke the truth.   Now stretch your imagination even further and imagine that Owen Paterson, Defra Minister, spoke the truth.  Here is what he would say.

“Her Majesty’s Government announce that we will impose punitive taxes on organic food in order to keep it at a price level that will deter consumers.  We will implement policies to encourage agricultural practices that will destroy the soil on which all life depends.  We will also continue to ensure that foods that lead to obesity and ill-health are subsidised by our government and foods that lead to good health are taxed, regulated or prohibited.”

“Your Government believes that bigger is better, so we will support the biggest farms the most and encourage obesity to that we can have bigger people to help support a bigger NHS.

“Like Labour, the Conservative Party believes that people who own large amounts of land and money should be rewarded for their cleverness or accident of birth by receiving large amounts of money from the taxpayer on a never-ending basis.  We therefore intend to continue to reward all owners of large landholdings with £110 every year for every acre of land that they own, or £265 per hectare, regardless of how they manage it.  However, we will make it difficult and complicated to claim for farmers who own less than 50 acres.  People who own a farm and home will not have to pay inheritance tax. We will continue to charge inheritance tax on non-farmers who own property worth more than £325,000.”

 “We will ensure that subsidised farming pays best when farmers do least to rebuild soil fertility and treat animals as cruelly as inhumanly possible.   We will ensure that farmers who grow food to be burned as biofuels will make more money than farmers who grow food for human consumption. We will support farming that accelerates climate change. “

What do they really say:  “Britain needs to be able to feed itself in an uncertain world.  Our farmers are our guarantee of food security and food independence.  Britain’s farmers are the backbone of rural society and help us preserve all that is best about British tradition and our countryside. We are importing too much food, we need to be more self-sufficient.’ 

What tosh.  The fact is that for every country where there is reliable data, the evidence shows that smaller farms are from 2 to 10 times more productive than large farms.  That’s productivity as normal people know it – i.e. getting a profitable income from an input of labour and capital.  In subsidised farming productivity just means ‘production.’  It is measured in soybeans and corn and doesn’t measure the input costs or the labour costs or the externalised costs such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and soil degradation.  The profit comes from the taxpayer.

Of course small farms also tend to integrate crops and livestock, they rotate their crops, they employ human beings.  Most importantly, because they live on the land and it has been in the family and they expect it to continue to be in the family they treat the land with respect and care.  An industrial farm uses up land and the employees don’t really care about a future beyond the next pay cheque.

What would happen if we took away all the subsidies and only allowed land to be inherited tax free if it was smaller than, say, 200 acres?

Farmers would go back to mixed farming.  Our current system mirrors the disastrous communist farming of the 1950s and 1960s, where government decided what would grow where and who would grow what.  Farmers would study the market and respond to demand from consumers, not price manipulation by government.

Agriculture is multifunctional.  It produces food but it also manages the landscape.  It creates employment and it should keep us all healthy. 

Sadly, it does the opposite.  It would be better to plant trees on the 40% of the US land that is devoted to growing corn to be burned as ethanol.  Why subsidise greenhouse gas emissions when you could be planting trees?

What can be done?  Nothing in Whitehall, nothing in Brussels, nothing in Washington.  They are hopelessly corrupted by the manufacturers of agrichemicals who spend fortunes on lobbying them and ensuring that the public have no say in how their food is produced. 

We just need to be aware and become the change.  Every person who cuts back on meat and uses the savings to always buy organic food is slowly but surely driving back the tide of industrialisation.  Supporting small farms, local food producers and the future.

Have you been dealing comfrey, sonny?

The natural food trade should take a lead in exposing the hypocritical regulation of herbal medicine, says Craig Sams

A bust in Denver: “Okay, kid, put your hands up against the wall. Spread your legs while we pat you down.” Two cops search a young man’s clothing.

“Nothing here but a couple of marijuana joints … Wait a minute, what’s this? It looks like comfrey tea bags. Get the handcuffs – let’s take this one down to the station.”

