A Hay Festival Event

Heart-to-Heart 2002
Transcript

Chair: Rory Spowers
Speakers: Dr. Michael Antoniou, Rupert Aker, Eric Llewellyn. Lynda Brown, Mark Haughton-Brown

The first thing to say is welcome and thank you for coming. Next I would like to introduce the speakers to you. There is one change to the programme, some of you may have had a little card saying Professor Kim Jobst was to be chairman this year, unfortunately he was called away, as far as Australia actually, but in your packs there on your seat you have a transcript of his talk. He would welcome any enquiries directly to him by email and sends his apologies for not beeing here today. Eric Llewellyn has an urgent surgery this morning but he will be here as scheduled on the programme. So just thre are just those two changes. Now, to the speakers who are here, you have brief C.V.’s, I would like to introduce themn so that you can put a face to the name. Rupert Aker, Soil Association, campaigning for small farms and practically helping small farmers with advice on customer care. Mark Haughton-Brown is from a long line of very practical farmers and he is going to explain how organic farming can feed the world. (from Mark: “ Oh! I had better change my talk”)

Rory Spowers is the fourth in a series of very illustrious chairmen and each one has brought slightly different things, we had Moira Bremner first who is a campaigner for organics, Terry Jones, who is a knight against the power of some of the massive companies and what they feel they can do, and perhaps in some cases what they have to do, to stay in power and keep their position. They are not there for the sake of their customers but for the sake of their shareholders and want to make a profit out of money. You must distinguish this from a profit from what you make, what you do, what you offer. A profit from making money is a very distinct and different thing and leads into very, very distorted human relations. Excuse me for that. I really should have learnt a lesson from the last chairman, Sir Julian Rose, who said, when he took over from my introduction “ I think what Martin was trying to say ……..” Julian is working in Poland now and he is changing the whole of their agricultural philosophy to one of organic small farming. If you would like them there are transcripts of all the previous Heart-to-Hearts, plus a video of the very first one,. Also there is available copies of Rory’s book, which was published just a few days ago and Daphne’s book and, Lynda Brown’s book. Lynda, I am sorry to miss you out but this is Lynda Brown ‘The Consumer champion’ Michael Antoniou has spoken here three times before and some of you may feel that GM is moving so fast that once a year is hardly enough. Michael is one of the few scientists who will stand up and tell you the truth of the matter. So with that I will hand you over to your Chairman.

Well once again, thank you all very much for coming along today and as Martin just mentioned, my book ‘Rising Tides’ has just been published in the last few days which is really the history of the environmentalism, a very broad overview of ecological thought and the title really refers to two rising tides which I see as sort of being the planetary race which we are all engaged in and the literal rising tide…………………more metaphorical rising tide opposite to the economic machine which is causing the problem in the first place and I feel we are all engaged in the planetary race and it is a question now of which is going to break down the barriers, of both the physical and psychological barriers, which we have created and, just by way of introduction, I would like to read a passage from a whole section about food and farming because it is such an important issue and I think ten, twelve years ago when I first started getting interested in these issues I really felt like a lot of people that food was always going to be the issue that was really going to generate such awareness when we all started to really get worried not only about the food we are eating but also the food we are giving to our children and I think the food issues leads on to a number of other issues which this book addresses but just to give as an historical context I want to read a section entitled ‘The Agri-Business’ which is really this term which has come to be applied to the history of industrial farming - just to give you some idea of how we have managed to get ourselves to this point so now I am going to throw a few things into the pot about bio-technology and about the supposed efficiency of industrial farming before I hand you over to our illustrious speakers.

‘In 1842, an English farmer called John Lawes combined sulphuric acid with phosphate rock to produce the world’s first artificial fertiliser, a concentrated super phosphate which could be applied to the soil. Not long after, Lawes founded the first chemical fertiliser company and was exporting his products to affluent farmers in Europe and the US. Adding nitrogen to the soil proved more challenging and it was not until 1909 that Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist who created poison gas during the First World War, first extracted the element from the air through ammonia synthesis. Like Thomas Midgeley’s suggestion of adding lead to petrol, or inventing CFCs, Lawes and Haber were blissfully unaware of how significant an impact their discoveries would have upon the planet, from disturbing global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles to the disruption of natural hydrology. By 1990, the world was using 150 million tons of artificial fertilisers every year. We now live in a world where chemicals, which have only existed for decades, have become so pervasive that they can be traced in soil, water sources and living tissues all over the planet – from the ice shelf of Antarctica and the flesh of penguins, through to the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The modern agri-business took shape after the Second World War. The industries which had produced the nitrates for explosives used similar processes to manufacture fertilisers, while the factories which had been making tanks now turned their attention to agricultural machinery, designing huge tractors and combine harvesters. The advent of chemical fertilisers and pesticides produced radical changes in our approach to agriculture. Thousands of years of traditional knowledge, encompassing methods for conserving nutrients in the soil and combating pests through diversification, were rapidly replaced by short-term chemical applications. The impact was phenomenal. Vast areas were opened up for monoculture production, allowing farmers to concentrate on crops such as maize, which responded well to chemicals, at the expense of others. This in turn led to a more restricted diet and two thirds of global agricultural production is now devoted to just three crops: rice, wheat and maize. At the same time, the gulf between rich and poor farmers dramatically increased as those with access to agro-chemicals produced bumper yields, leading to vast grain surpluses in richer countries.

The application of chemicals has proved almost impossible to regulate. It has been estimated that over half the fertilisers applied to agricultural land end up in downstream water sources, leading to the eutrophication of lakes and rivers due to an excessive amount of nutrients. Perhaps most significantly, farming has become entirely dependent on the oil industry, which produces the chemical fixes required to stay in business. The petro-chemical industry not only supplies the fertilisers and pesticides which the agri-business has become addicted to, but also the oil for the machinery which these energy-intensive methods of production require. In addition, to soil, water and sunlight, our food is now made from oil. When German U-boats had threatened to cut food supplies from overseas, Britain’s ability to feed itself was severely jeopardised. At the time, much of the agricultural land was devoted to grass or barley for animal fodder and Britain only produced 30 per cent of its own food. Post-war policy-makers responded by shifting the emphasis towards home-produced crops and introduced a concept which has plagued British farming ever since – the state subsidy. Like the introduction of chemicals, subsidies further encouraged intensified farming. Since the government was willing to pay a fixed price for crops, mixed farming was no longer practised as a way of insuring against market instability or freak weather patterns. Instead, farmers were pushed to specialise, aiming for bigger yields and bigger profits.

Armed with an expanding arsenal of product from the chemical industry, the drive for intensification had a dramatic effect on the countryside. To maximise the use of land, and make way for larger machinery, ponds were filled in, meadows ploughed over and hedgerows ripped out. Since 1947, some 97 per cent of our wildflower meadows have been destroyed and 60 per cent of our lowland fens have been drained and ploughed. This loss of habitat, combined with the chemical disruption of the food chain, has had a devastating impact on plant and animal life; wildflowers like lamb’s succory and thorow-wax have become extinct while the corn buttercup, prolific until the 1960s, has been reduced to twenty-five sites; many bird populations have dropped by half while the number of tree-sparrows has fallen by nearly 90 per cent. As Aldous Huxley remarked after reading Silent Spring, ‘ We are losing half the subject-matter of English poetry.’ Now, I’m not going to bore you with the ins and outs of the Common Agricultural Policy which, I am sure as you know, has consistently been shown to be one of the worst and most chaotic bits of legislation ever introduced by the EU but I will just finish with this extract from the book so you can learn a little bit about what’s happening now with the World Trade Organisation which is the sort of embryonic world government which nobody in the world has voted for and which is increasingly beyond the law for any nation state or any human accountability.

