Carbon Farming to Reverse Climate Change

This paper outlines the global threat from Climate Change and proposes a simple economic model as a practical solution through which land use innovation can drive behaviour change and reverse global warming. The planet is warming, we are losing the race to save all the inestimable physical wealth and cultural value that humankind created over the centuries and yet we have singularly failed to use the most efficient tool for reducing carbon dioxide levels: photosynthesis. Nothing else comes close to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, yet we neglect it.Two decades of policies to address the rising threat of catastrophic climate change have focused on reducing emissions. They failed, however, to slow the increase in greenhouse gas levels. Instead, directly and by default, government policies have brought about continuing increases instead.

Forestry and farming are the cheapest and most effective ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the vast unexploited reservoir of the soil and trees. Yet instead of actively pursuing these low-cost options we have deforested and degraded forest carbon and soil sinks.  How can we fix this?

The “4 per 1000” (‘Quatre pour Mille’) initiative launched at the Paris COP21 aims to do just that, by rewarding carbon farming.vBritain is a signatory and a Forum and Consortium member.  “4 per 1000” states that, if farming and forestry increased soil organic carbon annually by four parts per thousand per year, that would be enough to totally offset the annual 16 billion tonnes increase in greenhouse gas levels.  With carbon a marketable crop, we could stop worrying about global warming.

In 2015, the French National Assembly responded to ‘4 per 1000’ by setting a €56 (£50) a tonne carbon tax to comes into effect in 2020.

Carbon emissions reduction policies have failed so far:  

• HM Govt has spent over £1.5 billion supporting Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the idea that you can capture CO2 emissions and bury them securely in the ground. For CCS to work and be effective it would cost at least €70 per tonne CO2 stored and require an increase in fossil fuel use of 35%.

• The voluntary market has created credits for 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in the past 10 years. That’s a mere 1/500 of emissions. Cap and trade is subject to political vagaries. The European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Exchange went bust in 2010 when EU political decisions led to a gross oversupply of carbon allowances.

• The EU Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation requires mixing sugar beet ethanol, rapeseed oil or palm oil with petrol or diesel. 7 million tonnes of the world’s annual palm oil production of 66 million tonnes is burned as biodiesel, much more than is consumed as food in the EU. Land across the EU is degraded by intensive production of sugar beet and rapeseed for biofuel use, with negligible reductions and, even in some cases, increases in CO2.

The “4 per 1000” initiative is predicated on there being a price on carbon, whether emitted into the atmosphere or removed from the atmosphere. The Government sets a price for carbon and all emissions of CO2 are paid as part of a company’s tax bill, declared as part of its annual returns.  If a company can purchase carbon offsets for less it can deduct these offsets from its tax bill from carbon aware farmers. 

What would happen if there were a £50 per tonne CO2 price?

• Nitrates, pesticides and herbicides would become uneconomic in many applications and farmers would minimise or abandon these inputs

• Farmers would increase soil carbon by the use of grass leys and compost. They would minimise tillage and grow green manures to keep ground cover all year round

• Carbon from straw, sawmill waste and forestry arisings would be converted into biochar (agricultural charcoal) then added to the soil to permanently enhance fertility and increase the carbon in the soil ‘carbon bank.’ Biochar is 80-90% pure carbon and stays in the soil for centuries.

• Farmers would plant trees and hedgerows instead of growing rapeseed for biodiesel.

• Wood burning would 10.5 billion be disincentivised. Wood would replace steel and concrete in buildings and homes. Wood is carbon negative. Modern cross lamination technology produces wood that equals or exceeds the strength, durability and load bearing capacity of concrete and steel.

• The £1.5 billion Government subsidy to date wasted on carbon capture and storage research would be saved.

• Peat use would end overnight - peat bogs capture more carbon than any land use other than salt marshes.

• The sea would be more productive. Reduced fertiliser use and reversal of soil erosion would herald the end of harmful algal blooms that damage coastal ecosystems and fish stock populations.

Soil is the world’s most important and valuable commodity.  With a realistic carbon price, we would not suffer the resource misallocation of agricultural subsidies such as in the Common Agricultural Policy. 

Wind and solar are getting cheaper, but are nowhere near as competitive as 4/1000.  Money has been poured into supporting wind energy.  Every tonne of CO2 saved by onshore wind costs €162, from offshore wind £267.

A regenerating degraded forest can profitably generate CO2 savings for a cost of less than £5 tonne CO2.  Forestry management costs of planting, then thinning are minimal. Forests, pasture and arable farmland can easily sequester “4 per 1000 per annum.”  Yet we still lose 31 football fields per minute globally of productive agricultural land because industrial farming methods need take no account of carbon emissions.

How does a Carbon Price affect Fossil Fuel Prices?

A carbon tax would add $10 to a barrel of oil.  That is well within the range of fluctuations in the oil price (e.g. recent OPEC decisions).    

There is a financial opportunity. The Government simply establishes a tax that can be offset by carbon credits.  This then puts carbon dioxide, like any other valuable commodity, in the hands of markets.   

Fossil fuel emissions are 33 billion tonnes CO2 a year globally. At £50/tonne the market for carbon credits would be more than £1.5 trillion. If Britain leads on this by example then London would be the financial hub for carbon trading . The City of London has the depth of liquidity and the reputation for integrity that a global carbon market will need to succeed. 

The flow of cash into sequestration will be transformative.  Agricultural subsidies can fall away without impacting on land values.  Rural economies will be invigorated and farming can begin to remediate the misallocation of resources that current CAP policy encourages.

Auditing, validation and certification of carbon sequestration represents an opportunity for the certification industry, much of which operates out of the UK.

What is the scale of the opportunity?  Carbon sinks are primarily forests, fields and meadows.

The world has 1.5 billion hectares of arable land, 4 billion hectares of forest and woodland and 5 billion hectares of grassland, a total of 10.5 billion hectares that can be put to work removing CO2 from the atmosphere.  The annual net increase in CO2 levels is 16 billion tonnes.  If every hectare of our available land annually removed 4 tonnes CO2 then we would remove 41 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, which would get us back to pre-industrial levels in just 35 years.

Is 4 tonnes CO2 per hectare realistic?

La Vialla, a biodynamic family farm in Tuscany, comprises 1440 hectares including arable, pasture, woodland, vines and olives. Taking this as an example and microcosm of the global distribution of land use types, the University of Sienna, using IPCC methodology has evaluated La Vialla’s annual carbon cycle for the past eight years. Calculations show that 4.24 tonnes of CO2e per hectare have been captured every year for the past eight years. 

 An obvious criticism of soil and forest sequestration is that it can be reversed through human and natural impacts.  A farmer can plough up the soil, a forester can chop down the trees and then much of the carbon captured is released back into the atmosphere.  An additional risk is that fire, war, flood or hurricane can reduce the carbon store.

A two-part payment can address this by providing:

• a payment for the annual increment of CO2;

• an additional ‘interest’ payment on the carbon that is stored in the carbon ‘bank.’

Soil is the foundation of our natural capital.  In a capitalist system it should be valued.

Farmers can insure against loss of carbon. Banks will advance loans against land to farmers who operate best practice carbon farming in the knowledge that the asset that is loaned against is increasing in value as its carbon content increases.

The cost of low carbon food would come down and the cost of high carbon food would go up. No longer would price be a barrier to eating food that is rich in nutrients, low in pesticide residues and which delivers tangential social and environmental benefits.

Carbon sequestration in farmland, pasture and forests is a cheap and effective way of reducing greenhouse gas levels.  Compliance with agreed Paris COP 21 targets will be unlikely if we continue to depend on technological solutions and biofuels to reduce emissions.  Using up precious soil and forests for the production of biofuels is wasteful, uneconomic and does nothing to help mitigate climate change. An economic incentive to maximise soil and forest sequestration of carbon dioxide is the most effective, practical and low- cost solution to achieving greenhouse gas reduction.

Cannabis

Cannabis is popping up everywhere.  Former Prime Minister William Hague says the War on Drugs has been lost and they should be legalised.  The respected IEA Institute of Economic Affairs has published a report called “Joint Venture” that estimates that legalising cannabis would raise more than £700 million tax revenues for the government and cut NHS costs by £300 million. The same report concludes that over 60s consume 34 tonnes of cannabis a year.  Jeremy Corbyn said “Cannabis oil use is clearly beneficial to people and should be made readily available as quickly as possible.’  7-11 has just launched a CBD range in 4500 US stores. Holland & Barrett power through sales of cannabidiol oil (CBD ), as do other retailers.  The stuff works.  It’s not just the CBD part of cannabis that is therapeutic. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the part that gets you high, also has beneficial effects, not least with multiple sclerosis and epilepsy.  The New Scientist July 28 issue profiles GW Pharmaceuticals in Kent, the leading producers worldwide of a 50:50 blend of CBD and THC branded as Sativex.  It has been widely used for more than a decade to benefit sufferers from multiple sclerosis. CBD and THC are complementary, yin and yang.  Some proportions might work better than others, depending on the disease and the customer/patient.  It is, as the Victorians well understood, a remarkable and versatile medicine.

The psychotherapy and medical professions are demanding wider availability for therapeutic applications of psilocybin, the LSD- like substance extracted from magic mushrooms. The experiences of end of life users raise the question: ‘why do I have to wait until I have terminal cancer before I can legally take psychedelics and become happy with life, death and existence?’  Unlike other antidepressants, just a couple of sessions with psilocybin can provide a lifetime of cure.  Not very clever from a Big Pharma point of view, but wonderful for the person who wants to live a full and satisfying life.

Cannabis is now fully legal in Canada, California, Washington, Colorado, Uruguay, Portugal and Holland. The legalisation pathway goes like this: first allow the use of CBD; then allow the use of medicinal cannabis; then allow full recreational use. Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and many other countries with a history of cannabis use are quietly relaxing their controls. The only reason they made it illegal was US lobbying at the UN and threats of sanctions back in 1961. This is hard to sustain now so many US States have legalised.

It very much looks like widespread access to cannabis and psychedelic drugs will be commonplace in the next 5 years.  We will then look back on it as we once looked back on Prohibition and wonder why on earth we ever banned the stuff, crammed our prisons with innocent users and created global murderous criminal networks to fulfil demand.

The natural products business needs to consider is the coming impact on the way we live, the way we eat, what we buy and the way we interact with one another.  There was already a large scale experiment with widespread use in society of cannabis and psilocybin-like materials in the 60s.  What happened?

-       People formed communes and collectives (like Infinity, Suma and Essential) and shopped local and organic

-       Diet moved towards vegan/vegetarian/macrobiotic.

-       Alcohol consumption reduced - you can’t be high and drunk at the same time

-       People became actively opposed to war and pushed their leaders for peaceful solutions. 

-       People became mindful, adopting yoga, zen and meditation

 Healthy living and psychoactive drugs are better medicine than pharmaceuticals and alcohol. Cannabis and psilocybin use will induce major changes in society as legalisation makes usage much more widespread. The NHS will help people transition from opioids and antidepressants to the responsible use of cannabinoids and psychedelics.  There will be a negative impact on the pharmaceutical industry and reduced militarism and chemical agriculture.  Pension funds will have to provide for the increase in longevity.

It could have the potential to be social medicine as well. As we become more connected and supportive of one another economics, society and politics will change to reflect that thinking.