A bust in London: “Okay, kid, put your hands up against the wall. Spread your legs while we pat you down.” Two cops search a young man’s clothing. 

“Nothing here but a couple of comfrey tea bags … Wait a minute, what’s this? It looks like a couple of marijuana joints. Get the handcuffs – let’s take this one down to the station.”

Depending on where you are in the Western world of free and democratic nations, your choice of therapeutic herbs can either put you in the slammer or be purchased legally.

Charlotte Mitchell, who almost singlehandedly rescued the Soil Association from bankruptcy and oblivion back in 1991, has suffered the ever-increasing impact of multiple sclerosis. The NHS refused to authorize the use of Sativex (a marijuana extract made by a drug company in Kent) for her, so she has to fork out £100 a week for this medicine in order to be legal. She could buy dope from a street dealer in Edinburgh for a fraction of the cost, with all the risks of dealing with criminals, but she sticks to the legitimate stuff. The NHS, too busy enriching the peddlers of statins, antidepressants, hydrogenated fat margarines and other crappy drugs, won’t allow Sativex for patients in England or Scotland. All her working life Charlotte paid her NI contributions, but when her time of need came, she got two fingers and now has to pay out of her savings for the only medication that effectively eases the pain of MS.

Meanwhile, it’s all kicking off in the US. Not only do 20 states allow medical use of marijuana for all sorts of conditions, but two of them, Colorado and Washington, have decided to allow it for recreational use, too. However, comfrey is still prohibited in the US and all sorts of herbs are now prohibited or strictly regulated in the UK. How on earth are we going to deal with the hypocrisy of a situation where people can go to jail for peddling herbs like comfrey and slippery elm while we empty out our prisons of people who were sent down for dealing in herbs like marijuana?

This is not the only paradox in our society that needs resolving now that progress is beginning to happen. What about speed?

The pot paradox
‘Speed kills’ – this slogan arose in the sixties as people realized that amphetamines were a terrible drug with progressively degenerate consequences. Yet our rulers encourage its use. Today we force school kids to take speed if they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It slows them down. But it also makes them fat for the rest of their lives, with all the health problems that come with obesity. The US Army gives its soldiers amphetamines, antidepressants and sedatives to keep them going in battle conditions. Then they come home and struggle with addiction – a third of addicted ex-soldiers die of overdoses or suicide. More soldiers kill themselves than are killed by enemy forces – one in five suicides in the US are ex-Army. In US states where medical marijuana was legalized, the overall suicide rate dropped by 10% or more. It’s not just that marijuana cheers people up. It also lowers consumption of alcohol, a well known depressant and significant factor in suicides.

Is it time for the natural foods trade to lead the charge for marijuana legalization in the UK? Legalization of marijuana would help to clear away all the other hypocritical regulation of herbal medicines and strike a powerful blow for the right of all human beings to own their bodies and make informed decisions about what medications they take. As someone who hasn’t been to a doctor for 49 years, but who has also had recourse to use therapeutic herbs from time to time that have kept me happy and healthy, I’d welcome the chance to live my life without the nagging fear of being imprisoned for not being a burden on the NHS.

By Craig Sams

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

War and Peace

Back in 1993 when the world was waking up to the market potential of organic food Simon Wright put together a technical book called The Guide to Organic Processing and Production that cost £75 (a lot of money for a book in those days) which was essential reading for anyone who wanted to cash in on the coming organic boom.  I wrote the Introduction, a long explanation of what organic was, where it came from and why it was the future.  I wrote "The difference between conventional farming and organic farming is the difference between war and peace.  Conventional farmers wage war on nature using their armoury of chemicals to keep her at bay while they take as much as they can get. Organic farmers attempt to apply a creative process of conflict resolution whereby nature volunteers her bounty in return for a balancing contribution towards her well-being.  E.F.Shumacher wrote: 'We speak of the battle with Nature, but we should do well to remember that if we win that battle, we are on the losing side.'"