‘The Common Agricultural Policy is inextricably linked with the global trend towards promoting the concept of free trade, enforced by the World Trade Organisation and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. First signed in 1947, the central aim of GATT was to liberalise world trade based on the principal of ‘comparative advantage’ whereby commodities should be produced by those with the cheapest method of manufacture. However, like our entire economic system, GATT externalises all social and environmental factors, reducing the entire process to one of financial competition. In terms of food production, the concept of globalised free trade is especially flawed since agriculture cannot be treated purely as a business - it is essentially a way of life which produces food, rather than products than can be traded indefinitely, in addition, the world market for agricultural produce does not exist since some 95 per cent of food is produced close to where it is produced and that which does travel round the world purely adds to pollution and resource depletion through intensive transport use. Furthermore, there are intrinsic differences between systems of farming practiced all over the world. Trying to establish a single global agreement of international food production is indicative of our search for simple solutions to complex problems, of a drive towards intensification rather than diversification. The consequences of this are now hitting home. British farming is in crisis. UK farm income has dropped by 75 per cent in the last two years. 20,000 farmers have been forced off the land and suicide has become the leading cause of death, occurring at a rate which is three times the national average.’

Now I know we are going to talk about many of these things and I am just going to throw a few things into the pot about this supposed efficiency of industrial farming. On the news this morning we hear that 20 million people in Southern Africa are now facing starvation and a potentially catastrophic situation is brewing up there. At the same time we hear from official UN figures that the world already produces one and a half times as much food as the global population currently requires but we also find that a quarter of the world’s population eats half the world’s food and that in America twenty five per cent of the food produced in the market place actually ends up in the trash, that’s enough to feed 100 million people in Africa. So you can see where this disparity lies and we are looking at a distribution problem here, maybe, rather than a fact that we use biotechnology and intensive farming to make more food. Industrialised intensive farming produces 6 units of food for every 15 units of energy it uses, which can hardly be regarded as an efficient use of resources. Most of the nine out of the seventeen world’s fisheries are on the point of collapse with cod and blue fin tuna joining the endangered species list. A traditional fisherman, in a sustainable fishery, using a canoe with an outboard motor for every ton of fuel yields 40 tons of fish, compared to only 3 or 4 tons with a super trawler. For instance, trawling for cod, 20 calories of fuel are used for every calorie of fish or protein that is produced compared to 5 or 10 calories in a canoe so these things could hardly be regarded as efficient. Similarly, within fisheries if you compare a modern super trawler with a sustainable fishery, in the first year the super trawler will get this absolutely massive catch but within three years, because it’s reduced the spawning stock over those three years, it is catching exactly the same amount as the sustainable fishery, by the time you get to the fourth year the sustainable fishery is often actually landing more fish than the super trawler, because the entire spawning stock has been removed. The book also deals with a lot of alternative agriculture systems, which, in addition to organic farming, have been shown to produce quite astonishing yields without the need for chemicals. Permaculture systems, bio-intensive systems, agri-forestry systems. Perhaps the most efficient form of agriculture being practised in the world today was developed in Japan. On a quarter of an acre they produce 22 bushels of rice and 22 bushels of grain, feeding 10 people and needing a few days work for two people. This is already practiced on one million acres in China. These are staggering efficient ways of producing food without needing chemical applications or biotechnology. The tiny Indian state of Carolla, the most densely populated state in India, 3.5 million forest gardens, it is the most productive agricultural state in India. These forest gardens have up to seventeen layers of food bearing vegetation from the tree layer downwards. They feed the enormous extended family of 10 people and there are lots of associated industries and I think it’s very interested to see that the average Carollian male, despite having one seventieth income of his American counterpart has an average life expectancy of only two years less and despite incredibly sophisticated medical technology in America, Carolla comes only second to Japan on the physical quality of life index in Asian countries. This is an astonishing model of an ecological way of life. I am just going to touch briefly on bio-technology before I pass you over to Michael who knows a lot more about it than I do but I just want to throw out a couple of things about it, just these incredibly inflated claims thrown out in the past such as nuclear power which was supposed to give us an unlimited amount of free energy by the turn of the last century, was supposed to give us electricity which was too cheap to meter and now we find that they are being decommissioned because, even as The Economist points out, not one nuclear power station has ever made commercial sense and the reason why it was never subsidised is because it relies on these massive subsidies, I just think it is a very good example of the inflated claims made for new technologies. We find that seventeen out of twenty one samples of genetically modified maize, tested by the University of Wisconsin, actually produced lower yields that conventional varieties. We find that, despite being banned from human and animal consumption, 28,000 tons of Aventice Starling Corn have found their way into processed food and beer brewing and I don’t know if you saw the first part of the BBC drama ‘Fields of Gold’ but in something that’s very scarily reminiscent of that there is a genetically modified maize from Nevartes which includes a gene resistant to amphicillin, an antibiotic widely used to treat infections in humans and animals. I am glad to say it has actually been banned in this country but this is just an example of the way in which this industry is going and the potentially catastrophic outcomes.

I am just going to finish with two quotes now, one from the Rocky Mountain Institute in America which is an amazing centre developing all sorts of environmental technologies. Just to give you what really exposes the fundamental flaws surrounding this technology. ‘Division into species seem to be natures way of keeping things in a box where they behave properly. They learn that it is a bad strategy to kill your host. Transgenics may let pathogens bolt the species barrier and enter new realms where they have no idea how to behave. It is so hard to eradicate an unwanted set of wild genes that we have intentionally done it only once, with the smallpox virus. Shot-gunning alien genes into random sights in the genome is like introducing exotic species into an eco-system, such invasives are the top threats to bio-diversity today. It is unwise to assume, as genetic engineers often do, that ninety plus per cent of the genome is junk because they don’t know its function. That mysterious, messy ancient stuff is the context that influences how genes express traits, it’s the genetic version of bio-diversity which in larger eco-systems is the source of resilience and endurance.’

Finally, Barry Commoner, who is the senior scientist at the Centre for Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, City University of New York. ‘The wonders of genetic science are all founded on the discovery of the DNA double helix by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953, they proceed from the premise that this molecular structure is the exclusive agent of inheritance in all living things, in the kingdom of molecular genetics the DNA gene is absolute monarch, know to molecular biologists as the central dogma. The premise assumes that an organism’s genome, its total complement to DNA genes, should fully account for its characteristic assemblage of inherited traits. The premise is, unhappily, false. Tested between 1990 and 2001, in one of the largest and most highly publicised undertakings of our time, The Human Genome Project, the theory collapsed under the weight of fact. There are far two few human genes to account for the complexity of our inherited traits, or for the vast inherited differences in plants, say, and people, by any reasonable measure the findings signalled the downfall of the central dogma. It also destroyed the foundation of genetic engineering and the validity of the biotechnology industries widely advertised claim that it’s method of genetically modifying crops are specific, precise and predictable and therefore safe. In short, the most dramatic achievement to date, of the 3 billion dollar Human Genome Project is the reputation of its own scientific rational.

Thank you. I am now going to pass you over to the expert on this area, Dr Michael Antoniou, who is going to talk to you much more in depth about biotechnology and the implications.