These changes are coming. They will dramatically increase demand for the offerings of the natural health industry. 

Are we ready for it?

Organic Integrity

One of the early ‘miracles’ of genetic engineering was the Flavr-Savr tomato.  The edited gene enabled the tomatoes to be picked at peak ripeness and then the ripening process would be stopped and the tomato would be yummy. As always with genetic engineering, there were unforeseen complications. When the first year Flavr-Savr tomato crop in 1994 was shipped to supermarkets across the USA they arrived in terrible condition.  Nobody had tested them on a road journey. The slightest vibration on the truck journey and the tomatoes became inedible mush.  What to do?

The entire tomato crop was harvested, pureed and canned in an attempt to cut the horrendous losses.  Now who would buy the cans?  No American supermarket would touch the stuff, but Safeway and Sainsbury’s bought the lot.  The cans were proudly labelled ‘Made with Genetically Engineered Tomatoes’ and sold at 2/3 of the price of Italian non-GMO tomato puree.  It was great PR for GMOs: ‘Wowser! thought the consumer - these GMO tomatoes are going to knock loadsamoney off my grocery bill, so I’ll have more to spend on necessities like beer, fags and cheap disposable clothing!’  

Calgene, who launched the Flavr Savr, went bust and taken over by Monsanto.   Around the same time the introduction of GMOs into Europe was a done deal.  Directorate General Agri, or ‘DG Agri,’ the EU Commission department (who really decide what the rules are in the rotten and corrupt Common Agricultural Policy) had already promised the biotech barons they needn’t worry. 

When we realised what was happening Richard Austin of Rainbow Wholefoods organised the wholefood wholesalers and retailers to dig in their heels against GMOs.   With the Soil Association we lobbied to require that GMO ingredients be labelled.  As Safeway and Sainsbury’s had already proudly done it on front of pack, this was a relatively easy win and DG Agri let it pass, not realising it was a fatal strategic mistake until too late.  GMOs were dead in the water.  If a consumer saw ‘Genetically Engineered’ on the label they would put it back on shelf, no matter how cheap.

In September 1999 Patrick Holden and I met with the top people of Monsanto under the auspices of the Environment Council. Monsanto wanted to understand how everything had gone so horribly wrong with their planned GMO blitzkrieg into Europe. 

Patrick and I explained organic principles and how they were at total variance with the ideas of genetic modification.  I kept a note of the meeting that included this line:

This opening exchange was the first and most fundamental revelatory experience for them.  They had never really understood these most basic organic principles.

It was appalling how little they understood about organics.  Once they realised what an obstacle to the rollout the organic world represented they took us seriously.

Subsequently there has been an extended campaign of disinformation about organic food running with various fallacious arguments: we would have to cut down rain forests to get the extra land to grow organically; e.coli O157:H7 in lettuces is higher in organic food; organic farmers use terrible pesticides; GMOs are safer than organic; you can’t trust organic certification.

Forbes Magazine was a good vehicle for this kind of crap.  Dr. Henry I. Miller has written about how organic food is a ‘deceitful, expensive scam’ and ‘the colossal hoax of organic agriculture.’  Forbes finally fired him when they found out one of Miller’s articles was written by Monsanto.  Miller helped Philip Morris organise a global campaign against tobacco regulations and wrote that nuclear radiation is good for your health.  He wrote a blistering attack on the World Health Organisation when they pronounced Roundup a ‘probable carcinogen.’

Burson Marsteller are the PR company that Monsanto use whenever they have an environmental disaster - they are expert at making bad stuff look ok.  And at making good stuff look bad.   When there was an anti-GMO demo in Washington they hired, for a $25 honorarium, counter-protestors with signs saying: ‘Biotech Saves Children’s Lives.’  

There’s a well organised misinformation campaign out there about how you can’t trust organic certification.  Meanwhile the Soil Association has been asked by China to certify organic producers there because of its globally-respected integrity.  A leading oats supplier sued the Soil Association, backed by Defra and another certification body, because the Soil Association refused to accept documentation on oats that tested for pesticide residues at levels well above ‘spray drift.’  Now all certification bodies must sample for pesticides and have the right to reject products that fail the test.  Belt and Braces. Food You Can Trust.   

Vegfest

Way back in 1944, when the Vegan Society was born, they dabbled with different names and ended up with “Vegan’ the letters of which were ‘the beginning and end of veg-etari-an.’  Hard to imagine that they were being that prophetic all those decades ago, but boy, are they gaining traction now.  These days, vegetarianism is the gateway food choice to veganism.

In the 70s the Vegan Society began publishing a printed list of vegan foods.  This was in the days when ingredient lists on food products were optional.  Of particular interest was crisps: the only flavour listed as acceptable to vegans was “Prawn Cocktail Flavour”.  All the other crisps had milk powder or derivatives in their flavour coatings.   It wasn’t easy being a vegan then, well now it is…and much more fun.

Anybody who was at the vegan mega-festival “VegFest UK” in Brighton in the last week of March could be forgiven for thinking the battle was over and that vegan militancy could lighten its stance.   No way, vegans are on a roll.  There was seminar after seminar on activism. 

There is a dynamism about Veganism that warms my heart.  None of the friendly compromise between vegetarians and meat eaters, no common ground.   The consumer of eggs and milk is complicit in shortening the lives (I could’ve said ‘murder’ but I’m trying to walk the middle ground here) of chickens and calves.  Vegans’ hands are clean.  

The Hunt Saboteurs Association were handing out copies of their magazine ‘Howl,’ which contained an erudite article dismissing the stereotype that hunt sabs are really about class war and ‘sticking it to the toffs’.  This critique diminishes the seriousness of the passionate and militant wing of veganism.  But what is clear to any vegan is that all activity that involves taking food away from animals or killing them for their meat (or for fun) has got to stop. 

The Brighton Centre was rammed.  At any given time there were up to half a dozen well-attended workshops, lectures, discussions and musical events - this wasn’t just about looking at lots of interesting vegan products, this was about conferring, debating and consolidating the thinking of the movement.   Plenty of beards and dreadlocks but also plenty of mainstream middle-class people who had come along to get with the programme.  The youth of the attendees bodes well for the future of veganism over the next few decades.   Speakers were armed with the facts: if we were all vegan then climate change anxiety would disappear, the countryside would be more biodiverse, badgers would sleep in peace and the pressure on the NHS would disappear. 

Vegans understand nutrition much better nowadays and there were lots of products that contained the kind of concentrated nutrients that are important to athletes and active vegan lifestyles.   I chatted to one particularly muscular guy and his very fit wife Zoe.  He said the guys at the gym can’t quite believe he really is vegan, thinking he must be sneaking meat somewhere to keep those pecs so well defined.   “Protein is protein,” he commented.  “It’s the iron you pump with it that counts.”

Junk food has its place in veganism too.  There was a burger stall with proud signage: “Vegan Junk Food.”  And CBD was all over the place, in food, in remedies and in skincare.  All you have to do is call it ‘medicinal’ and low-grade cannabis fetches a better price than skunk.  The Hempen Cooperative were selling hemp leaf tea, hemp seed oil and CBD oil.  I suppose you could smoke the tea if you were so inclined.  

Although many of the speakers extolled the environmental virtues of veganism, I was surprised at how many products on display were not organic.  My first reaction was that vegans were less concerned about organic provenance than about being animal product-free.  However, it soon became evident that there is an opportunistic element - many food processors make vegan products anyway, could care less about vegan or organic principles but see a fast-growing market and were out in force to capture the loyalty of this very committed constituency.   

I sampled and bought a jar of yummy vegan pesto - it was indistinguishable from (I hesitate to use the adjective), the ‘real’ thing.

Green Brexit conference - 'Is a Zero Carbon Future Possible?' I make the case for pricing all carbon equally.

In March 2018 I was a panellist at a Green Brexit conference - our theme was 'Is a Zero Carbon Future Possible?  The video is below. I come in at 8:34 and 24:56 and 39:05 but the whole session is interesting. The point of this conference was to explore how Brexit could be a positive green step away from the distortions, waste and environmental degradation that the Common Agriculture Policy has brought it its wake. The conclusion was the there needs to be an overarching commitment to the environment that legally binds all future UK governments of whatever political colour. My message was that the one thing that makes a lot of wishes come true is to reward people who take carbon out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere heated up at 39:05 when Michael Liebreich called me out for seeking a universal and equal price for all carbon - he called it 'utopianism' and naive. Maybe he's right, in which case we are all going to die.

WWOOF

A couple of young women pitched up at our place recently. We fed them, gave them a twin-bed room and they worked for us for six hours every day, mostly weeding and cutting back brambles on the edge of the orchard. If they had to pay for a B&B it would cost them £700 a week at this time of year so they’re earning, for a 30-hour week, nearly £10 an hour.

And they’re not tourists; they’re immediately part of the community. That’s ‘wwoofing’ for you.

WWOOF was founded in 1971 by the wonderful Sue Coppard, who was also the editor of Seed Magazine, the Journal of Organic Living that we Samses published from 1971-1977. She wrote to an organic farmer in Sussex and asked if she could come and help out for a weekend. She had a transformative and exciting time and friends said they’d like to do it too, so she took them on a second visit. That was the beginning of an organisation called Weekend Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Then people started staying for weeks, not just weekends, so it became Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Now people in 61 countries are wwoofing. Globally there are more than 10,000 organic farms and gardens that are WWOOF hosts, so now it is Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (still WWOOF). A person who ‘wwoofs’ is known as a ‘wwoofer.’

Wwoofers can be any age or nationality. It is refreshing to reflect on the people we have met who we would never otherwise have encountered: the American honeymoon couple wwoofing round England on a tandem bicycle; Andre, the French engineer in his fifties who got all our generators, strimmers, brushcutters, rotovators and everything else electromechanical running perfectly; the Italians and the dinners of pasta and brown rice risotto they would prepare for us. Then there is Chris from Oxfordshire who is happiest working alone in the woods, clearing brambles, creating nice spaces among the trees and making charcoal. He’s a regular now.

Every time a wwoofer stays with a host they get a cultural immersion. An organic farmer or grower is living a lifestyle and a philosophy; that’s why they’re organic. Living with them for a few weeks helps the wwoofer to absorb the ethical rationale for farming in harmony with nature. It’s a rationale that infuses one’s whole life. It’s ‘ecotherapy’. So, after a season of wwoofing they will return to their regular lives with an irreversible change in their attitude to all the environmental and social issues that have their roots in the way we produce our food. When they go shopping they will unhesitatingly choose the organic option when it is available. They have become part of the movement.

When Attlee’s Labour Government in 1947 passed the Agriculture Act an important part of it was subsidies on mechanisation, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, aimed at moving agricultural labour off the land and into factories. Farmers who didn’t comply could have their land confiscated by the State, so small farms and rural employment crashed. Growers became dependent on casual labour from abroad, weed killers instead of hand-weeding and chemical fertilisers instead of manure and compost. This commitment to industrial agriculture was cemented into Britain’s farming and has been a burden on the taxpayer and on the environment ever since. Organic farmers were left at a permanent disadvantage, as chemical pesticides are cheaper than manual labour and there are few controls on the resulting poisoning of the environment. Nobody really measures the cost to the NHS of farm pollution. Nobody really measures the impact on biodiversity. Nobody measures the carbon footprint. So when a farmer has a steady supply of wwoofers to help with their labour-intensive chores it is economically
transformative and makes organic food much more competitive. Readers of my column know that carbon pricing would tip the pricing balance in favour of organic. That, plus wwoofers, would mean organic food would be consistently less expensive than non-organic.