So when I read Maria Rodale's recent open letter to President Obama I was 100% behind her.  Maria is the granddaughter of J.I. Rodale, the man who convinced Lady Eve Balfour to call their enlightened way of farming 'organic' and who founded Rodale Press. It's the world's leading health and wellness publisher (Organic Gardening, Prevention, Women's Health, Men's Health and books like The South Beach Diet) and Maria is CEO.  Her letter refers to a cartoon of a little girl speaking to Obama - his speech bubble says "We are going to war with Syria because they poison little children" and the kid replies "So why don't you bomb Monsanto?"

Like many people in the organic movement, Maria Rodale campaigned in support of Obama's election campaign.  She was subsequently dismayed at his unthinking support of Monsanto's interests.   Now she is horrified to see that he seems no more than a puppet of the military-industrial complex that needs wars in order to use up the weaponry that keeps arms factories going.  With 3500 cruise missiles at $2 million each, the US is well-stocked, but that means that Raytheon, who make Tomahawk cruise missiles, will have to shut their factory if they don't get more orders.  So the military has to use them up.  Sound familiar?  Monsanto needs to sell herbicide, that's where their profits come from.  If farmers make peace with nature and find non-poisonous ways of dealing with weeds, coexisting with them and protecting biodiverity, then the bottom falls out of Monsanto's market.  It's the same with GM - designed to allow increased use of ever more deadly herbicides and to contain poisons that kill insects on contact... until the weeds and bugs develop resistance.  Then they use stronger poisons.  Now Wall Street is pouring money into pesticide companies as their sales boom to farmers for whom the GM crops no longer work.

The Organic Trade Board and the Pesticide Action Network have shown that the amount of pesticide residues we and our kids consume has doubled in the past decade - unless we choose organic.  We know that pesticides can trigger adverse health reactions and that long-term exposure is undesirable.  But the fact is that American and British kids are 'collateral damage' in the war against weeds and bugs just as Pakistani kids are 'collateral damage' when a drone blows up a village because a terrorist might be there.  In Vietnam a US officer famously said: "We had to destroy that village in order to save it."   

Our 'village' is the global community.  It is being torn apart by unnecessary wars fought for fictitious reasons but leaving behind real corpses, devastated landscapes and psychologically damaged ex-soldiers whose suicide rate exceeds their death rate in battle.  The war against nature using pesticides and genetic modification, leaves behind devastated landscapes and (in India) devastated farmers whose suicide rate exceeds any historic comparison.  

It's time to stop the killing and to fight on the side of nature.  Instead of making imaginary enemies let's all fight together against global warming, which no amount of genetic modification or explosive weaponry can stop.  We only have one planet to live on and we are destroying life on every level, from the tiniest microbes in the soil to entire communities of people in whose lives we have no business to interfere.  Living organically means being committed to peaceful coexistence with nature - it's in everyone's ultimate best interest to shut down the arms trade's endless war against people and to shut down the pesticide industry's endless war against nature.   Let's use the trillions they waste each year to make the Earth safer for future generations by waging war on carbon dioxide emissions instead.

Carbon Tax

I love fossil fuels.  After food and sex they are just about the best thing that has happened to humanity in all our history.  More than William Wilberforce of Abraham Lincoln, they helped us transcend the need for slavery, creating energy from machines to replace forced labour.  This led to the libertarian regard for human rights and freedom that makes the times we live in more blessed than any other period in human history.  We must never go back to the bad old days of not having cheap energy.   But fossil fuel abuse is a transgenerational form of child abuse – we waste them now and our grandchildren pay the price in flooding, starvation and war.