Firstly, I would like to express my thanks to Martin Griffiths, our host, for inviting me back here to Penrhos this year. It is always a pleasure to come to these meetings. As you can imagine, as a medical research scientist, I go to lots of conferences and get invited to good seminars about my work but speaking at events like this is a very different experience for me because it really does allow me to have a ‘heart to heart’ exchange as the theme is here and really engage you as a fellow human being, rather than as some kind of expert ‘up there’ talking down to all of you ‘down there’. What I will be saying, of course, in addition to covering a few technical details about genetic engineering technology, is really expressing some personal opinions and making political statements, which scientists aren’t normally supposed to make. I think in genetics now for scientists to say things and not really be caught up in politics is very, very difficult because what we’ve seen in the last twenty five years or so, is the overt commercialisation of science and with it its overt politicisation and this has tremendous ramifications to how really the whole discipline is functioning and is for me, as a scientist, very worrying and I hope to illustrate that to you during the course of my presentation.

So, we begin with the organic position we are all here, at least us here and, I hope, most of the US supporters of organic sustainable methods of organic food production and its important to begin with the organic position, especially in the light of an issue of the magazine New Scientist which appeared recently. On the cover it says in big black letters ‘Beyond Organic, the smart farming revolution’ and below it that red blob is a tomato and stamped across its front is stamped ‘guaranteed genetically modified and organic’. Now, to me, the articles that pertain to the theme on the front cover of this issue of New Scientist there are so many flaws in this argument it is difficult to know where to begin but it shows, at the very least, that it understands little about organic farming and little about the organic ethic and why the organic movement, many years ago, albeit for me a little late, but nevertheless came down against the introduction of GM, not only in organics but in agriculture, its saying there is no place for genetic engineering in farming or food production. What I hope to show you today is why that not only, as the current knowledge of genes and genetics stands, that is scientifically the correct position to take but also as a matter of principle you can really understand why people get into organics and you will hear that from an organic farmer later on, is that if people understand the principles behind why people support organics, then you will understand why genetic engineering has no place because organics means appreciating what the infinite intelligence of nature has produced and working with nature, other than fighting it all the time. As Patrick Holden, the director of the Soil Association said on many occasions in the past, and I have shared platforms with him, including the very first Heart to Heart here many years ago, was that genetic engineering is merely the latest tool that industrial agriculture has used to suppress the problems that arise out of an what is an inherently flawed approach to farming and food production, so it doesn’t actually solve any problems, it just adds to them at the end of the day.

Now, you need to have been on another planet not to realise that what we have descended into in society generally now is a genetics, genes dominated view of life. Hardly a day passes without some little article, or sometimes a major article, in the press highlighting the latest discovery of some gene or genetic process that is going to cure some disease or problem in the world. In other words, we’ve come to the situation …………….so after 20 years of trying to repair that I wonder why and what for. No better that conventionally grown varieties of crops, the very first GM crop to hit the market was Soya, American Soya beans. There have now been numerous independent investigations of the yield from genetically engineered Soya beans, compared to conventional equivalent varieties and one was published in a regular mainstream agronome science magazine called the Agronome Journal and I would just like to read you the conclusion from this comparison of GM and non-GM Soya beans that the authors came to after their investigation and this mirrors a general investigation of what’s been going on in real fields across America. ‘Yields are suppressed with a GM Soya bean cultivars. The work reported here demonstrates that a 5% yield suppression was related to the gene or its insertion process and another 5% suppression was due to the cultivar’s genetic differential. Producers should consider the potential of 5% - 10% yield differentials between GM and non-GM cultivars as they valuate the overall profitability of producing Soya bean. Based on our results from this study, and those elsewhere, the yield suppression appears associated with the GM gene, or its insertion process, rather than the glyphosate, the herbicide itself. This again is just another example of how the random simulation of a gene, which shouldn’t be there in the first place in this plant, is causing a general disturbance in its metabolism such that it’s functioning less efficiently and, as a result, produces less.’

I could read you more examples of Soya bean problems and for maize as well but time doesn’t allow me to do that but, in short, the yield advantages have not been observed. Chemical input reductions, also, have at best been only short term, as pests become resistant to the pest resistant crops and farmers are having to put more and more chemicals on their maize and cotton to make up for the fact that the pests are becoming resistant to the genetically engineered pesticide that’s in the crop.

I’d like to finish with the general worrying thing that I feel is taking place in science at the moment and which, to some degree, scientists have only themselves to blame for the way things have come about, that is how science has become very much overtly politicised. You no doubt read in the papers lately the Prime Minster, Tony Blair and about his speech that he gave at the Royal Society recently in which he accused the British public of being against science and against science’s big developments. If you remember last year he called anyone that spoke out against scientific developments such as genetic engineering as ‘anti-science’, like me. Which is a bit of an insult obviously as I am a scientist who uses genetic engineering and I would like to see how he could explain that. For me, there were many things to highlight about Tony Blair’s position and to some degree I don’t blame him for having these views because the sort of people who have access to the Prime Minister are the sort of people who are promoting this technology and he doesn’t really here the other side of the story at all. In fact, I am only aware of one meeting he has had with people like us who are against genetic engineering and that was several years ago. It shows he is really out of tune with public opinion about genetics and science because I find the public is not against science but against is some of the applications of science and that is with good reason because the track record shows that there are side effects to some technological advances, so we need to be cautious and sometimes draw the line. There has been confusion between science and technological applications. Genetic engineering is not a science, it is a tool and you have to acknowledge its limitations. Science is not an unquestionable discipline, scientist who speak against the establishment now are being vilified, as I will illustrate.

The PM is calling for an informed debate because he feels the public are being misinformed and misled by organisations like the Soil Association and Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth. We called for this public debate back in 1996 so he is a bit late and I find the public are not misinformed. The latest incident concerned researchers, based in California, found GM material had somehow contaminated the wild maize population in Mexico, a great concern as maize is a major food crop. Some phoney accusations were made about this study resulting in pressure on the journal ‘Nature’ to withdraw the article. The editor outrageously bowed to this pressure and withdrew the article, despite the paper being passed by at least 3 pre review expert scientists. Since then, independent Mexican studies have found the presence of GM extensively in the wild maize population in Mexico. This undermines the whole pre review system. After this event the co-author of the article wrote: ‘ Science has progressed in modern times by the presentation of results, which are subsequently refined or rectified by, further empirical work. As Nature well knows, the self-perpetuating genetic contamination of our crops will remain as an undeniable ecological reality for others to confirm but will we, as a society, have the independent public infrastructure to confront this and other similar challenges derived from our transformation of the biosphere. The co-ordinated attempt to discredit our discoveries in the public piazza sends a chilling message to those who would dare ask impertinent but uncomfortable questions and find their truthful answers. It is an assault on the very foundation of science’ and that is what worries me.

Thank you very much.