Once a wwoofer always a wwoofer. The global community of wwoofers is ever-expanding and is an important pillar of the organic movement.

The Old Order is crumbling – great news for health freedom

The big conflict of our age is between Big Government and the MAAFIA (Microsoft Apple Alphabet Facebook Instagram Amazon), says Craig Sams. The implications for health freedom are profound.

Recently Theresa May has been making threatening noises about needing to control the internet and social media for ‘national security’ reasons. The press, including the erstwhile freedom-loving Guardian, are full of articles somberly bemoaning the hazards of allowing the free-for-all of viewpoints that the internet allows.

This new transparency is driving our rulers crazy. It used to be that you could do what you liked in the corridors of power. You could cut deals with drug companies to prohibit alternatives to their products that sell with 1000% (at least) markups via the NHS You could declare war on innocent countries in order to bring them democracy, killing hundreds of thousands of innocents while sustaining the market for the bombs and missiles that create profits. Whenever I read an argument for nuclear power, military expenditure or protection of pharmaceutical makers and see the word ‘jobs’ I see red. Claiming ‘jobs’ is the last refuge of the scoundrel, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson (on patriotism).

Google was recently fined €2.3 billion for stacking the deck on price comparison. Big deal. Nobody uses those sites anymore – just go to Amazon and you can see it all. This is just an EU way of taxing a company that is making the world a more efficient and economically smarter place.

The big conflict of our age is between Big Government and the MAAFIA (Microsoft Apple Alphabet Facebook Instagram Amazon). Big Government rules us by force, with a momentary opportunity every four or five years, to consent to more rule by force. The MAAFIA rules us by consent. We voluntarily let them have our personal data because we trust them in a way that we would never trust a government. They give us something back: convenience; money saving; time saving; instant access to massive amounts of knowledge; safety; social networking. They let competing ideas fight it out on their platforms. If you want insights into how to be healthy you don’t look on a government website, you go to Google or ask your Facebook friends. If you want to know what the Government thinks just study the lobbyists from FOWAP (Finance, Oil, War, Agribusiness, Pharma). They set the Government agenda and the mainstream media dutifully tell us it’s for our own good.

The Government takes our money, as taxes, then insists that our ‘free’ medical system revolves around addictive overpriced drugs with horrific side effects. If you try to offer a herbal remedy for illness, or other natural treatments that don’t have side effects, you could end up in jail. The Government taxes soft drinks to raise £500 million a year and then blows £250 million a year on subsidies to sugar producers. And we elect them!

The MAAFIA is here to stay. Of course, the mainstream media will egg on the Government to control it while still defending themselves against press censorship. The Guardian and The Times are both watching helplessly as their readership defects to online forums. How frustrating it must be for a journalist who has worked their way up the pecking order at a newspaper and then finds that some kid with a three million following on Instagram is being courted by advertisers because their followers trust them more than the recycled press releases they can read in a newspaper.
Hands off the MAAFIA! It has been created in our image and carefully reflects our every thought and deed to make sure that it is a true manifestation of what we most care about. It is immune to lobbyists and political bribes. It is our gateway to true freedom.

Hydroponics

Back in the 1940s, Eve Balfour wrote a book called The Living Soil that became, along with Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament, the bible of the organic movement.  Albert and Eve were going to call farming in harmony with nature ‘Biological’ farming, but J.I.Rodale, Eve’s pal in the US, persuaded her that ‘Organic’ was a better name.  Organic farming is biological’  farming in that the carbohydrate produced by plants fuels the biological engine of microbes, worms and other creatures in the soil that converts soil nutrients into food for the plant.

So…what happens when there’s no soil involved?

When hydroponic farming came along, the organic movement was divided.  How could we not grow things in soil and call them ‘organic?’  The proponents said that hydroponics mimicked soil by using peat or coir as the growing medium, infused with water and organic nutrients.  The Soil Association allows peat and coir, but only for starting plants out or to improve soil, but not as a growing medium on its own. So as hydroponics wasn’t ‘soil’ it wasn’t approved. The EU organic regulations also prohibit hydroponic growing.  However, the US organic regulations do allow hydroponic growing. They require that the nutrients are organically approved and no pesticides or other prohibited inputs are used.  It’s what they call ‘bioponic’ – in other words as long as the biological activity is the same as in organic growing, where microbes in the soil interact with nutrients and plants, it is the same, functionally, as growing in soil.

We have an equivalence agreement with the US that allows the import and export of organic foods even where there may be some differences in regulations.  This is one of those differences and it’s now being reviewed on both sides.

I should declare my interest.  Our company Carbon Gold sells soil improver to organic greenhouse growers who benefit from the benificial biological impact of enriched biochar which encourages the active microorganisms that typify healthy soil.  It does it by providing a huge surface area that enables them to flourish.  With it they can grow tomatoes avoid suffering from soil-borne diseases.  But we also sell much more to non-organic growers who value the fact that, whether combined with coir or peat, biochar’s biological boost enables them to reduce or eliminate pesticide use and enjoy higher yields, by plugging in to the ‘soil food web.’   So I’m walking both sides of the street and ‘conventional’ growers are reducing their dependency on pesticides and inputs.

Farmers who grow hydroponically and using biology are getting yields and quality up, too. It’s reached a point where a grower in Holland can get 80 tonnes of vine tomatoes per hectare, a 10-15% increase, by working with biology.  It would be unfortunate if branding such as ‘pesticide-free’ or ‘LEAF’ were to predominate with consumers who just want a ‘clean’ product that is free of pesticide residues.  Most aren’t bothered if the roots of the plant were in soil or instead in some kind of soil-like mixture off the ground.  They just don’t want to eat pesticides.  Strawberries, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce and salad crops all perform brilliantly in controlled situations. Performance equals competitiveness.

 Organic growers use peat in greenhouses and also steam sterilise their soil between growing seasons.  This raises ecological and biological questions that are uncomfortable to answer.  With ‘bioponics’ you recreate the biological conditions of growing in soil, but in troughs that allow at least 180 litres of soil per square metre – this means ‘feeding the soil’ rather than ‘feeding the plant’ and looks like it may be the compromise way forward.  For the past 5 years I have been growing vegetables (for my own use) in my greenhouse in troughs 2 feet off the ground that contain 400 litres of homemade soil per square metre.  I use the same troughs in the spring to propagate healthy plants that are then planted out and sold as Soil Association certified.  And I’ve never had to steam sterilise or use peat.

This affects everyone.  When you go into a supermarket the first thing you see is fresh vegetables.  In Denmark fresh fruit and vegetables are 30% of the organic market. The same proportions apply in the UK.  25 years ago, when organic was first making headway the only organic products supermarkets bothered with were fresh produce. That’s because people are most passionate about organic when they are buying fresh fruit and vegetables.   If organic vegetable growers lose ground because they can’t take full advantage of the clean growing breakthroughs in biological technologies and pest controls then they’re not the only ones who will suffer.  The entire organic marketplace will be weakened if consumers start to choose non-organic ‘clean’ fruit and vegetables.  Once consumers have weakened their commitment to the organic ‘brand’ it can have unwanted repercussions on all their other purchasing. 

So the transatlantic debate about hydroponics, bioponics and earth affects us all, not just vegetable growers. 

Capitalism Must Price Carbon - Or Die

This was a speech I gave at the Harmony in Food and Farming conference in Llandovery, Wales in July 2017.

Please click here to see video clips of the Prince of Wales, Patrick Holden and myself during the conference, which was organized by The Sustainable Food Trust. It aimed to develop an agricultural perspective on the ideas propounded in the book 'Harmony' by HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper.

In 1967 Joni Mitchell wrote a song called Woodstock that included these lines:

“We are stardust, We are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

back to the garden”

We are indeed ‘billion year old carbon’ – the average person of about 80kgs/176lbs  contains about 15kgs/33lbs of carbon.  That ancient carbon is in our bones, our muscle, our fat and our bloodstream, as carbohydrate, fat, protein and other compounds.  The carbon in our bodies may have been previously in soil, in trees, in charcoal, in dinosaur turds, in mosquitoes, in honey...  It was everywhere before it ‘reincarbonated’ in us.  Carbon is immortal.   And it is stardust.

A billion or so years ago a very hot star kept getting hotter.  As it got hotter, it formed hydrogen, then carbon, then oxygen and then the other elements that we know.Sir Fred Hoyle, the great astrophysicist, described this as ‘stellar nucleogenesis’ – stars creating atoms.

When that star got too hot it exploded, became a ‘supernova’ and blasted its carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and rock into space.  Those chunks of rock and elements consolidated to form our solar system, with a sun that is still burning today with the remaining heat of the star that formed it a billion years ago.

Carbon is a promiscuous atom, it has 4 points where it can ‘mate’ with other elements.  That’s why there are so many carbon-based molecules and why carbon is the foundation of all living things.  Where there’s life, there’s carbon.

 According to Hoyle, life, in primitive form, was everywhere. This was called ‘Panspermia.’

Life in rock was called ‘Lithopanspermia.’

Life was fungi. That life bumbled along, depending on acid rain from the very CO2-rich atmosphere a billion years ago to break down carbon that was stored in rock. Then a miracle happened that changed everything.

Bacteria called cyanobacteria became able to combine carbon dioxide CO2 from the atmosphere with H2O water, using sunlight energy, to make carbohydrate C6H12O6, whilst excreting oxygen.  That carbohydrate was the sugar that is the basis of all living energy in plants and, eventually, in animal life too.

Once this happened, one can speculate that the rock-eating fungi saw their chance and organised the cyanobacteria into chain gangs, maximising their potential to capture carbon from the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, then at about 95% CO2.

These became algae, then simple plants, all busy making sugar to feed their own growth and, more importantly, to nourish the growth of the fungi that created them.

The fungi worked with other microbes in the soil, thriving on the sugar coming from the plants and delivering back to 'their' sugar-making plant all the mineral nutrients that they needed to grow.  Plants died and decomposed.  Fungi and bacteria died and decomposed. The carbon-rich detritus of their existence rotted down to become what we know as ‘soil’ – a most precious resource because it is the perfect habitat for fungi and bacteria and a rich source of recycled nutrients for plants.

This soil built up over millions of years, producing rich plant growth that eventually could support the large life forms such as dinosaurs and brontosaurs that existed in the ‘Carboniferous’ age.

This was the soil that early pioneers found in the American Midwest, rich in organic matter that ran very deep thanks to the 3 metre roots of prairie grasses.

When my great grandfather began to plough virgin prairie in Nebraska back in 1885, the soil on our farm contained over 100 tonnes of carbon as organic matter (organic matter in soil is approximately 50% carbon).  By the time I was born in 1944 this was down to about 20 and now it is closer to 10, totally dependent on fertilizer and pesticides.

Farmers are frugal, on our farm we grew and processed almost all the food that we ate, only buying in commodities like flour, salt, sugar and soap that we couldn't make on the farm.  Old calico flour sacks were washed and recycled as clothing, overalls for the boys and dresses for the girls.