Back in 1841 my great great grandpa Lars Doxtad, arrived from Norway and started chopping down trees in Wisconsin.  Thousands of other pioneers like him cleared the massive forests of the Mississippi river system to create the American Midwest.   80% of the trees were gone by 1920.  In 1927 came the great Mississippi Flood.  Water levels were 27 feet above the flood line.  Instead of replanting the trees, the Government dredged deeper channels and built levees, or raised banks, all along the Mississippi, to carry away flood waters infuture.   In 1933 came the Dust Bowl.  There were no trees to hold down the soil.  When Lars Doxtad first put his plough to the soil, the level of soil carbon in the Midwest was 100 tonnes per hectare.  Now it's 5.  The other 95 tonnes of carbon as organic matter either washed down the river or blew into the air as carbon dioxide gas.   Nearly half the increase in greenhouse gas levels since 1850 has came from deforestation and farming. This process of human ignorance, which began by cutting the trees in the upper Euphrates above Sumer and sparked the flood legend of Noah, just goes on an on.  It happened in Egypt, Babylon, Mohenjo-daro, China, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Ukraine - with the same disastrous results.  Can we avoid repeating the mistakes of our ancestors?

Farming can save the planet almost singlehandedly – of course we need to reduce fuel consumption, eliminate waste, eat less meat and insulate our buildings, but farming is the magic wand that can solve our climate problems at a stroke

Industrial farms are the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the history of farming.  Although they only produce one third of the world’s food, they contribute most of the  .

Rodale research shows that organic farms sequester 3.7 tonnes of CO2 per annum and industrial farms emit the same amount.  That’s a difference of 7 tonnes – organic farmers support global greenhouse gas reductions almost equal to the emissions of industrial farms.  Take it worldwide: if everyone farmed organically then we could take 7.2 Gigatonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year, easily cancelling out the 5.5 Gigatonnes of increase in CO2 that is steadily making the planet more uninhabitable

Oh, yeah, I forgot - organic food is ‘too expensive.’  For F**k’s sake!  Help me somebody! What is really, really expensive is having to deal with floods, droughts, massive crop failures, flooding of the world’s coastal cities and human extinction. 

The solution is so easy it makes me want to weep.  All we need is a carbon tax that prices carbon emissions at the future cost of dealing with climate change.  That’s about £150 per tonne.  Actually, we probably only need to tax it at £35 per tonne to get the behavior change that would solve our problems

What would a carbon tax do
Well, the price of meat would go up, particularly beef and dairy products (did you know that if you put all the world’s cows on one side of scale and all the rest of the non-human mammals on the other that the cows would weigh more?). 

The price of organic food would go down.  £35 per tonne would mean that an organic farmer would get £130 per hectare in carbon rebate and the industrial farmer would have to pay a carbon tax of £120 per hectare – that’s a £250 difference.  It pretty much cancels out the phoney cost advantage of industrially produced food and in many cases organic food would cost less.   

We’d end up with other benefits – reduced nitrate pollution of water supplies; fewer endocrine disrupting chemicals affecting us from the foetus till old age; more biodiversity – you know the drill. 

A carbon tax would also encourage tree planting. You can cut a tree down in a few hours - it takes 20-50 years to grow a new tree.  A carbon rebate for tree planting would pay the tree grower 10 tonnes or £350 a year, just for planting a new woodland. 

Sheep farming emits 5 tonnes of CO2 per year per hectare, so sheep farmers would have to pay £175 in carbon tax – that’s a difference of £525.  Few farmers would raise sheep and they’d all plant trees.  What would happen if we planted trees on the higher ground?  Well, trees soak up water when it rains.  Their root systems stop soil from washing away into rivers and the sea. Duh.

There’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land and about 3.5 billion hectares of pasture.  That’s 5 billion hectares.  If we stopped trashing the soil and started farming organically and planted trees on pastureland we could sequester over 50 tonnes of CO2 every year.  That would be overkill, though. The net increase in carbon dioxide that is causing global warming is only 4 tonnes per year.   But it shows how easy it would be if we just taxed the emission of carbon and rewarded farmers and foresters who sequester it.