Networking small organic farmers and their customers.
Rupert’s task at the Soil Association is to raise awareness and understanding of the importance of organic food

This morning, I thought I would show you some pictures of some of the farms I am working with on the organic farm network, which is really a way of trying to encourage people to reconnect with farms and farming and actually go out there and see where the food comes from. Mark is one of the farms on the network; we have about 30 at the moment throughout the country. It may look a green and pleasant landscape but the actual farming system itself means that maybe wildlife has been depleted, we are looking at mono cultures rather than mixed farming systems and all that has an effect on the environment and, at the end of the day, the health of people living in this country. One of the schools I was working with recently, talking to the children and asked the question where do eggs come from, one little boy said they came from cows and another said the supermarket. I have also heard from other places that potatoes grow on trees and baby pigs are called guinea pigs, so we have a huge lack of understanding from children about where food comes from. A lot of it is to do with the fact that things like Home Economics is not taught as part of the curriculum and also many children do not have the opportunity to go out and visit farms, so that is one thing we are very keen to change. The network provides a platform for doing this, the farms have a farm trail for people to follow and various points there will be something of interest such as the use of hedgerows. Some also have display boards to indicate various parts of organic management. I think something these trails can also provide is a new sort of green tourism where people can actually feel welcome into the countryside. That is one of the things highlighted by the foot and mouth crisis, how much people value being able to walk through the countryside. Other ways of promoting green tourism are campsites on some farms, bed and breakfast and a whole host of ways to encourage tourists to learn while on holiday. Farm shops can provide a whole new experience when it comes to shopping, so many people are used to supermarkets, to go to a farm shop to buy fresh produce and maybe see where it is produced is a good way of reconnecting people to what they are eating.

Box schemes are becoming increasingly popular for many people, they provide a way of receiving fresh produce, usually from a farm and having it delivered direct to your door or a nearby drop off point. Scragoak Farm in East Sussex, currently deliver between 700 – 800 boxes per week, employing 9 people. Farm open days are a good way of inviting a local community to come and find out what’s happening on the farm. New uses for farm buildings – a lot of farms have redundant buildings on them, perhaps once used for rearing livestock and now too small for modern farming practices but can be useful locations for farm shops, visitor centres, school visits etc. One of the most important things we can do is inspire our future generations with visits to farms and children are very aware and interested in environmental issues and animal welfare issues. A visit to a farm can have a life long effect. It is easier to take primary children to a farm, in the case of secondary schools, where the curriculum is split we are taking the farm to the school via ways such as the internet, with virtual farm walks on our website, videos, though there is no substitute for the real things.

Demonstration farms are also a good venue for farmer training days. Farmers learn most from other farmers about how to convert to organic farming, sharing problems and solutions to issues and to encourage them to visit other farms is a good way of sharing that knowledge and expertise. So, as well as talking about farms operate and methods used they can highlight the wider benefits farmers bring to the country, things like improved landscapes, organic farming methods usually entail using traditional practices such as hedge-laying and prohibit chemicals which would destroy wild flower meadows. Also, looking at animal welfare such as pigs running free outside, is a good way of showing them how much happier animals are than crammed together in and intensive pig unit and that milk actually comes from cows.

Thank you.

We are now going to hear from Eric Llewellyn who is a naturopath and nutritionist and would like you all to welcome him.

I was jabbed at 4 years old by a doctor, who I thought was there for my health, it caused me excruciating pain. At the age of about 8 or 9, I became interested in acupuncture and I thought, well here’s another needle going in and these people are getting much better and it seemed to me the natural extension to that was to work from the energy onto diet, I became vegetarian at the age of 12 and knew exactly how to help all people on the planet, they just gave up eating meat, fish and eggs. By the time I started college I realised, of course, that this was totally untrue, it is about our attitude to foodstuffs.

Setting the Record Straight
It is very strange that we should trust chemists, even biochemists, to provide us with our knowledge of food. They never taste it professionally, when taste is the first thing we notice and care most about. Then they kill it, when our interest is in living. Next they split what in Nature tastes best whole, using methods which do not occur naturally, into categories which are alien to our stomachs. Once finished they still have no idea why a particular food organism has the form or taste that it does. They could not begin to put it together again. This short pamphlet sets out to correct all that. We start by re-stating principles, first set out at the turn of the century by the great nutritionist and holistic doctor Max Bircher-Benner, which enlarge our vision of life and make it much easier to understand food. More to the point, they empower us to eat for health and vitality once more, like some of our grandparents did. Hence the name we shall use for this approach, resurrected from the dead - the Vitality Diet.

Living Beyond Chemistry
The key is to take proper account of vitality, vital energy or life force - it has been called many things over the centuries. Food grows under the influence of force fields and information fields in Nature which "know" the shape and evolutionary path of each seed and egg, over and above the genetic content of the creature itself. These fields are better recognised so far by physicists from their theory of quantum mechanics than by biologists, though increasing numbers of biologists are taking serious note of them. For working purposes, and to distinguish them from other ideas, we use the term psi-field for these fields that organise the growth and form of living things.

Psi-field Influence
Modern knowledge of the psi-field is still in its very early stages, but there are certain things we can already say about it. It is present everywhere, a sort of background hum or "ether" that extends between the material forms to which we are accustomed, as well as concentrating strongly within and around these forms. Through the psi-field all living things are connected and related. That is how the forms of trees adapt themselves to their neighbours in the plantation, and how animals and people are able to communicate wordlessly with each other.

As well as this connectedness now, the psi-field is the vehicle for connectedness in history. It blends the shapes of parents to create the shapes of their offspring, over and above the influence of their genes.

Genes provide the tool-kit and instruction manual for cells individually. The psi-field enables whole groups of cells to organise themselves into meaningful forms - tissues and organs, ultimately the whole organism. It is part of the mechanism of evolution, overcoming the slow and wasteful randomness which is supposed to take place in the accepted Darwinian view. Using psi-field mechanisms, evolution can proceed far faster and more intelligently than we have so far supposed.

Classifying Foods
Our present chemical classification of food is therefore fundamentally deficient. We need in the first place to take account of the psi-field status of what we eat.

The most important distinction is whether food is fresh enough still to be alive - that is, still to be vitalised by its psi-field dynamic. If it is, we can consume and digest the psi-energy as well as the nutrient chemistry. Living food is vastly superior to long-dead food, in which the psi-energy also is dead.

Within living foods we can distinguish two sorts, the latent and the active. Latent foods are seeds, or storage organs like roots and tubas, which can spring into active growth when the seasonal conditions are favourable. These have their psi-energy locked up and dormant but hard for the consumer to reach, whereas active organisms have their psi-energy fully set out and easy to consume but vulnerable to spoilage.

The growth history of the food organism is the second main distinction we have to take into account. If an organism has the opportunity to grow in the vivid, perfectly formed psi-field provided by healthy seed in fully fertile soil, clean water and air the psi-energy is a hundred-fold stronger than for feeble seed in a chemically fertilised, polluted environment. Such a difference does not only register as the stronger psi-energy possessed by this food when really fresh, it also registers in the structure of the food organism after it has died. This more intricately formed, stronger structure itself retains "structural information" from the psi-field, which still has considerable nutritive virtue even in dead food, whose psi-field activity has vanished.

This is where the terms "organic" and "bio-dynamic" come in. Organic food has grown in a strong, well-formed psi-field which conventional food lacks. Such food when fresh has a power which is consumed along with the nutrient chemicals, and provides the consumer with a strong vitality boost of a specific character. Interplay of the psi-fields of consumer and food organism is actually how appetite works. But even when organic food has died and lost this advantage, it still retains structural information because of its growth history which still has vitalising power, though or a lesser order than when live and fresh. This is like the difference between being wired directly to the mains supply, and being connected to a charged battery. The former is boundless and direct, the latter derivative and limited - a reminder rather than the real thing.

Intermediate between the two categories so far mentioned is dying food. This is either wilting, as it continues to metabolise unsustainably after harvesting, or being cooked. There is a period of a few hours during which cooking makes latent psi-energy more available - like capital bleeding out as cash. There are even some dishes - e.g. casseroles, curries - which appear not to lose but to expound their psi-energy as enrichment of taste for some days after cooking.