Some enterprising flour companies printed pretty patterns on their flour bags when they realised this was happening.  My mother and her sister Thelma wore Nell Rose flour sack dresses.

The men were frugal too, but they were unwittingly wasting the most precious resource on the farm, the soil.  As the poet Wendell Berry put it:

 "We didn't know what we were doing because we didn't know what we were undoing." 

What we were undoing was all the decomposed plant matter that had been accumulating ever since those first Cyanobacteria sped up the process of life on Earth.

The destroyed soil lost its water holding capacity and lost its structure and integrity.  The result was the great Mississippi floods of 1927 when the river was 60 miles wide from April to October, sparking the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities as their farms were submerged for half a year.

Then in the 1930s the Dust Bowl triggered another migration, of "Okies" from their farms in Oklahoma, Kansas and western Nebraska as their farms became submerged in dust and dirt.  Richard St. Barbe Baker, an Englishman who founded Men of The Trees in 1926 and was a founder member or the Soil Association, helped restore the broken soils of the Midwest.  Operating under the banner of President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps he oversaw 3 million men who planted 10 billion trees between 1933 and 1940.  (These men also made good soldiers in WW2).

Tractors also played a destructive role, they could plough twice as deep as a horse-drawn plough, bringing up fertility and carbon from deeper in the soil.  My Uncle Floyd (pictured with me in 1947) still used horses to draw his 8-row planter because horses didn't compact the soil. Tractors did, weakening soil structure.

This experience alarmed people in Europe.  In Britain Eve Balfour wrote "The Living Soil" which proposed a new approach to agriculture that worked with nature and became known as 'organic farming.'

Eve Balfour collaborated with Dr. Innes Pearce who had shown at the Pioneer Project in Peckham that low income families did much better if they understood the basics of good nutrition and domestic hygiene.

Together they formed the Soil Association in 1947 on the premise that good farming would produce heathy food to nourish healthy people and create healthy societies.

My introduction to organic food and healthy eating came via the Japanese guru Georges Ohsawa, author of Zen Macrobiotics.  I imported the books to the UK and sold them via various bookshops.

I sold brown rice snacks at the UFO Club, where the Pink Floyd were the house band.  In February 1966 I opened a restaurant in Notting Hill to spread the macrobiotic message.  In 1968 my brother Gregory opened Seed restaurant, our larger restaurant in Bayswater, London.

Getting ourselves back to the garden

ZEN MACROBIOTICS - Taoism

• Balanced - Yin and Yang

• Organic - Sustainable

• Wholegrain

• Food for health

• 'Justice' (Fair)

• Japanese (Miso, Nori, Tamari)

• No additives, no hormones

• Avoid sugar

• Eat only when hungry

• Exercise and Activity

Like the Stoics mentioned in the Prince of Wales’ book "Harmony" we believed in "an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos."  We saw this through the prism of Daoist yin and yang philosophy and saw it as the key to a long and happy life ('macro' = 'big, long', 'bios' = 'life').

When we launched a range of macrobiotic food products in 1970 we branded them "Harmony" with a trademark that was a Yin Yang symbol with leaves and roots.

The company went on to become Whole Earth Foods a decade later - unfortunately 'Harmony' was a brand we couldn't register in our key European markets.

When I launched Whole Earth cornflakes in 1997 a friend Dan Morrell, who had founded Future Forests (later to become the Carbon Neutral Company) asked me if I'd like to take the corn flakes 'carbon neutral' -  a term he originally coined. .  He then commissioned  Richard Tipper of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to measure the carbon footprint of the cornflakes.

To our pleasant surprise we had to plant hardly any trees to offset the carbon used in growing, shipping, processing, packaging and distributing the cereal because the increase in the organic matter on the farms where the corn was grown almost completely offset the carbon emissions from everything else.  That's when I understood that, if we priced carbon into the cost of food, people would farm in a very different way.  It is now urgent that we do so

The UN has said that we only have 60 years of farming left. Farming generates more than a third of the annual increase in greenhouse gas. 

Volkert Engelsmann of IFOAM has calculated that we are losing farmland at the rate of 30 football fields every minute.  None of these losses come from organic farming, which is restorative and regenerative.

Industrial farming wastes energy.  It takes 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy.  A farmer with a hoe uses 1 calorie of human energy to produce 20 calories of food energy.  On a calorie-for-calorie basis a farmer with a hoe is 240 times more carbon efficient than a farmer with lots of equipment and inputs.  More than 30 years of trials at the Rodale Institute farms in Pennsylvania show that organic farming can sequester 1 tonne of carbon per annum.  They have also shown that once the soil is in good shape, the yields match those of industrial farming.

There is an effort afoot to attempt to bring market forces into bringing an end to this potentially disastrous loss of viable farmland.  Part of this is to attempt to appeal to the self-interest of companies like Unilever and General Mills whose supply chain will suffer if farmland becomes unviable and unavailable.

The French National Institute for Agricultural Research published a report in 2015 that stated that if farmers could sequester 4 parts per 1000 of organic matter,  that’s 0.04%, every year in their soil that would be enough to totally offset the annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions that is causing climate change.  That’s without counting any transition to solar, wind or greater energy efficiency.  As a result the French National Assembly voted a carbon price of €65 per tonne to take effect in 2020 and to include agriculture.  French Agriculture Minister Stéphane Le Foll then announced his ‘4 per 1000’ initiative which became part of the Paris Climate Agreement. It was endorsed at COP 22 in Marrakech and  36 countries so far have signed up to participate in restoring soil, the capital base of every nation.

The Prince of Wales co-authored a children’s book called ‘Climate Change’ that shows how carbon goes into the atmosphere and how it comes back into the earth and the sea.  The net annual increase is 16 billion tonnes.

A 3000 hectare biodynamic farm called Fattoria La Vialla in Tuscany Italy has its carbon measured every year by a team from the University of Siena.  La VIalla are sequestering ‘7 per 1000’ every year.  If everyone farmed like those 3 brilliant brothers  in Italy, whose farm is roughly 1/3 pasture, 1/3 forest and 1/3 everything else (grape vines, cereals, fruit, vegetables), then we would not only cancel out the 16 billion tonne increase in CO2 but would see a 12 billion tonne reduction every year.   Additional benefits would be greater biodiversity, cleaner water, less risk of drought and flooding and safer food.  (Their wine is pretty awesome, too).

Going beyond stopping degeneration is the regeneration movement.  This includes: Regeneration International, an offshoot of the mighty Organic Consumers Association in the US; the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO; Soil and More (Netherlands); People 4 Soils (Slow Food movement); and Save our Soils (UK).

Corporations like General Mills are taking strong initiatives.  They have 100,000 hectares of land from their supply chain to be organic by 2020 as part of their carbon reduction policy.

But we still burn food.  One half of the annual USA corn crop is converted to ethanol using more energy to produce it than is embodied in the ethanol. It is mixed with gasoline to be burned as fuel.  The US is now exporting oil and gas yet still burns vast amounts of food in the name of 'energy security.'

We still destroy forests.  According to HRH the Prince of Wales this is at a rate of 15 football fields per minute.  If we valued the carbon stored in those forests at $20 tonne each hectare would be worth $15000.  Once the forest is cleared and then planted with soybeans it is worth $300 per hectare.  HRH described this in a speech in 2008 as ‘The greatest example of market failure in the history of capitalism.’

We still burn wood.  There is a false virtuousness to burning wood.  200,000 wood burning stoves a year are sold in the UK alone.  Wood smoke is more harmful to health than smoke from coal, oil or gas.  It takes a tree 50 years to sequester the carbon that is then consumed in a wood burning stove in 50 minutes. If a replacement tree is planted, will take 50 years to take that carbon back out of the atmosphere.

Wood has the resilience of steel and the load bearing capacity of concrete.  'Glulam' and other new wood technologies mean that wood can be used in 20 story buildings ('plyscrapers'), sequestering the embodied carbon in the wood for centuries.  We should never burn wood, it's a terribly inefficient waste of carbon.

Biochar, or charcoal made from wood, is a way to convert wood by-products into a carbon rich substance that can be put in the soil and will stay there for decades or even centuries.

It dramatically increases the population of beneficial microbes in soil, delivering a healthier plant immune system,  increased water retention and reduced loss of nutrients from leaching.  It is the best use for woody material that is not suitable for building or furniture making.  It is proven to help restore degraded soils and make them fertile and fit for farming again.  There are many examples of its benefits: tomato growers use it to combat plant diseases and increase yields; it cures honey fungus, ash dieback, chestnut blight, phytophthora and other tree diseases; it helps cocoa farmers overcome the devastating impact of black pod.  Stockholm uses it for all their new urban tree plantings as it enhances survival rates.  In Qatar the Aspire Park now use it for all their new tree plantings, with gratifying results.  Biochar in soil protects the beneficial microbes that are part of a plant’s immune system, its food supply and it’s water supply.

Farming and forestry would be transformed if carbon pricing were to be introduced for their activity.   People would plant trees instead of growing wasteful biofuels.  Prairie grass would replace corn in the Midwest.  Farmers would adopt regenerative methods such as organic and biodynamic farming.

Farmers would profit from farming carbon in 2 ways:

1. An annual payment for any increase in soil carbon and a charge for any decrease in soil carbon

2. An 'interest' payment on the actual level of soil carbon on the farm. This would be effective at around 10% annually.

A typical organic farm would benefit to the tune of approximately £100 per hectare and an industrial farm would have to pay a carbon tax of as much as £100 per hectare.  Farmers would change behaviour overnight and agribusiness behemoths like Monsanto, Bayer and John Deere would have to rethink their business model.  Taxpayer-funded subsidies to farming could be largely phased out as carbon markets would trade the carbon credits.

Farmers could also insure against catastrophic events such as flood and drought that might impact on their soil carbon.   However, farming with carbon in mind would reduce the likelihood of such damaging events.

Soil is Nature’s capital and the foundation of all life on Earth.  Capitalism is about valuing capital and pricing it.  Capitalism has failed to deal with carbon because industry, transportation and farming have been allowed to pollute freely at no cost.  All other forms of pollution are nowadays strictly controlled for wider social benefit. It is time for carbon to be priced and traded like very other important commodity.

We can get 'back to the garden' - the Garden of Eden.  We just have to price carbon and change the way we farm our beautiful planet.

"We are stardust, We are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

back to the garden"

Harmony in Food & Farming conference videos

V&A Keynote Speech

The V&A 'Revolution - Records and Rebels 1966-1970) exhibition closed earlier in 2017.  I was invited to give the keynote speech at the launch dinner at the museum.  It was well received.  Here's the text:

While staying in a Sikh temple in Delhi in April 1965 a couple of guys from San Francisco gifted me with a 1000 microgram capsule of Sandoz pharmaceutical grade LSD.  I took my first trip in September of 1965, 51 years ago almost to the day.  Then I went back to complete my final year at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.   In October Timothy Leary came to Philadelphia with his message to explore higher consciousness.  This created a psychedelic community, as happened wherever Leary went.

The American Medical Association described the diet as ‘the Hippie diet leading to death.’  My restaurant opened in February 1967 and one of my first customers was Yoko Ono, who had been working at the Paradox when I had visited a year earlier

People got religion – not the old guy in the sky variety, but the personal spiritual discovery embodied in yoga and meditation and Zen Buddhism.