We stopped emitting lead 20 years ago because it was making everyone stupid and crazy.  We stopped emitting hydrofluorocarbons because they were destroying the ozone layer.  We stopped emitting sulphur dioxide because it was causing acid rain.  This was done with regulation and taxes to encourage the alternatives. 

The big climate talks are in Paris in November 2015.  By then the EU, China, California, Quebec, New England, British Columbia, Washington state and Oregon will have a carbon tax.   This means there will be genuine momentum to bring the rest of the world into the system, with no exceptions (Kyoto excluded agriculture and transport and let developing nations like China, India and Brazil off the hook).  A carbon tax is the simplest way to change behavior.  By paying a tax of £35 per tonne of CO2 now we can save a future cost of £150 per tonne emitted and protect our grandchildren from the consequences of climate change.  That’s £4 of payback for every £1 we save now.

It’s time to forget adaptation.  We have the power to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, we just need a carbon tax. 

Germany

What is about the Krauts?  Are they really that much cleverer than us Brits?  Where did we go wrong?  Back in the day, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were the clever dicks, they rowed over from Germany, took over Britannia and made it the most powerful nation on earth  The Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and other Germanic tribes had to settle for Middle Europe.  We thrashed them in 2 consecutive world wars, reducing them to abject poverty twice in one century.  I remember, as a 13 year old in Germany in 1957, seeing a farmer hitch a plough to his missus so that they could plough a field to get in a crop of potatoes.   Not any more.

Now they are one of the world’s most powerful economies and they have a government that actually behaves like it hasn’t completely lost its marbles, unlike our Anglo-Saxon regimes.  Where did they go right?

Luckily for them, after our victory in World War 2 we imposed a constitution on them to make sure that they had a truly democratic political system, to make sure that Germany could never again be taken over by a genocidal dictatorship that would launch wars of aggression (you know, like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan).   Then they developed an economic system that relies on a lot of small to medium enterprises (the ‘Mittelstand’) instead of favouring the huge inefficient corporations that Americans and Brits subsidise so they become too big to fail.  

Proportional representation means people can vote for the party they really want, not be faced with the Tweedledum and Tweedledee choices of us Brits.  The Green Party has 44 seats in the German Parliament,  while in the UK Caroline Lucas, an outstanding politician, struggles along with the only Green seat in the UK Parliament. When Fukushima blew up Germany sensibly committed to closing down nuclear power.  They already lead Europe in solar power, with nearly half the total installed capacity.  Compare Britain, where the Tories reacted to Fukushima by giving huge subsidies, guaranteeing double the cost of conventional electricity, to companies from communist China and socialist France to build nuclear power stations on the flood plains of the Bristol Channel!  The last tsunami in the Bristol Channel was in 1607 – it’s the worst place imaginable to build a nuclear power station. 

The Germans love organic food –they consume twice as much organic food per person as Brits or Americans.  In 2008, when the market for organic food in the UK slumped, it just kept on rising in Germany.   One factor main was that the government in the UK has been consistently unsupportive towards organic food.  You’d never get an Owen Paterson in Germany – singing from the Monsanto hymn sheet and doing the minimum required by the EU to support organic farmers.  The German government says organic farming is ‘economically strong, eco-friendly and sustainable.”  If Owen Paterson said something like that the NFU would have his guts for garters – they are insanely jealous of the handouts they get from us taxpayers (a typical 2000 acre farmer in Suffolk gets £500 a day in income support).   The Germans dedicate around £16 million a year to research into improving organic productivity and educating consumers about organic food and farming. The UK has never supported a bid for EU funding to promote organic food. The Organic Trade Board took the initiative to apply for the funding that paid for the  “Why I Love Organic” campaign.  Biofach every February in Nuremberg brings together the global organic industry in a massively impressive trade show.

The Germans also don’t like wasting money on war and toys for generals and admirals.  They only spend 1.4% of their GDP on military expenditure, compared to 2.5% in the UK and 4.4% in the USA.  The billions they save helps to support health, education, investment in industry and infrastructure and support for organic farming.   Their government debt as a percentage of GDP is 57%, compared to 83% in the UK.