In modern times things have become much worse than any of these categories, however. Natural, information-rich foods have been refined and processed so that their information content has been drastically degraded, sometimes completely. An example of this is white sugar, which has been degraded right back to a pure chemical substance without any shred of psi-field. White, refined flour psi-field is not totally degraded but severely damaged, as well as being chemically adulterated with a range of additives.

Dr Bircher-Benner had an insight of how plants grew which was brilliantly intuitive at the time. He attributed their shape and vitality to the way in which they handled sunlight and the closeness of their relationship to it. He classified foods therefore according to their sunlight value.

Those with 100% sunlight are actively growing leaves which are dedicated to collecting light and storing it. Stems, roots and seeds process some of their sunlight capital to create their special forms and functions, which slightly diminishes their value - say to 90%. Animals which eat these items convert them rather inefficiently into meat, which has only say 40% sunlight value. Dairy products would go down further to 30% for living milk but only perhaps 10% for cheese and butter which have lost a good deal of their structural integrity. Preserved whole foods such as fish and dried fruit may perhaps retain 15% of their sunlight value as structural information. Refined foods would have perhaps 5% left, invented items none, and fungi (grown in the absence of light) would have a negative value! Not a perfect theory and the figures are hypothetical, but it fills out the picture.

Water
Water is a key factor in maintaining the energy and efficiency of the human organism. Its place in nutritional science is shamefully underdeveloped, particularly in the English-speaking world.

From the ordinary chemical point of view, water should be as pure as possible. The modern pollutants - pesticide residues, organic compounds, hormones, and water processing chemicals - are all highly undesirable, quite obviously, but can be removed by various types of purification. Some medical experts argue for the value of the mineral salts which constitute hardness, but there is little to support and much to refute that view. The best that can be said is that magnesium salts save the lives of some people whose food is deficient in magnesium and who would otherwise be vulnerable to disturbances of heart rhythm. Food with adequate magnesium content is a far better solution, and when this is available even magnesium hardness becomes a health hazard. There has never been a case in favour of calcium hardness, and this is the likely source of most calcification processes affecting people - hardening of the arteries, gallstone and kidney stone, osteoarthritis etc. The best account of the effects of water hardness on health have been produced by Louis-Claude Vincent, a French water engineer, and his medical colleagues between about 1930-1960. Unfortunately most of their works appear in French, Dutch or German and are rather inaccessible to English speakers. Vincent developed a theory of the electro-chemical mechanism by which water affects human health, and thereby cast some light on the electrical component of vitality.

Water has a living or psi-field aspect too, however, which evidently goes beyond electrical potentials and forces. This is apparently generated by its pattern of movement which can radically alter its physical properties too. This part of the story was best developed by Viktor Schauberger, an extraordinary figure in Austrian forestry and hydrology in the early part of this century, whose ideas are expounded in Callum Coats' current book "Living Energies".

The chief function of water is to cleanse, purify and vitalise. Tap-water in most urban communities is now a poor and even dangerous medium for these purposes. If it is purified by a good reverse osmosis apparatus, or distilled, it again becomes fit for the first two purposes but not the last. For that it should have its electrical activity (a strong negative charge) restored by adding a small pinch of vitamin C crystals to each jug before drinking. Restoration of structural information cannot easily be done at present but pouring it from a height into the glass and stirring each glassful briskly into a vortex helps. Schauberger designed and patented better systems which will no doubt be marketed once we have appreciated the need for them.

Once adequately pure water is available, and especially if it is vitalised, the more you drink of it the better. Three pints (two litres) daily is desirable for health, and one quickly develops a thirst for the refreshment it gives.

Bottled spring water is an appealing but hazardous short cut to this ideal. Many springs are very hard, which rules out large daily consumption. Water in plastic bottles contains some of the organic chemical which has been polymerised to make the bottle itself, and some of these substances imitate oestrogen quite strongly. Men and women are now acknowledged as being exposed to a significant environmental oestrogen overload which affects sperm count and menstrual cycle balance, among other things: so avoid plastic bottles for any kind of consumable liquid. Glass bottles are, of course, expensive.

Digestion
Living food conveys additional advantages which modern nutritional science has completely lost sight of. These have to do with the processes of natural digestion.

In the first place, from a purely chemical point of view, the enzymes (nature's machine tools) present in all living things are still active in live food. These enzymes co-operate in the process of digestion, actually dismantling the food from within. This is like the difference between dressing a living baby and a limp rag doll.

In the second place there is the mysterious process known as the digestive leukocytosis, known to biologists for a hundred years and thought to be inseparable from the process of digestion until Bircher-Benner proved it otherwise.

When cooked food enters the empty stomach and passes beyond it into the first length of small intestine, known as the duodenum, it causes a reaction in the skin or mucous membrane lining it. This reaction is a gathering of the white cells from the blood, known as leukocytes. This normally occurs as the beginning of an inflammatory reaction, and in this case was interpreted as hostility to the food - suspicious, perhaps, of a take-over bid. Bircher-Benner demonstrated that a meal of live food does not arouse this reaction. What is more, a meal which merely starts with a live food course fails to arouse it, even if some of the later courses contain cooked food which would have aroused the leukocytosis if it had been the first course!

This finding remains true. Living food at the start of a meal abolishes the digestive leukocytosis throughout the meal. This is unlikely to be explained by enzyme chemistry alone, since the live food course with its enzymes tends to move on down the intestine rather than linger and help with digesting the food that follows. More likely the effect involves psi-field mechanisms in some way, yet to be clarified.

There is a third factor to consider which arises from the arrangement of meals into courses. The digestive apparatus in humans is arranged as a tube with various specialised functions at different places along it. There are no overtaking places. It therefore makes sense to eat every meal arranged in the same order as the specialised digestive functions are set out in the intestine. This is very simple in practice, though unfamiliar except in France where it is part of the way of life.

The fastest form of digestion is the absorption of liquid, so it makes sense to slake one's thirst first of all, before eating at all. Next comes the live raw food course, to set up digestion favourably as just explained.

Third comes any rich protein food, such as meat, fish, poultry, hard cheese, soya or lentils. These require the two specialised functions of the stomach. The lower part, or pylorus, acts as a vat, insulated by its stirring action and by mucus formation from the effects of the strong digestive juices necessary to digest its protein contents. The stomach lining itself is, after all, made of protein too! If the juices intended for food manage to reach the stomach lining, ulcers quickly form.

The juices for protein digestion are made in the upper stomach, or fundus, but once enough has poured into the pylorus the fundus becomes inactive and functions as a hopper. It has adapted to hold starchy food, mixed already with saliva from the mouth, while this digests over an extended period. A muscular purse-string pulls tight between the fundus and pylorus while this is happening, to separate the strongly acid digestion of protein below from the neutral digestion of starch above. Liquid sugars start to drip through as they are released, but that no longer interferes with perfect digestion of the meaty meal below.

The biggest mistake we make is to mix starchy food with protein, mouthful for mouthful, as in the ham sandwich. This makes perfect digestion of either component quite impossible. All we have to do to correct matters is to eat the protein first on its own, and make a separate course of any starchy food such as bread that we still hunger for afterwards.

So for perfect digestion:-
drink first;
then eat live, fresh vegetation followed by any cooked vegetation;
then eat any protein, on its own;
then eat any starch, on its own;
then neither eat nor drink anything more for several hours.

No second helpings of any previous course - only the course you are eating now!