Our clothes helped us identify each other.  I imported coats I’d seen in Afghanistan a year earlier.  The Beatles bought some at Granny Takes a Trip boutique on the Kings Road and set off a global craze.  I also imported Tunisian kaftans, Tibetan shoulder bags and Chinese silks that Aedan Kelly would dye with blobby designs that were then tailored into shirts and dresses.

Clothes also helped the police to identify us and they started randomly searching and arresting people who looked colourful or had long hair.  We understood what it was like to be black and this fuelled empathy for civil rights as well as for drug law reform.

We believed in the power of peace and love.  The Vietnam war was at its peak – we tried to stop it and faced up to the full force of the law in Grosvenor Square, Chicago and Kent State.

We experienced nature and the environment on an intuitive and empathetic level, seeking out green places like Golden Gate Park or Kensington Gardens.  We read the romantic poetry of Keats and Blake, deploring dark satanic mills.

When the Move sang “I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ or The Small Faces sang ‘It’s All Too Beautiful’  we responded viscerally.   Then the Beatles summed it all up as “All you Need is Love.”

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth both were born out of this awareness of our oneness with our beautiful planet.

We got sexy.  It was hard to repress sexuality when all your other senses were heightened, so if you were gay you let yourself go, if you were polyamorous you started to swing. Sexual experimentation led to sexual liberation.

We were a community – with a strong sense of communalism.  Not communism, quit the opposite: we didn’t trust the State but we did form communes. Our individualism, communalism and libertinism combined to forge a political libertarianism.

It wasn’t easy to get a job if you dressed like a hippie and had long hair, so many set up their own businesses. Fashion, publishing, natural foods and music were areas where entrepreneurial spirits could follow their heart and make a good living.

Our goal was to create an alternative society, an exemplar of how life could be and should be.

We underestimated the degree to which the legacy industries that profit from war, environmental degradation, ill health and financial manipulation would still control the agenda 50 years later.

This exhibition captures magnificently the deep spiritual, philosophical and political intent of those times and their impact on the world today.

It could help to accelerate the change of which we dreamed.

Perhaps it will help us to build Blake’s hippie vision of a new Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.

My Sugar Odyssey

Now that the Government is slapping a tax on soft drinks I am going to indulge in a reminiscence of my troubled relationship with sugar, health and food. My first job, as a 7 year old kid, was to scour the streets of a Pittsburgh suburb called Bridgeville, collecting discarded soda bottles and taking them to my aunt Gloria's store to collect the 2¢ deposit refund.  At that time a soft drink was 10¢, so the drink was 8¢ and the bottle deposit was 2¢ and people still threw the bottle away.  The deposit didn't make much change in behaviour.  When people wanted sugar, they paid what it cost.

I didn't really have much appetite for sugar for most of my childhood, our mother was pretty strict about it.  I remember the day in 1953 when confectionery came off the ration in the UK  and some schoolmates emerged from a sweet shop with a bag of humbugs they'd just bought  without having to cajole their mother to come along with her ration book.  The nation went mad for sugar and the Government had to put it back on rationing until supplies recovered.

It was in 1965, when I was in Afghanistan, recovering in Kabul from a serious case of hepatitis, enhanced with dysentery, that I understood sugar.   My liver was on strike and the doctors told me that I should eat lots of simple sugary food to keep my blood sugar levels up.   The dysentery told me otherwise: I knew from an early bout in Shiraz, that a diet of unleavened whole meal flat bread and unsweetened tea was the key to stopping the runs.   So I tried it again and the dysentery cleared up in 2 days.   Amazingly, so did the hepatitis.  My liver stopped throbbing with pain and the whites of my eyeballs went from greenish yellow to something close to white.

That autumn, back in Philadelphia, I adopted the macrobiotic diet which forbids sugar.  My health rose to an even higher level and I haven't once needed to see a doctor since about my health.  After a few years I was able to reintroduce alcohol into my diet but tried to keep a lid on sugar.

In 1966 I was in London, aiming to open a macrobiotic restaurant and study centre. From December, I was a regular at the UFO Club, where proto-hippies would listen to the Pink Floyd and then buy macrobiotic food that my mother had helped me make.  My little band of macrobiotic missionaries would then explain to people trying this strange food that brown rice was good for you and sugar should be avoided.  I opened a little basement restaurant in Notting Hill in February 1967.  Yoko Ono was one of our first customers, as she knew about macrobiotics from Japan.

We made bread without yeast, macrobiotic-style and I imported books like Zen Macrobiotics by Georges Ohsawa (Nyoiti Sakurozawa) that were sold in Indica Books, the bookshop owned by Paul McCartney and Barry Miles.

Macrobiotics avoided yeast for the same reason they avoided sugar: too much could cause dysbiosis of the gut flora.  Meanwhile the American Medical Association called macrobiotics a diet that 'could lead to death'

Dr. Arnold Bender, Britain's top nutritionist, said white bread was the most easily digestible and nutritious bread you could eat, slapping down the wholemeal alternative as too slow to digest and with lower nutrients, because wheat bran fibre has no protein and carbohydrate.

In 1968 I had to leave Britain and my brother Gregory opened a larger restaurant in Bayswater called Seed.

None of the desserts were made with sugar - a touch of salt was enough to bring out the sweetness of the apples in the crumbles.  At festivals like Glastonbury and Phun City we would serve up porridge to the festival goers and got into trouble at one festival as our customers would head off to an adjoining catering tent to get sugar to sprinkle on their porridge and muesli.  We had a shop on the Portobello Road called Ceres Grain Shop that sold all the whole grains, beans, seeds and organic vegetables but the only sweet thing we sold was Aspall organic apple juice.

I wrote a book called About Macrobiotics in 1972 that was translated into 6 languages and sold half a million copies where I wrote: "If sugar was discovered yesterday it would be banned immediately and handed over to the Army for weapons research."

We were hard core.  My kids didn't dare even ask for sweets - they might sneak them with friends at school but would destroy the evidence before they got home.

We didn't believe in refined cereals either - no white flour or white rice touched our lips.  Our macrobiotic food wholesaling company Harmony Foods introduced the first organic wholegrain rice.   In 1973, with other pioneering natural food companies we wrote the manifesto of the Natural Foods Union.  We promised each other not to sell sugar or any products containing sugar or white flour or white rice.  We were committed to developing organic food sources which were then rare.  Signatories included Community Foods, our own Harmony Foods and Ceres Grain Shop, Haelan Centre, Infinity Foods, Harvest of Bath, Anjuna of Cambridge and On The Eighth Day in Manchester.

We published a magazine called 'Seed - The Journal of Organic Living' that had cover stories with headlines like "Garbage Grub - How The Poor Starve on Rich Foods" and a story on Britain's future which set out a dystopian vs Utopian vision where on one side people were clamouring for 24 Hour TV and More Sugar.  On the other they were tending goats and living in countryside communes eating whole natural foods.

Then in 1977 I worked out how to make jam using apple juice.  Being higher in fructose it was possible to make a jam with a lot less sweetening, so it tasted light and fruity.  They were 38% sugars from fruit when other jams were 65% sugars from sugar cane and fruit.  Whole Earth jams were an international success as they reached out to the increasing numbers of sugar avoiders in the UK, Europe and North America.

However our sales met stiff competition from much sweeter jams that used fruit juices like grape juice that were higher in glucose than white sugar and they used a lot of it, to match the sweetness of regular jam.  Our moral restraint cost us sales to these much more sugary jams.   However we also used apple juice to sweeten other products, marketing baked beans, soft drinks and salad dressings.  Even our best selling Whole Earth peanut butter contained a touch of concentrated apple juice to make it taste more mainstream.

Then, while searching for another source of organic peanuts I connected with Ewé tribal people in Togo, West Africa, who grew delicious peanuts as part of an organic crop rotation.  Unfortunately the peanuts failed our aflatoxin tests but the farmers also grew organic cocoa beans.  There was no organic chocolate on the market at that time so I got a sample made up of 70% solids chocolate made with organic cocoa beans.

We called it Green & Black's and launched it in September 1991. It was the first time I had sold a product containing real sugar from sugar cane.  It was the first organic and the first 70% and the first chocolate with a transparent supply chain.   So we put a sugar warning on the label – I think this is the only time that any company has done this. It read:  “Please Note:  This chocolate contains 29% brown sugar, processed without chemical refining agents. Ample evidence exists that consumption of sugar can increase the likelihood of tooth decay, obesity and obesity-related health problems.  If you enjoy good chocolate, make sure you keep your sugar intake as low as possible by always choosing Green & Black’s.”

How did I square this with my conscience?  Well, a French author called Michel Montignac had written a best-selling book called 'Dine Out and Lose Weight' that was one of the first places the idea of glycemic index had been in print.  In his book 70% dark chocolate had a ranking of 22 on a scale where sugar was 100.  Brown rice was at 50 and carrots at 70.  Fructose was at a mere 20.

Two of our best Whole Earth foods customers, Community Foods and Planet Organic, flat out refused to stock Green & Black’s because it contained sugar.  Tim Powell at Community said: "Craig, you were the one who got us all to not sell sugar back in the day - we can't stock this."  (they came around eventually)

I mentioned earlier that apple juice was higher in fructose.  The crystals of fructose and glucose, the two monosaccharides that make up a sugar molecule (sucrose), have exactly the same chemical formula: C6H12O6.  So what's the difference between glucose and fructose?

1. If you beam a light into the glucose molecule it bends slightly to the right. If you beam a light into a fructose molecule it bends slightly to the left.

2. If you put a given amount on your tongue the fructose will taste more than twice as sweet as the glucose

3. If you eat the glucose it raises your blood sugar within 20 minutes. If you eat the fructose it has almost no impact on blood sugar.

If you eat a given amount of sugar the glucose half hits your bloodstream, the fructose half passes down your digestion and is eventually turned into glycogen or into fatty acids.  These provide an energy source that is managed by the body rather than just absorbed in the way that glucose is.  So Lucozade, a glucose drink, was marketed on the premise that ALL the sugar - because it was glucose - got through to you immediately and that this would 'speed recovery.'  It was a deluded proposition, but it captured the fact that you got twice as many sugar bangs for your bucks.

If you have apple juice, there is more fructose than glucose or sucrose, so you don't get the same 'hit' as a lot of the sugar takes a different metabolic pathway.  Corn syrup is about 80% glucose.  Because glucose isn't very sweet on the palate, you have to use a lot more of it to get to the same level of perceived sweetness.  This increases the load of glucose to satisfy the taste for sweetness, with a resulting harsh impact on the blood sugar level.    'High fructose corn syrup' has a higher level of fructose, between 45 and 55%, so it is used in industry because it has nearly the same glucose/fructose balance as white sugar.  It's healthier than ordinary corn syrup, as measured by blood glucose impact.

If you really want to get all the glucose right away then it's best to drink it on an empty stomach.  All sugars are not absorbed equally.  If you eat dessert before you eat a meal the sugar will get into your system very quickly.  If you eat dessert after a meal then it has to work its way through the previously ingested food and has a longer exposure time to your digestive bacteria. The higher the fibre content of your meal, the longer it takes for the sugar to be absorbed.   There are some fibres that are particularly good at delaying the impact of sugar.  One of these is psyllium seeds.  Not only do they delay sugar absorption by up to an hour or so, they also bulk up, by absorbing water, your intestinal contents, helping regular passage of food.  Glucomannan also has this property as does oat bran.  Wheat bran doesn't absorb water to the same degree, but it absorbs sugar and delays its release in digestion.  The longer it takes for sugar to be absorbed, the less impact it has on blood glucose level.