Don’t get me wrong, the Germans drink too much beer and eat too many sausages – obesity is as big an issue there as it here.  Their sense of humour is, as Mark Twain observed, ‘no laughing matter.’  

But you have to salute them (keeping the elbow bent) for their common sense and commitment to sustainability.

Small is still beautiful

Who needs big organisations that are inherently inefficient in this age of smartphones and smart farmers? The future is small, the future is beautiful … and resilient

The Royal Scottish Geographical Society, in their wisdom, decided to bestow their Shackleton Medal (for Leadership and Citizenship) on me, and my wife Jo Fairley. The event was in Perth, traditionally known as the ‘Fair City’ but also a registered Fairtrade City.  Supporters poured into the Perth Concert Hall and we met two schoolgirls whose school curriculum included writing an essay about Justino Peck, a personal friend of ours in Belize. Justino led the Toledo Cacao Growers Association in 1993 from near collapse to a vibrant cooperative built on supplying organic cacao to Green & Black’s for Maya Gold. Arguably he should have been awarded the Shackleton Medal – he moved heaven and earth to get organic cacao production up going in Belize.

What sank in as we prepared our speech was how much the world has changed. In 1993 British aid advisors and agricultural experts from the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) urged the cocoa farmers to ignore us, warning that if they went organic and abandoned chemicals their cocoa orchards would be wiped out and they’d never be able to repay the money they’d borrowed to buy hybrid seeds and chemicals in the 1980s. Justino advised the farmers to trust us and go organic – most farmers don’t like spending money on chemicals anyway.

In the 1960s there had been a massive move towards big industrial scale cocoa plantations to ‘modernise’ cocoa production. 420,000 hectares of cacao were planted in Malaysia and over 200,000 in Bahia province of Brazil. Now there’s fewer than 20,000 hectares in Malaysia and even less than that in Bahia. What happened? Quite simply, the experts were wrong. They confidently gave crap advice that led to a huge waste of money. Big plantations planted cacao trees 8 feet apart with no shade trees (instead of 16 feet apart and with shade trees. Teams of workers were paid by the hour to harvest and ended up picking under-ripe pods to meet their targets.  The result was cacao that was rubbish for anything but the cheapest chocolate. The Malaysians sent teams to Ghana to find out that complexity of flavour comes when you have lots of independent farmers growing cacao and picking it only when it’s ripe.  In Brazil a disease called Witches Broom spread like wildfire in 1989, the fungicides failed to work and 90% of the trees in the Bahia region died.  An awful lot of money, human effort and heartbreak went into this misguided scheme to ‘modernise’ cocoa farming. A lot of women got cancer or had deformed births from spraying chemicals into the underside of the trees. Some plantations wouldn’t give women jobs as backpack sprayers unless they could prove they’d been sterilised. Cheap food at what cost?

Now it’s all changed and all the chocolate companies are actively courting smallholder producers.  Big is not beautiful, it’s a disaster. Tyre companies like Michelin want smallholders to plant rubber trees. Unilever want them to plant oil palm. The big plantations don’t work. Now everyone has to make nice to the smallholders. They have the whip hand and, organised into cooperatives, can command fair prices, supported by the Fairtrade Mark and other assurances.

The thinking behind depopulating the countryside was that all those peasants were needed to go and work in factory jobs, assembling computers and cars.  Only robots now do the job cheaper.  Apple’s new factory in Arizona will make computers in the USA again, but with very few jobs.  But there’s no point in making stuff if nobody has the money to buy it. The independent smallholder farmers, getting fair prices for what they produce, will be an important market for manufactured goods.

What’s more, independent people who own their own business or land are the backbone of any representative democracy. They’re harder to push around.

Just look at what a mess ‘Big’ has got us in. Big farmers in the US and EU depend on subsidies for half their income – they’d go bust overnight without £400 billion each year of taxpayer support. Big supermarkets are struggling, squeezing suppliers for cash to prop up their flagging share price, while independent butchers, bakers and brewers and other small retailers are popping up all over the place.