Mineral Shortcomings
Vine fruits and their juices possess a special importance now that so much of our top-soil farming is reliant on the use of biocidal chemicals. The soil relies not on its powdered rock or mineral content but on the teeming bacteria, fungi and larger organisms it naturally contains. These organisms are the microcosm on which all the plants rooted in soil rely, and therefore also all the animals (including humans) who will consume those plants.

Biocidal chemicals applied to plants during their growth cycle drip onto the soil and decimate these soil organisms. They all but kill the soil and reduce it to sterile powder. The chief casualty of this disaster is the conversion of mineral salts, in the form of powdered rock, into foods suitable for plants. That process is handled by soil bacteria and root fungus. If these have been killed off by chemical sprays, the minerals remain unavailable to the plant. Since that is the main route by which mineral nutrients enter the food chain, this drastically alters our supplies of them. It does not matter what form of food we choose, most of the mineral content should have come from the soil but is still locked in there.

Supplements of mineral salts cannot substitute for food as it should have been. Animals cannot eat soil directly, we rely on bacterial processing to vitalise it first. We have to find some other route by which to obtain vitalised minerals. Here are the options:-

Vine Fruits
Vines have the habit of tapping deep into the subsoil where they are planted, drawing moisture and minerals from up to ten metres below ground. At this depth organic activity is less compromised by surface chemical treatment and minerals still reach the grapes.

Sea Food
Sea-weeds and fish provide the minerals of sea water, but these do not correspond in types or balance with what humans need. Sea food is a useful mineral resource but we need others.

Orchard Produce
Top fruit trees draw much of their sap from the subsoil, so that they and their juices are more reliable mineral sources than many vegetables. The healthy reputation of cider vinegar is based on this.

Hive Produce
Honey, pollen, royal jelly and propolis are less susceptible to agricultural interference because bees tend to prefer wild flowers. The mineral content of these items tends therefore to be higher.

Organic/Biodynamic Produce
Provided that a plot of soil has been managed organically for some years, its produce will have normal mineral content. Newly rehabilitated land with a history of chemical treatment will take time to regain this property.

Renatured Products
The term re-natured refers to a patented process for feeding a target nutrient to a yeast culture and harvesting the yeast tissues without destroying the psi-information it has acquired. It is now established, in science and in law, that this process makes a real difference to the behaviour of the target nutrient within the body. Minerals are properly vitalised and enabled to reach bone and other tissues and to be conserved there for prolonged periods. In time this type of nutrient supplement will supersede all those based on pure chemical formulae whether simple, complex or chelated.

Toxaemia, or "Sludged Blood"
It is rather old-fashioned to talk of toxic waste build-up in the body but there is no doubt that it occurs very widely. It can easily be seen under the microscope in the stickiness of blood cells, which stack up like plates into "rouleaux". They do so because they are coated with a slime of protein waste. This is the basis of a simple medical test for inflammation, when antibodies increase the protein stickiness. Overall this has a marked effect on resistance to blood flow, and therefore on blood pressure and wear and tear to blood vessels. It underlies the tendency for blood to clot abnormally, causing thrombosis in veins, coronary arteries and the brain - still the largest killer in developed countries. Less dramatically but just as devastating in the long run, protein sludge in the blood and connective tissues of the body creates the conditions leading to some forms of migraine, rheumatoid arthritis and chronic nephritis.

The way to avoid this is to keep your consumption of rich protein food a small proportion of your total food intake, a system dealt with in more detail in the next section. If you are already badly affected by symptoms of toxaemia or protein accumulation you will need in addition to consider the advice in the succeeding section on juices.

ALKALINE AND ACID FOOD AND DRINK

You require from your food, not just nutrient tissues but vitality (psi-energy) and electronic charge. This section is about the implications of the last of these. Vincent in his investigations of the health-giving values of water noted that a strong negative charge is revitalising. Others since have noted the same in relation to the air you breathe - it is most refreshing when negatively charged. Evidently you need electrons to boost your electronic vitality.

One way of looking at metabolism is the progressive stripping of electrons from food molecules, leaving them as electron-deficient as possible for discharge as waste. This is the process of oxidation. Acids are also, by definition, electron-hungry. For these reasons most body wastes are oxidised and acidic.

It does not make sense, therefore, to eat foods which burden the body with acidic or oxidised residues since this hinders your electronic nourishment. On the contrary, it pays to select alkaline or reduced foods, which are electron-rich. Some essential nutrients are themselves acidic however, so a balance must be struck: you need approximately four times as much alkaline as acid food.

Archetypal alkaline foods are fruits, vegetables and salads. Acid foods are represented chiefly by starchy and protein items, with the essential fatty acids in oils.

The Alkaline Meal
The Alkaline meal can be made up of any of those foods in the Alkali-forming and Neutral columns of the following table. Many delightful dishes can be made up from these: crisp fruity salads, vegetable stir-fries/bakes/soups, etc. This meal, along with those alkaline foods eaten at the starch and protein meals, will result in the correct bodily balance of alkali to acid ratio being achieved.

Using Juice
Food is an effective form of treatment as well as health maintenance, but there is a limit to the power delivered by whole foods. This is set largely by the intestine's capacity for handling the bulk of each meal. When a food is rendered into a juice, free of relatively inert and bulky fibre, this problem is overcome. If the juice is extracted carefully, it comes complete with the large majority of its structural information or psi-energy, as well as most of its amino-acids, vitamins and minerals active and intact. It also supplies the cleansing agents the body needs to eliminate poisons vigorously.

One can consume vastly more juice than solid whole food. This over-rides the rate-limiting factor and increases enormously the power of food to heal. There are clinics throughout Europe where raw, live juices are used very successfully as therapy. Juices help relieve hypertension, cardiovascular and kidney disease and obesity. Good results have also been obtained in rheumatic, degenerative and toxic states, in peptic ulceration, chronic diarrhoea, colitis and toxaemia from as little as a litre of juice daily. The high buffering capacity of juices explains their value in stomach acidity. Milk has often been used for this purpose, but spinach, cabbage, kale and parsley juices were, in Public Health Laboratory tests, far superior to milk.

Juices have an all-round protective action. Regular consumption of juices greatly increases resistance to winter ailments.

When taking a course of raw fruit and vegetables juices some physical disturbance is not unusual, such as aches and pains where the cleansing process is taking place. At times one may feel nauseous. These symptoms indicate that fixed wastes are being loosened from the connective tissues ready for cleansing through the circulation, and whilst in this more active form they upset your constitution for a few days. Toxins accumulated over many years cannot be eliminated in a day, but persistence for several months can bring remarkable results.

Juices from green vegetables are generally too potent to be taken alone. Dilute all green juices with an equal amount of water or combine them with an equal amount of juices from root vegetables or fruits.

As a general rule, one pint of juice daily is the least that can be expected to do much good. Usually two to eight pints (1-5 litres) daily are needed, up to the limit imposed by physical discomfort. The more juice taken, the quicker the cleansing and rejuvenation will be.

Dietary Do's and Don'ts

Stimulants
Stimulants such as tea and coffee, salt and flavour enhancers such as monosodium glutamate and of course sugar have entirely negative effects. These items are props for tired organisms and jaded palates, unable to function efficiently for lack of vitalising food.

COFFEE is best reduced as much as possible, and only taken freshly prepared from fresh-milled beans, not instant coffee. Do not consume coffee that has been re-heated, or standing for more than 45 minutes. In any case, limit intake to not more than two cups per day. Coffee substitutes are available from health stores and supermarkets.