There are also foods that help with insulin production and that reduce insulin resistance, thanks to the presence of  chromium.  Chromium-rich foods include black pepper, broccoli, bran, brown rice, lettuce and green beans.  The leaves of the white mulberry are considered particularly effective at delaying sugar absorption,  containing a component called reductase.

There are also co-factors that accelerate the rate at which your body metabolises sugar or that challenge your natural regulatory mechanisms.  These can increase the likelihood of a blood sugar drop, known as hypoglycemia, the symptoms of which are fatigue, depression and a craving for more sugar.

These co-factors include:

Coffee and, to a lesser extent, other caffeine stimulants like tea,  maté, cola, guarana and cocoa.  They will increase the rate at which the brain burns sugar.   Small wonder then that when you purchase a cup of coffee there is always an extensive display of white flour and sugar sweetened products to tempt you.  Your body knows it's going to be short of sugar after you drink the caffeine, so you instinctively go for the antidote to have on hand as you consume the stimulant.

The liver is the main organ, along with the pancreas, that regulates your blood sugar level.  As blood flows through the liver its glucose level is measured and, if it needs topping up, the liver dips into its store of glycogen, converts it to sugar and drip feeds it into the blood.

Alcohol  When you drink alcohol the liver prioritises dealing with what it perceives as a poison and puts dealing with blood sugar on the back burner.   The pancreas also finds it harder to produce insulin and regulate insulin levels when it also has to deal with the presence of alcohol.

Dope is another culprit.  When you smoke marijuana it increases the blood level in the brain by an estimated 40 millilitres.  This increases the amount of sugar available for the brain to burn and this heightened mental activity is part of what is called being 'high.'   However this increased usage of sugar makes it harder for the liver to keep up and the resulting drop in blood sugar is the symptom known to dope smokers as 'the munchies' - an irresistible craving for sweet foods.

Glyphosate or ‘Roundup’  - research has shown that ultra low doses of Roundup consumed over time leads to fatty liver disease.  Fatty liver doesn’t function very well and therefore makes it harder for the blood to maintain the right glucose levels.  Farmers spray Roundup at the end of wheat harvest to kill off the wheat plants.  When the plants realise they are dying, they frantically make as many babies as possible, i.e. wheat grains.  This is reflected in an increased harvest quantity, but ensures that every loaf of non-organic bread or other flour product contains a low dose of Roundup residue.

Antibiotics also can lead to powerful cravings for sugar.   If antibiotics are ingested, they don't just target the disease bacteria they are taken to cure.  They wipe out the beneficial microbes that are our healthy population of gut flora.  That's why it's advisable to consume yogurt or sauerkraut or other foods rich in lactobacilli to replace these important microorganisms.  It's also a good idea to eat foods rich in fibre to help the equally important bifidobacteria which are a pivotal part of the immune system in the large intestine.  A small population of these and other beneficial bacteria are always present in your appendix.  The appendix is the body's equivalent of a survivalist's food store, a place, at the junction of the small and large intestine, where, once the antibiotics are finished, the intestines can be repopulated.  Antibiotics can not kill off the tiny population of yeasts that are a part of the wider bacterial community of the gut.  But once the dominant lactobacilli and bifidobacteria are out of the way, yeasts quickly mutate into a fungal form, candida, a sticky white slime that imbeds itself firmly in the walls of the intestines.

There is an established communication between the gut and the brain and this is a vital part of our food choices, what smells nice, how hungry we feel and also what antibodies the gut flora need to produce to combat pathogens - what we call our immune system.  When candida gets a grip, like a Russian hacker taking over the CIA,  it  takes over the communication channel and sends a message to the brain demanding more sugar.  The more of these foods it gets, the more powerful it becomes and the more successfully it outcompetes the beneficial microbes that are trying to repopulate the gut after the antibiotic A-bomb has exploded.  Getting rid of candida is not easy, but there are ways to do it:

1. Saccharomyces - these little microbes compete effectively with candida for sugar, thereby holding back the growth of candida and starving them out. They come in capsule form

2. L-glutamine - this also attacks candida. Also in capsules

3. Fasting - I often say that 'breakfast is the most important meal of the day…to skip.' This is because by the time you wake up in the morning the liver's reserves of glycogen are low and it's time to convert fat into glucose to keep the blood sugar level up. This keeps sugar away from the gut and the candida, which then die off. If you eat a carbohydrate-rich breakfast, perhaps with a glass of fruit juice, the sugars keep the candida topped up and maintaining or expanding their population, perhaps even migrating to other parts of the body such as the vagina or skin. Starve them out by fasting for 17 hours a day.

4. Colonic irrigation - pumping water into the large intestine and then pulling it back out removes a lot of candida.

5. Lactobacillli - probiotics. Eating foods rich in lactic acid and consuming spores of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria helps to create ideal conditions for repopulating your beneficial gut microbes that compete with candida

6. Inulin - this is a molecule that is made of a long string of fructose molecules strung tightly together. It is indigestible and counts as fibre but when it gets to the large intestine the wonderfully beneficial bifidobacteria feast on it and increase their numbers by the billions.

Good food sources of inulin include whole grain wheat and rye, shallots, onions, leeks, chicory root and the white part of chicory leaves and Jerusalem artichokes.  These are all valuable nutrition for the gut microbes.  Inulin powder, extracted from chicory roots, is a concentrated source.

Candida puts pressure on you to consume the sugar it needs and urges your brain to crave refined flour products, dairy, wine, beer and sugar.  It's not just antibiotics that give candida its supremacy in the gut, it also benefits from hormone replacement therapy, the birth control pill, steroids and hydrogenated fat.

Vinegar also plays a role in sugar metabolism.  Nobody’s quite sure why, but if you take 2 tablespoons of vinegar before a meal the increase in blood glucose later is 34% lower than if you don’t take vinegar.  That’s a big difference as it keeps the level at a level less likely to be stressful.

Lactate

The brain consumes glucose as the energy source that enables neurons to fire.  It's the 'carb' or 'carbon' in 'carbohydrate' that is the energy source.  Oxygen feeds the fire of carbon in the body, which is why we breathe.  So we are like a coal fire, burning carbon to keep ourselves warm and to enable our brains and bodies to function well.  However,  lactate is another rich source of carbon for the brain.  If there is lactate in the blood then the neurons in the brain will preferentially coat themselves in it rather than with glucose.  It's as if lactate is like gas fuel for the brain, glucose more like coal or wood.  Where do we get lactate?

1. When our digestive system has a healthy population of lactobacilli they will compete with candida and other microbes that are eating starch or sugar and a by-product is lactate

2. When we walk, run, jump or dance or do any exercise our muscles burn glucose and give off lactate.

At some point in evolution our brains evolved to function best on the super fuel of lactate in preference to glucose.  Glucose for the body, lactate for the brain.

So exercise is really important as it provides a better quality of energy for the brain  - lactate also delays brain ageing and neurodegeneration.  The heart and liver use it, too. Insulin function works much better too if there has been exercise and lactate production.  This is why exercise is increasingly being used as a cure for pre-diabetic conditions and for curing Type 2 diabetes in many cases.

Plato wrote: 'I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency'.  Kellogg's say 'Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."  Who to trust on this?  Everyone has a different metabolism, but they all have the power to change bad habits.

Metabolic Syndrome is the name for the multi-symptom disease that is typical of modern sedentary people.

It's also known as 'Sitting Disease.'  If a person gets up in the morning, sits down for breakfast, then sits in a car or on a train or bus, then sits at a desk or an assembly line and then sits down to return home to sit down to eat a meal and then sits watching television or enjoying social media they lay the foundations for Metabolic Syndrome

Contributing factors are

1. Inactivity/laziness (Both cause and effect but a natural human condition)

2. Overeating - large food portions of food low in nutrients

3. Stress

4. Pesticides - these have a hormonal effect as well as being mildly toxic

5. Processed denatured food that is low in fibre

6. Hydrogenated fat - harms the circulatory system, reducing blood flow

7. Sugar and refined cereal such as white bread and low fibre breakfast cereals

8. Television, electronic games and sitting at computers.

So what's the answer?

Our Government has one solution for everything:  Tax it.

A tax on soft drinks will have little impact as the appetite for sugar is not responsive to pricing.  If your candida want sugar or you are on a cycle of high and low blood sugar you don't give a damn what the cost is of a soft drink.  It's the cheapest form of sugar already and a tax won't make a difference.  You get more sugar in a chocolate brownie than in a can of Coke and a brownie costs at least 3 times as much.   The best selling soft drink in Britain is Red Bull.  It costs double the cost of Coke and has just as much sugar.

A tax will help in one way though: The Government currently subsidises sugar beet farming and sugar production to the tune of £250 million per annum.  A sugar tax will raise an estimated £400 million.  So the soft drinks tax will neatly subsidise the taxpayers money that goes to sugar producers.  How smart is that?

There is a far more intelligent alternative.  Researchers studied a group of 46,000 people in a Japanese city who were over 48 years old.  They measured their blood sugar, blood pressure, lung function and other measures of health and then recommended actions to rectify any problems before they became serious diseases.  Not all of them complied, but enough did to make a difference.  They became ill less often and therefore cost the health system less.  The estimated average saving came to £200 per person per year.

In the UK, with 26 million people over the age of 48, that would be a saving to the NHS of  £5.2 billion every year.   Why don't doctors and pharmaceutical companies recommend it?  Why don't wine makers discourage wine drinking?  Why don't car makers urge walking instead of driving?  No business likes to lose its customers, even the caring professions.

In 2011 the Soil Association applied for and won a £17 million National Lottery grant to initiate its Food For Life project.  It was a huge success, with schools coming in at Bronze entry level and working up to Gold, where they offer a significant proportion of school meals that are organic, locally sourced and freshly prepared on the premises.  There are now 2 million school dinners a day served under the Food For Life Programme.  A lot of those schools have stopped serving desserts on some days a week.  These kids perform better and learn something really important: you are what you eat.

Those kids will fare better in life, but we have a couple of generations who got the worst of crap food, hydrogenated fat (recommended by doctors), exposure to lead and pesticides and other environmental toxins. They are the ones who need help.  Diabetes levels are already dropping in the Western world as more people eat more wholesome food and exercise a lot more, but there is still work to be done.  A soft drinks tax is pathetic when you consider what the government could be doing to support healthier lifestyles

Change begins with the individual and it's about education.  If people are junk food junkies they will always find junk food. Trying to reform the food industry, which is responding to demand that arises from a multiplicity of causes, is to fight the wrong battle.  If we change demand then supply will follow.

The new science of epigenetics informs us that acquired characteristics can be inherited.  The unhealthy acquired characteristics of previous generations has been one factor in the increase in autism, birth defects, hereditary diabetes and other diseases, food allergies and other developmental problems.  But we need not despair, this is already being turned around and future generations can look forward to even better food produced in a cleaner environment to make healthier happier people, whose babies will be even healthier and happier.  We know more now about these factors than we ever did before, so we have the power to evolve positively.