“Just look at what a mess ‘Big’ has got us in. Big farmers in the US and EU depend on subsidies for half their income – they’d go bust overnight without £400 billion each year of taxpayer support. Big supermarkets are struggling, squeezing suppliers for cash to prop up their flagging share price”

EF Shumacher wrote Small is Beautiful – as if People Mattered and went on to be president of the Soil Association. Who needs big organisations that are inherently inefficient in this age of smartphones and smart farmers? The future is small, the future is beautiful…and resilient. Just look at the cacao example – it’s the same wherever you look.

Health Food & Natural Food

When Robin Bines launched Natural Product News he helped bridge a long-standing gulf between the ‘health food’ and the ‘natural food’ worlds.  The divide was artificial in a way, more of a generation gap than a difference of ideology.

The health food trade had its roots in the vegetarianism and pacificism of the 1930s.  It sought, unsuccessfully, to change the world by logical argument and thoughtful articles. Wholemeal bread was its iconic food.  George Bernard Shaw was a principal advocate.  

The natural foods movement sprang up in the late 60s, its roots in macrobiotics and the hippie idea of creating an alternative society rather than arguing for change in a society that seemed hopelessly doomed.  Brown Rice was its iconic food.  Georges Ohsawa was a principal advocate.

The health food trade show was called Helfex and was put on by the Health Food Manufacturers Association.  Our company, Harmony Foods, was the first natural foods company to exhibit their wares at this show.  We wore jackets made out of hessian brown rice bags and had long hair.  We had pictures of brown rice fields in Italy as a backdrop on the stand and focussed on our brown rice, along with miso, tamari, tahini, hiziki seaweed, millet, buckwheat and other unfamiliar foods such as umeboshi plums.  We’d paid for our stand but we stuck out like a sore thumb.  The hot product of the day was ‘Quintessence’ – a herbal tonic that had the endorsement of Barbara Cartland, the romantic novelist who was also the poster girl for the health food trade and a passionate advocate of the benefits of honey.  We were carrying the natural foods banner, which dismissed honey and brown sugar as no better than white sugar.

When Barbara Cartland was walked around the show she would pose in front of each stand with the proud smiling owners…until she got to ours.  Her minders firmly grasped her elbow and marched her past – no danger of her being photographed in the presence of a bunch of hippies.    The Soil Association had a similar problem at the time.  Before she died, Mary Langman confided in me that Lady Eve Balfour had been strongly advised to distance herself from us hippies who were selling organic food. They feared it would undermine the credibility of the Soil Association at a time when luminaries such as Lord Kitchener were tabling motions in the House of Lords calling for more research into organic food production.    We were creating an alternative world rather than trying to change an established system.

In early 1970 our salesman Stan Stunning and Gregory and I went to the University of Sussex to give a talk about macrobiotics to some students there who wanted natural foods in the canteen.  One of them was Peter Deadman, who soon teamed up with Robin Bines to found Infinity Foods in Brighton.  A lot of other natural foods enterprises emerged in the next few years.

In 1973 we formed the Natural Foods Union with other pioneering retailers and wholesalers and set out the principles that distinguished us from the health foods shops.  Not long after, Maurice Hanssen would invite me to speak at seminars where I would explain to health food retailers what this natural foods stuff was all about and explaining that they could get aboard without having to buy bulk and pack it down if they bought our Harmony Foods prepacks. I remember the owner of Sunshine Health foods speaking out, saying that he was delighted that Harmony Foods and others were taking the health food trade back to its pre-war roots when food rather than pills and potions was its stock in trade. 

As time passed by the health food shops stocked more and more grains and beans and seeds and other natural foods products and the natural foods stores started to stock more vitamins, supplements, honey and tonics.   This changing and merging of retail concepts was reflected in the Natural Products Show that sought to embrace all aspects of our trade.