TEA contains some undesirable toxins, and should also be limited to two cups per day. Ideally, total consumption of both coffee and tea should be limited to two cups per day. Brew tea from loose leaves rather than tea-bags which contain bleach residues. Alcoholic fermentation of fruit juice is an effective way of preserving it from putrefaction. Since vines tap deep into the subsoil to get their minerals and moisture, they are a particularly valuable source of minerals in a world where these are scarce (see above). So properly fermented organic wines are valuable foods, which still possess some psi-value. Chemically synthesised wines and beers are not foods, however; nor are distilled spirits. Alcohol in this form is a net charge on your diet, since you need nutrients from elsewhere to enable you to break down the alcohol and relieve your liver from its toxic effect. Spirits and cheap brews are therefore a negative meal, from any point of view.

Alcohol is dangerous, consumed in any form and quantity on a regular basis. Something can be said in mitigation, however, for properly brewed wines and beers which contain within them the nutrients required to handle the alcohol content.

Fats and Oils
ANIMAL FATS are best reduced. Use only non-hydrogenated vegetable margarine. Unsalted butter or Vitaquel margarine may be used sparingly as spreads. Cold pressed sunflower or cold pressed virgin olive oil are recommended for cooking and salads. If possible, select extra virgin olive oil, in glass containers, though the very best extra olive oils can be purchased in tins, which is fine. Never re-use oil that has been used for frying.

Dairy
Consume dairy products in only moderate quantities. COTTAGE CHEESE (ideally low-fat) should by kept to no more than 50 grams maximum daily intake. CURD CHEESE should also ideally be of the low-fat variety and consumed very sparingly. Try to obtain HARD CHEESE with a rind. LIVE YOGURT is the most beneficial (ideally from goats' milk). 'Natural' refers to the flavour, it does not mean 'live'. Live yoghurt may be included once or twice daily. Plain yoghurt is best and can be flavoured, if desired, with whole maple syrup (Epicure brand is excellent), raisins, grapes, or other fresh fruits.

Avoid cheese that is not on the rind. Standard pre-packaged cheeses predispose to sluggish liver function and mucous-forming conditions. Therefore, find and patronise a good speciality cheese shop. SOFT GOAT CHEESES are best when organic; most shops, including the major supermarkets, offer a selection. Unless you are able to obtain organic Camembert, it is best not to consume the 'skin'. There are many organic cheese suppliers, local addresses are available on request.

Eggs
The best eggs are FREE RANGE. DEEP LITTER is also superior to the standard battery-produced egg, which is best avoided. The term 'Farm Fresh' relates to battery produce.
A few (2-4) free range eggs a week is a sensible allowance. NO FRIED EGGS.

Meat
It is unreasonable to expect health from eating the flesh of animals that are not healthy themselves. Though it is difficult and rather more expensive to obtain meat from organically reared animals, we strongly recommend anyone wishing to eat meat to go to that trouble.

BEEF is best kept to a moderate intake and prepared lean. Avoid frying. Baking, boiling or stewing are sensible cooking methods. Only eat beef from an ORGANIC producer. No organic herd has ever had a case of BSE.

PORK is best eaten only very occasionally. Avoid salt pork unless you can cope easily with high sodium intake. It is best to avoid cured products such as ham and bacon.

LAMB is preferable to other meat. Grill it for the best result.

Smoked meats, sausage, salami etc. are highly undesirable.

Poultry
Free range CHICKEN, TURKEY, or DUCK is acceptable, organically fed is preferable. Be especially wary of conventionally produced poultry since it is highly processed and chemically treated. Never fry poultry.

Fish
Fish provides a most valuable protein and mineral source, low in total fats and especially in the more harmful saturated fats. Fish from colder regions are rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids of the omega-3 type which are essential to the human diet. Omega-3 fatty acids reduce abnormal cholesterol and triglyceride build-up in the blood and contribute to the construction of healthy cell membranes.

Fish from coastal waters, especially from the Mediterranean and Baltic seas, tend to be significantly polluted so deep sea fish from cold oceanic regions is recommended. Fish rich in Omega-3 fatty acids are salmon, sardines, herring, trout and shellfish.

Shellfish inhabit coastal waters and are particularly liable to pollution, so be aware of the source. Raw oysters and shrimps (fresh or frozen, not tinned) are very desirable, crab less so. Scallops are fine occasionally.

Fried or breaded fish products should be avoided: buy fresh or frozen wet fish. If you like sauce with fish, prepare it from good quality ingredients. Prepare fish simply by baking (not in aluminium foil), grilling, broiling, steaming or poaching; soup is also very nutritious.

Vegetables
To be most nourishing, vegetables should be harvested and prepared immediately before use and in the shortest possible time. The vitality of fresh vegetables declines progressively with storage or refrigeration.

Desirable vegetables: Cauliflower, celery, beetroot (raw or freshly boiled - not pickled). Organic beetroot leaves are excellent in salad - beetroot was originally cultivated for leaves, not roots. Spinach can be enjoyed raw in small quantities but in quantity is safer cooked. Onions are good steamed, boiled or raw, as are leeks. Most types of cabbage are desirable once or twice a week.

Desirable salad ingredients: Globe artichokes in any form, cos lettuce, watercress, rocket and garlic; parsley may be taken in order to reduce the garlic odour, but not in quantity. Organic or 'wet' garlic is preferable to the dry supermarket varieties. Chives are also valuable - fresh rather than dried.

Sunflower or pumpkin seeds are an excellent supply of nutrients and latent psi-energy. They can be eaten as a snack as well as on salads.

Dietary Fibre
The skeletons of vegetables are made of cellulose, a polysaccharide which humans cannot digest. They therefore pass through the intestine unaltered, providing much of the bulk of the faeces. Many forms of cellulose have the useful property of dissolving into water to form a gel, which is a semi-solid or stiff liquid. This is the ideal medium for digestion and enables the intestine to wrap up irritant or poisonous wastes in a cocoon for safe elimination. Constipation most commonly occurs when insufficient dietary fibre is consumed to achieve this. As well as vegetables, fibre is present in many other foods such as beans and peas and many fruits.

Take care to choose crude, unprocessed fibrous whole foods rather than pure or processed materials. Once fibre has been cooked it takes up far less moisture and fails to form a proper gel, which is the whole object of the exercise. Furthermore, a pure fibre unmixed with other food elements may clog into lumps when moistened. These lumps get plastered along the walls of the intestine where they stick like glue, interfering drastically with normal function. Avoid bran flakes, therefore, in favour of porridge, wholemeal bread, apples and vegetables.

Flour Products
Whole grain flour is so far superior to refined flour in nutrient and fibre content, and in lack of food additives, that you should use this exclusively. Go one better whenever you can and buy organic flour to make bread.

Pumpernickel (rye) bread (extremely high in fibre), wholemeal pitta breads and German seed breads are all fine, as variations on the wholemeal theme. White flour may be consumed occasionally if produced from very strong, unbleached flour.

In general, avoid biscuits. Wholemeal crispbreads are good if fat is not on the ingredient list. Whole-wheat or durum wheat pasta is good to eat. Pasta may be consumed almost freely.

Fruit
Fruit, though a great source of nutrients, is chiefly important as a vitality source - particularly when organically grown and picked fresh in season. However avoid oranges until you have been awake for at least 4 hours. Apples (organic, or at least unsprayed) are most beneficial and may be consumed freely. Melons in any form should be eaten on its own, at least one hour before or after other foods, to aid digestion.