IS NUCLEAR DOOMED AT LAST?

The curse of nuclear power and its associated mass extermination weaponry has hung over the heads of several generations since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were conned by promises of 'electricity too cheap to meter' when the first British nuclear plant was erected at Calder Hall (renamed 'Windscale' then renamed 'Sellafield) but in fact it now costs more than wind or solar. Now Toshiba, who suicidally bought the Westinghouse nuclear business, is consulting bankruptcy lawyers. Electricité de France, 85% owned by the French Government, is in terminal decline, with a share price ten percent of historic highs.  This still leaves the question of who will pay to clean up the toxic mess from places like Fukushima and Chernobyl and, eventually, Hinkley Point. The militarists who promoted nuclear power as a cover to get weapons grade plutonium? The politicians who were wined and dined and voted this madness through? The insurers who backed these projects under government guarantees? The investors who relied on taxpayer money to guarantee the huge investment required? Or the taxpayers of today and tomorrow and centuries to come who will have to protect civilisation from this toxic blight on everyone's future?

The below is from the Financial Times...

The end of nuclear

Gregory Sams, my brother

50 years ago I opened a little restaurant and macrobiotic study centre in Notting Hill.  People filled in their own bills, based on what they ate and paid on an honour system.  Then Graham Bond brought his Hammond organ down for a party one evening and played until 2 a.m.  The neighbourhood erupted in rage and I was chucked out.  I found ideal new premises: two big rooms in a hotel basement between Paddington and Notting Hill. I got it ready to open.  Then a complication about my right to stay in the U.K led me to have to leave the country.  That's when my brother Gregory, who had been a wheelchair user since an accident 8 months earlier at University of California Berkeley, rose to the occasion.  He completed the restaurant project, supported by our mother Margaret and my girl friend Ann. Seed Restaurant opened in early 1968.   It was an instant success, with great macrobiotic food and a loyal customer base that included John and Yoko, Terence Stamp and everyone else who understood that organic wholesome food was the way  of the future.  Gregory published a magazine called 'Harmony' that neatly set out the basics of the macrobiotic philosophy.   He then opened the first ever natural foods store called Ceres Grain Shop.  It had all the grains, beans, seeds and organic vegetables. There were no products containing sugar, honey, refined cereals and no supplements.   Ceres was the model for the new natural food stores, distinctly different from health food shops. 

I rejoined him in 1969 and we went on to create Harmony Foods, with an offering of hitherto unknown foods like organic brown rice, miso, tamari, aduki beans, seaweeds and (because of our customer base) patchouli oil.  Ceres Grain Shop moved to Portobello Road where the manager in 1971 was Pamela Donaldson. Pam represented us in setting up the first Glastonbury Fayre.  She became ill so I took over running the shop, working with Gregory at Harmony Foods.  We did the food at that legendary Glastonbury.  In 1972 the premises next door became available and we opened Ceres Bakery, pioneering sourdough and wholemeal sugar-free baking. There was little or no competition in those days. Most people were still wondering how long this natural organic food fad would last.

Gregory liaised with committed organic farmers who grew cereals and bought their wheat, oats, rye and barley, milled it at Harmony Foods and supplied it to Ceres bakery.  He organised flaking of cereals that led to British cereal flakes being the mainstay of German organic mueslis.  He sat on the Soil Association committee that drafted the first organic standards: 2 pages, would you believe?  When the Soil Association expressed a lack of interest in 'trade' he and David Stickland set up Organic Farmers and Growers to certify and market homegrown organic cereals.  Harmony Foods went from strength to strength and we moved to a huge warehouse/factory in Willesden. We had a big cash 'n' carry area and manufactured our Whole Earth branded jams, peanut butter, packed cereals and macrobiotic specialties.   We grew too fast and in 1982 found ourselves overstocked and with cash flow problems.  Gregory had just created the world's first 'Vegeburger' and trademarked it because nobody had used the word before. Yes, true. His Realeat food company marketed the VegeBurger. and I concentrated on downsizing Harmony Foods and focussing on peanut butter and jam.   He instigated the Gallup polls that highlighted the trend to vegetarianism.  The Vegeburger was a massive success, Gregory cashed out and retired.  For a few months.  Then in 1989 he created the world's first fractal art shop and created stunning posters based on the Mandelbrot set and Chaos Theory.  Since then he has written two ground-breaking books:  The State is out of Date and Sun of God, two books that will change your perspective on everything. 

I am honoured to have known this remarkable guy for 68 years and to acknowledge his seminal contribution over 50 years to this wonderful world of natural and organic food we take for granted nowadays.

Larry Smart

I first met Larry in 1967, when he was in the dance troupe Exploding Galaxy.

They would perform free-style dance at the weekly hippie gathering, the UFO Club, in between sets by the Pink Floyd.  They helped encourage everyone to ‘freak out’ their dancing style.  The Exploding Galaxy were part of a commune which lived in North London and took their name from a painting by Larry of the same name.  They were immortalised in the book 99 Balls Pond Road by Jill Drower, one of the communards.

Born in 1945, Larry spent much of his childhood in Baghdad, where his father Philip worked with Shell Oil.  His exposure at an early age to Islamic art and architecture and its intricate geometry became a lifelong influence. Later he went to boarding school in England and then to Croydon Art College.

Larry's art owed much to his art school mentor Bridget Riley. He created more structured geometric forms than found in her work, while still generating the vibrational effect that results from staring at Riley's paintings, the 'op art' experience.   Larry's paintings were more symmetrical and colourful while still achieving and even enhancing the same ‘op’ effect.  His circular mandalas were an aid to meditation and awareness heightening, oscillating when you concentrated on them.

 At psychedelic events such as the UFO Club, Summertime in the Wintertime or the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, Larry's mandalas would be the focus of light shows created by John Bloomfield.  The impact of the mandala was enhanced with pulsing light, increasing the op-art psychedelic effect of looking at his paintings.  His mandalas were bought by Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison and funded his meals tab at the vegetarian Baba bel Poori restaurant in Bayswater.

In 1967 he married Carol Grimes, the blues and jazz singer who later performed with Lol Coxhill and the band Delivery.  Their debut performance was at our macrobiotic restaurant Seed in 1969.  One of Larry's mandalas adorned their album cover.

Larry produced work for Apple Corps and subsequently produced silk screen prints representing John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan.

In 1970 George Harrison invited Larry to paint murals at Friar Park, his vast mansion near Henley.  Regrettably these works, completed over a year,  appear to have been lost.  Patti Boyd, his first wife, is unaware what happened to them.  Olivia Harrison cannot remember ever seeing them.

Larry also produced landscapes with towers and minarets rising on high peaks that imagined a fantasy world reminiscent of Arabian Nights.  After his break up with Carol the mood of his fantastical landscapes changed and led to a series of paintings showed crumbling edifices, with cracks in the walls and broken towers.

Larry was commissioned by the owners of country houses to capture the look of their houses in his distinctive magical realist style, populating the grounds with cricket or croquet players in Edwardian or Victorian dress.   The intensity of the acrylic colors he used gave a special vibrancy to these paintings and, indeed, all of Larry's work.

He also spent some time in Granada, painting the gardens of the Alhambra.

In 1968 Larry, myself and Jordan Reynolds spent a week in Marrakech.  It was a bit of a blowout for us all, partying until late and then recuperating by the hotel pool the following day.  Larry was captivated by the beauty of the architecture and art of the city and the high plateau landscape of the region.  He and his new wife Karen subsequently visited Marrakech frequently and Larry began to capture on canvas the fountains, palaces, gardens and mosques of the city.  This was a time when the old riads of Marrakech were being restored and the new owners would commission Larry to capture the intricate tiling and designs of the courtyards and fountains of their villas.   Larry's bible at this time was "Arabesques" - an art book by Jean-Marc Castera that explained in great detail the mechanics (and cheats) of, for example, creating a 128-point star and integrating it into a pattern of interlocking stars.  Larry's understanding of how this art was created by the original tilers and designers was reflected in his canvases, which draw the viewers eye inwards and then back and from right to left and left to right.  He saw this work from the inside out and captured its depth of geometrical and mathematical thinking in a way that an artist without that understanding would find challenging.   In Tangiers he stayed with Philip Arnott, who introduced him to clients in Marrakech and who now deals art from the Lawrence-Arnott galleries in both cities.

In the late 1980s and 1990s Larry worked closely with me on a number of projects.  I would brief him on a new organic food product project such as whole grain corn flakes, blue corn flakes, muesli, baked beans, Blaisdon Red plum jam or hummus tahini and he could create a painting that formed the basis for the label or carton artwork.   He created a landscape of the digestive system that provided the perfect packaging for our All Your Fibre breakfast cereal.

By then Larry had settled into a pattern of spending 3 months in Marrakech, then London, then Marrakech again.  He would complete commissions in his London flat for clients in Marrakech, then deliver them a few months later and obtain new work, which he would complete in Marrakech or take back to London to complete.  His paintings were also sold to visitors to La Mamounia hotel, the pre-eminent and historic establishment in Marrakech where Winston Churchill often stayed and painted.

Larry was a regular visitor to our house in Hastings and painted scenes that captured in detail the shape and symmetry of the Old Town's tiled rooftops, the patterning of the wood on the boats of Hastings fishing fleet and even imposed Arabic- patterned arches over a view across the Old Town from the nearby allotments, where he mischievously slipped in a cannabis plant to a lush display of asparagus, marrows, leeks, lettuces and other garden produce.

In 2004 a work colleague showed me an advertisement in Record Collector magazine for Larry's poster of Jimi Hendrix, selling at £350.  I showed it to Larry and he contacted the vendor who proposed printing a limited edition of the poster, to be signed by the artist.  The posters were marketed in 2005 and are now prized collector’s items.  Larry signed the limited edition but then died a few months later.

The Victoria and Albert Museum hold Larry's Jimi Hendrix silkscreen poster in their permanent collection. They used his 'Kaleidoscope Eyes' (hippie slang for acid-tripping) poster on the publicity material for their wonderful 'Revolution: Records and Rebels 1966-1970) exhibition that runs from September 2016 until February 28 2017).  The revival of interest on the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love has increased awareness and appreciation of Larry Smart's work.  Larry captured the essence of the time and his work informs any understanding of the aesthetic that reflected the transformation in social and political thinking that emerged from the experience of the late 1960s and its aftermath.

A Larry Smart limited edition A1 silk screen print, Kaleidoscope Eyes is now available - only 300 printed, please order from here.

Kaleidoscope Eyes

Mose Allison

Apart from Wagner, of all the music that has embedded itself in my mind and my soul, perhaps none had a deeper grip than that of Mose Allison. Born on a cotton farm in northwest Mississippi in 1927, he was a country boy who experienced and was shaped by the Depression years in the Midwest. Perhaps he resonated with me so much because our farm was a few hundred miles north in Nebraska. Whatever, he got me deep down. Country boy with jazz infusion.

I was 16 when I first heard Mose’s music in 1961, on the school bus on the way to Bushy Park School, the first dedicated American high school in London. On the 45-minute bus ride from our pickup point in Ealing, as I'd be trying to remember a few more lines of a Shakespearean sonnet or finish other homework, Cam and Tom, two fellow students, would be harmonizing on "Young Man" or "Parchman Farm." Cam and Tom both went on to study at Ealing Technical College - I went off to the University of Pennsylvania, but came back to London from Philadelphia every summer vacation. We’d all hang out with the Ealing crowd, including Pete Townshend (the Who) and Michael English, an artist best known for his posters for the UFO Club as Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. We'd go to the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street in Soho for the all-nighter sessions where Georgie Fame sang his rocking version of Parchman Farm and other Mose favorites.