The rest is history – Natural Products News reflected this new paradigm and the boundaries between natural foods and organic foods, which had always been somewhat artificial, have largely dissolved

Was Adam a Fungus?

At the Soil Association conference in October I heard comments that the name wasn't very sexy and maybe something like 'The Organic Society' might be more compelling.  I have to disagree, based on my, admittedly quirky, interpretation of world history.  Also, I'm an acolyte of the Zen macrobiotic guru,  Georges Ohsawa, who said that humans and soil are a unity.   Here's my take on what he meant.

When life began on earth 500 million years or so ago there wasn't much around beside stringy little mycorrhizal fungi living on rocks. A mycorrhizal fungus had to erode a piece of rock with enzymes, helped along by carbonic acid from rain (the air was mostly carbon dioxide back then). It would get enough carbon to survive. 

Then a miracle happened - little green bacteria called cyanobacteria managed to harness sunlight in order to turn carbon dioxide and water into a simple carbohydrate, glucose sugar inventing photosynthesis.  That was when life really kicked off.  The mycorrhizal fungi, no slackers, saw the opportunity and created chain gangs of these sugar-producing bacteria, sucking out some of their sugar and feeding them with minerals like phosphorus that they harvested from rocks.  The chain gangs got bigger and bigger, organised into fan shapes to maximise capture of carbon dioxide.  Then they installed tubes that helped deliver the sugar that much quicker to the ever hungry, sugar-addicted fungi down below. 

These were the earliest plants.  Nothing has changed since.  Even a mighty oak tree

is nothing but a collection of tubes that carry water and minerals up to the sugar factories in the leaves and carry sugar down to the hungry mycorrhizae clustered all around the roots.  Then they form a network of filaments that can be 8 miles of superfine threads in just one cubic inch of soil. They communicate with each other through chemical signalling, electric pulses, smell and touch, making sure that the system runs smoothly.

So far so good, but what about all the other organisms down there? We know of 10,000 different bacteria and fungi that all have some role.  They need sugar too.  And the only way they can get it is to make nice with the mycorrhizae, the sugar barons of the underground.  So they do.  They even copy fungi in shape, so much so that before electron microscopes people thought bacteria like actinomycetes and streptomyces were fungi because they formed the same stringy filaments as their sugar-dealing masters.  We all mimic our wealthy betters, so why not bacteria?  Those filaments help to channel mineral nutrients to the fungi that reward them with sugar before trading it on to the plant up above.  If mycorrhizae are Mr. Big then the actinomycetes are the street dealers in the sugar racket.

It's not all peace and love, though.  From time to time nasty fungi and bacteria that eat plants' living tissue come along. The mycorrhizae have the answer, though. They just feed sugar to SAS commando bacteria, which quickly mulitply and kill off the invaders. You might call them an immune defense system.  Most of our antibiotics come from soil bacteria - they're very, very effective at wiping out nasty bugs.  Once the killer bacteria have seen off the invasion, the sugar supply tapers off and their population is reduced to a minimal state until they're needed again. 

Inevitably, some rebel fungi and bacteria thought 'Why are we so dependent on the mycorrhizae?  Let's get mobile, grow legs and wings and mouths and eat the plants instead of waiting passively to be fed"   Animal life emerged, all the way up to us humans.  We all have our own resident population of bacteria and fungi that date back to the origins of animal life.  They are our immune system, just as mycorrhizae are the plant's immune system.   They may be little, but there are 500 to 1000 bacterial species in a human gut with 100 times more genes than the human genome and comprise 10 times the total number of human body cells.  Humbling, isn't it?  Are we just walking food gathering mechanisms for a bunch of clever bugs who have been evolving for half a billion years before the first humans came along.

Are we a triumph of their evolution?

And did the name 'Soil Association' unconsciously (or bug-consciously) reflect the fact that it is an organisation dedicated to restoring the chemical-depleted global population of soil-dwelling organisms to their former glory?