Cam's girlfriend Marika also studied at Ealing and they invited me to join them in Formentera, then a sleepy little island south of Ibiza, where we stayed in a pension called the Fonda Pepe. My accommodation was a converted pig sty on the nearby road. We’d hang out on the Mitjorn beach during the day and at La Tortuga, a nearby bar run by an American called Don, in the evening. Don had all the Mose Allison albums up to that time and the bar resonated with his music and various jazz records. Walking back along Formentera’s dusty rocky roads at night I’d be singing ‘Young Man’ or ‘Parchman Farm’ to any hoopoes or mosquitoes that might be listening. Cam left the island and a day later Marika and I began a multi-year relationship. She was a Mose fan too, so our good times together were often accompanied by him on the turntable.

In February 1965 I headed east to India. I had purchased a small battery-powered turntable and carried with me 4 albums: Kirk’s Work, Georgie Fame Live at the Flamingo, an Egyptian dance music album and Mose Allison Sings. Music is the international language and having this music with me in by dad’s old Marine Corps duffel bag (I wore his combat jacket as well) helped to make friends wherever I went. But I was alone a lot, too. Mose kept me company and I learned the songs on that album by heart. One Room Country Shack was the song that was most compelling at that time. It describes being ‘1000 miles from nowhere’ and ‘my only worldly possession is a raggedy old eleven foot cotton sack.’ As I sat alone with my duffel bag in a shelter on the road from Abargoo to Yazd in the lunar landscape of southern Iran I shared the feeling in Mose’s plaintive wail.

In Philly I’d catch Mose at The Showboat whenever he came to town, at least once a year. It was always a bit disconcerting to hear him moaning and grunting when he played. That never ended up, thankfully, on his recordings. Thelonius Monk did the same thing when I saw him at the Five Spot, I guess some pianists need to growl the notes as they play them, maybe using their voice to stay in key.

The lyrics of Young Man are even more appropriate these days: “Nowadays, the old men got all the money, and a young man ain’t nothing in the world these days.” Mose nailed it then and all his later music did it too. ‘Middle Class White Boy’ was his sardonic take on the hippie scene. It kindly captured that moment of change in popular culture.

I saw him many years later at Ronnie Scott’s and we had a chat about the Philly scene. By then the Showboat had closed. Mose lamented the fact that a great club had shut down because the economics of a jazz club no longer worked. Hearing him at Ronnie Scott’s, with a quiet and respectful audience, was quite different to the raucous atmosphere of Philadelphia jazz clubs, where even John Coltrane had to blow extra loud to drown out the chatter.

I suppose my favourite line of all from Mose’s great repertoire of one-liners was ‘Your mind is on vacation but your mouth is working overtime.’ A lesson that I am still trying to learn many decades after I first heard it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpekvOkwNM&w=560&h=315]

Dear President Trump

Dear President Trump

Now that you have been elected on a platform of freeing the world from the grip of monopolies, lobbyists, bankers and their ilk I submit herewith my 7 proposals on how you can come good on your promises to make America great again

1.   Make America Healthy Again.  This will save you a fortune on whatever modified form of Obamacare you come up with.  It will upset Big Pharma and the American Medical Association, but so what?  Stop autism by honouring your promise to give people freedom to choose vaccination or not, or do it slowly, like you did with Baron.  Scrap restrictions on alternative therapies and nutrient supplementation and let people engage fully with preventive medicine. “Prevention is better than cure”. 

2.   Legalise all Drugs and Medicines – now more than half of US states allow marijuana use, why not go all the way?  Bayer marketed heroin in the 1900s as the non-addictive alternative to opium.  Now the epidemic of legally prescribed opioid addiction is killing far more Americans than heroin.  2 million Americans are addicted to opioids prescribed through Obamacare and it costs them twice as much money as less addictive heroin.  Let the free market prevail over which painkillers people use.

3.   Make America’s Soils Great Again. Stop the ethanol racket.  It was encouraging to see biofuel shares dropping and staying down after your election.  Why on earth is half of America’s corn crop subsidised and forcibly converted to ethanol to be burned? Our pioneer ancestors plowed the rich fertile soils of the Midwest and trashed them.  You are a builder.  Help America rebuild its soils by stopping the huge waste of resources involved in growing corn and then burning it.  If you took away the subsidies then farmers would diversity and grow real food for real people.  They could grow trees for the new technologies of wood-based architecture.

4.   Get Independent Advice on Climate.  The French proposal of ‘4 per 1000’ says that if you rebuild soil organic matter by 0.04% each year that is enough to completely offset the annual increase in greenhouse gas.  Organic farmers increase soil organic matter by 7 per 1000.  Let the carbon markets pay farmers to rebuild soil for future generations and use farm subsidy money to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure.  You can keep on burning oil and gas and still see greenhouse gas levels drop.

5.   Crush ISIS.  This monster was created by an unholy alliance of the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to fulfil Hillary’s stated goal of supporting Israel by weakening Iranian influence in Syria. It has backfired. The easiest way to stop ISIS is to stop financing them.  In the debates you were clear that your priority is to stop ISIS, while Hillary prevaricated.  Make sure that no more American money or NATO money goes to fund terrorist organisations.  Let people of the Middle East get back to normal life. The refugees from this meaningless conflict would rather go home.

6.   Make Nice with Russia.  Gorbachev opened the doors to a new era of peaceful relations with the United States but now they’re the enemy again. President Putin has banned GMOs and announced that he plans to make Russia the world’s most organic nation.  He’s no dummy.   Ask him why he’s doing this. We don’t need to create more enemies, best to make friends, as you said in your victory speech.

7.   Make War on Poverty and Decay.  You promised to rebuild America’s infrastructure, its highways, bridges, tunnels, airports and schools.  You have 2 million men and women in the armed forces who aren’t particularly busy making America great.  Put them to work rebuilding infrastructure. That’s what China’s 2.3 million army do.  President Roosevelt created the 3 million-man Civilian Conservation Corps that built America’s dams and highways in the 1930s and planted 10 billion trees that helped restore the Dust Bowl land.  Get the missile and bomb factories to reconfigure to make something that people want instead of picking fights with faraway countries in order to use up their output. Make forests not deserts.

You are the only politician who can give the finger to the lobbyists from the military, pharmaceutical, oil and financial industries who called you a jerk and your supporters ‘morons’ and ‘deplorables.’ They all supported your opponent.   You owe them nothing.  You owe it to the American people to cast off the baleful influence of these parasites and let people freely choose if they want peace, good health, clean air and economic stability.

1960s Rebels: Craig Sams, Health Food Pioneer from Victoria & Albert Museum

In conjunction with their exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966 – 1970 (10 September 2016 – 26 February 2017), the Victoria and Albert have uploaded a series of videos interviewing 1960s Rebels including myself.

The late 1960s saw progressive ideas emanate from the countercultural underground and revolutionise society. Challenging oppressive, outdated norms and expectations, a small number of individuals brought about far-reaching changes as they sought to attain a better world. Their idealism and actions helped mobilise a movement which continues to inspire modern activists and shape how we live today.

Agribusiness

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When a business sector sees a rash of mergers and acquisitions, it's for one of two reasons, growth or decay. The organic food industry has seen a lot of acquisitions by companies anxious to get in on the ground floor of the 5% annual growth rate in organic food and regenerative farming. Meanwhile, on the dark side, Monsanto is facing takeover by Bayer, not for any positive reasons, but because they are both looking into the abyss. Merger is one way to survive when the farmers they are competing for are spending less. Farmers aren't stupid - they can do the maths. When they see diminishing returns on their investment in seeds and agrichemicals, they reduce their spending. Normally in a situation like this the agribusiness operators would go to the EU or Washington and just wheedle more subsidies out of the national purse, bleating about food security while encouraging biofuels to prop up soy, rapeseed and corn prices. Who cares if you're destroying the earth's precious farmland at 30 football fields a minute? If you were a big landowner, you'd feel entitled to being paid to do this. That's what us mugs are here for. Now that the EU even subsidises grouse moors you'd think the gates were wide open. But the money is running out. Half the EU budget goes to farmers, much of it British money going via Brussels to France. The US spends $350 billion a year propping up agriculture in the US, channeling money through farmers to agribiz.

Let's take a look at who's eating whom. The potash fertiliser price has halved in the past 3 years, from $450 a tonne to $219. So in Canada, Agrium and Potash, two of the world's biggest potash producers, are merging in a desperate attempt to keep afloat while they wait for a bounce in price that may never happen. Bayer and Monsanto are both facing plunging sales and profits. Monsanto have the seed and Bayer have the pesticides to go with them. But again it's desperation. They hope that innovation will save them, but innovation is not something you find in mega corporations.   GMOs are losing support - US farmers never wanted them but were denied choice after Monsanto bought up all the seed companies and forced GMOs down their throats.

The whole ethanol biofuels scam is blowing up, too. It was never even vaguely 'carbon neutral' - it takes more energy to produce a litre of ethanol than the energy you get by burning it. It's more energy efficient to just mix corn with coal and shovel it into a power station, but that would be too obvious and repulsive.

Chem China has taken over Syngenta. They make the herbicides that Syngenta's GM seed can resist. Nobody in China will eat GMO rice but they'll tolerate pork or chicken fed on GM maize. But the real prize for Chem China is Syngenta's strong presence in US market: they're after Bayer/Monsanto's piece of the diminishing pie. Their US competitors are suddenly bleating about food security.   Two other agrichemical giants, Dow and DuPont, also merged recently. They're all like a bunch of drunks spilling out of the pub after a good night out, trying to keep each other from falling down.

If you're a farmer, what do you do? You used to be able to play off one agrichemical giant against the other, but soon you'll just take what you're given. Or look for an alternative and boy, what an alternative is on the horizon!

When the French '4 per 1000 initiative' succeeds at the Marrakech COP22 climate conference in November every hectare of organic farmland will be set to get over €150 a year in carbon credits. A hectare of chemical-dependent farmland will have to pay for its carbon footprint and that could cost close to €100 per hectare.   It won't happen overnight but the French have fixed a price of €56 per tonne for carbon, to take effect by 2020. The world will probably follow, even the US.   If you were a government that was facing huge annual costs to subsidise farmers with money that flows through their bank accounts to Dow/DuPont, Bayer/Monsanto and Chem China/Syngenta and you could instead just let the carbon markets transfer the money from fossil fuel power stations direct to organic farmers, what would you do? Keep on propping up a dying industry or finally recognise that organic food, when the carbon is priced in, is actually cheaper than the degenerative kind that is destroying our available soil at the rate of 30 football fields per minute? (I can't repeat this often enough)

Governments have been holding back for quite a long time because of the immense political power of the agrichemicals industry and of the landowning fraternity. They passionately hate socialism in all its forms, until it comes to their welfare payments.

It's time for a change. We need to bring freedom to farming. Carbon pricing that encourages regenerative farming instead of degenerative farming is the way forward. Organic is good for you and the climate, too.