Favourable fruits: organic apple, (when available), strawberries, pears, plums, figs, blackcurrants and elderberries. Prunes are also fine but should not be treated with sulphur or mineral oil.

Nuts
Sunflower seeds, pine kernels and pumpkin seeds are very desirable foods, suitable either as a snack or in salads and soups. All salted nuts should be avoided. Brazils should be avoided unless they are very fresh; almonds (brown and not de-husked) are desirable (but not more than 10/12 per day, chewed well).

Water, Juices
At least 6 glasses (2 litres) of FRESH WATER should be consumed daily - in addition to any other watery beverages. Freshly squeezed lemon juice is the only desirable additive: tea, coffee etc. should be excluded from this total. Fruit and vegetable juices are excellent, and those made by Biota and Eden are of good quality. Avoid orange juice until you have been awake at least four hours.

It has been my pleasure to talk with you and I hope you have got some sense out of it.

Thank you.

We are now going to hear from Lynda Brown, who is the consumer champion among us who we all need to hear from, so would like to pass over to Lynda.

What the Customer deserves
Lynda is a food writer & broadcaster and consumer champion

I would like to begin with a personal thank you to Eric, if I may, I have resolved never to buy another supplement again, so he has saved me a fortune and has also provided a superb backcloth to the kind of things I want to talk about and I would also like to add that I am a huge fan of frozen peas and it is so wonderful to have a nutritionist confirm they are good for me. We have had a lot of information thus far and I would like to bring it back to basics and make four very simple points. The first one is that I think it’s very easy to work out the kind of food that we, as consumers, deserve. We deserve pure, natural, nutritious food that we can trust. It is our birthright. As a species it seems to me that we did not evolve with ? Phosphates, nor did we evolve with flavourings to make us hyperactive and the fact that MRM that wonderful stuff which is called mechanically recovered meat which is the bits of gristle and things that you really would not want to know about, which is extracted from bones, turned into slurry and which is consumed by the truckload is even considered is food I feel is a measure of how far we have come from the food we deserve and the crap that an awful lot of us get. The second simple point that I wanted to make was that it also seems to me that today, apart from the food that you can grow or raise for yourself, the only food you can really trust, at the moment, and therefore deserve, is organic food. Plus, I would add, food from local, caring small producers that you buy in farm shops and in farmers markets because you can actually form a relation ship with them, you can ask people how their food is produced and you can then make a decision on it. I thought I would give you a very simple run through why I believe we deserve organic food and why I believe its better for us. The highlights of which I think characterises quite a good check list of what I think we deserve. This is what I think you should be looking for:

Number one, it has field to plate tracability, which is legally binding, a very important point. Secondly, its produced in ways that care and safeguard the environment. If we really want a future for this planet it seems to be this is not a luxury but a necessity. It’s a simple question of survival. Thirdly, it has better animal welfare. If we only farmed organically we would not have had BSE, nor would we have had Foot and Mouth. I think that speaks volumes. Fourthly, its GM free, a hugely brave decision, in my opinion, and hugely important as Michael has already outlined for us.

Now, from a personal level, organic food also has a singular absence of pesticide residues. Did you know the average daily diet these days contains over 30 different pesticides? No growth hormones, no antibiotics, if you eat organic processed food it attempts to process it in minimal ways and you actually only have only 7 natural processing aids instead of a cocktail of 7,000 which are allowed in the conventional food industry. Secondly, I believe very much that it does offer positive nutritional benefits, generally speaking it does contain more vitamins and minerals. A simple example, you may or may not be aware of, is that cows fed on grass and particularly cows raised organically, have higher levels of linoleic acid, it is very important for your brain. So you should all drink organic milk and you should definitely give it to children and choose to buy non-homogenised milk. For those of us who do believe that organic food has a greater chance of being more vital, there is a lot of wonderful research work going on in Europe to show that. It also has more trace compounds and is proving to be immensely good as cancer preventing compounds, etc. So I believe that, as a package, organic food is definitely the food we deserve, it also offers you the best chance you have of optimising your health and nutrition in terms of the food that you eat. The third very simple point I wanted to make is, at the moment, we have a choice; we can actually buy the food we deserve. The choice has to be for real food, rather than fake food, but you can do so if you want to, the problem is that supermarkets sell what the consumer wants. We tend to blame others for this and never say it is primarily our responsibility. We believe the myth that we are all too busy, cooking and buying food has almost become a weekend hobby. I think we have lost sight of the fact that food is first and foremost nourishment, not just for the body, but also for the mind and soul. The fourth point that I want to make is, yes, we can pick and choose, at the moment, we can dip into the food we deserve when we want but unless, we as consumers, radically change our view of food and the critical role it should play in our lives I don’t believe we will have that choice much longer and then the supermarkets and GM giants will have won. I would like to urge everyone to make that choice, not only do we deserve natural food as our birthright, we also deserve to nourish ourselves. I think the reason is very simple, to use that well known advertising phrase, it’s ‘because we’re worth it’, folks.

Thank you

We are now going to turn to the last of our speakers, Mark Houghton-Brown who is going to talk to us about his own farm.

13:00 Mark Haughton-Brown

Cost effective high-yield nutrition from the farm
Mark is a Soil Association Trustee and organic farmer

I noticed the other week that Germaine Greer apparently boycotted Hay Festival because of the sponsorship of Nestlè and I have got total solidarity with that but my subject, large scale organic, is a difficult subject. We can’t avoid it now because we are, in the western world, a largely urban society. Organic food is actually a fantastic success story. We are the biggest organic consumers in Europe by a long way, the bad news is three quarters of it is imported. 60% of shoppers bought some tiny organic thing last year, so the ground is being prepared, people are open to organic. Many of the largest multi-national corporations, you will not be surprised to find, now have organic ranges and it is a good thing because they provide the vast majority of food. We may have to convert them even though we might not approve of the majority of what they do. However, 80% of organic food, despite what we’ve heard today about where we should be buying organic food, is sold by just five companies. Massive companies, like Rank Hovis McDougall, Uni-lever, Mars Corporation all now have organic ranges and a range of different strategies. Names, which you may be familiar with, Go Organic, Seeds of Change, Joy Organic are all brands owned by multi-national food corporations. I am not getting into the argument today about big farmers or small farmers, it’s a massive issue, I know what all farmers need is fair prices and it is very difficult for farmers to get those fair prices when a very few enormous corporations stand four-square between the farmer and the consumer. It’s always going to be that way while they own the real estate, which means the shops where most of us shop.

I have been told to tell you all how to feed the world organically and that might seem like a massive problem. We can certainly feed the world organically, the two things we have to do are stop subsidising food production and start subsidising the environment. As the Currie report showed, most farmers can actually live with that by just moving the subsidy away from cheap grains and towards hedgerows, downland, moorland, woodland, it is the same deal for farmers and we can also start taxing aircraft fuel. For both of those we do need some sort of global agreement. In the long term, of course, organic food is going to be the cheaper option by far, we are going to have a healthier society, we will have far lower environmental costs so organic food and GM is really another argument about short termism and long termism. One of the key ways that the changes, which I just outlined, will feed the world is by encouraging us to consume more grains directly, rather than feeding them to livestock and without intensive grain production and the resultant intensive livestock production, the world could feed itself with only 30% of the agricultural land area which we are now using. So, it is not strictly speaking a massive problem but it will require a massive change to the super tankers of agricultural food policy and energy policy, which are now in place. I am going to tell you a little story now about our own wheat production on the farm. Wheat is one of the three main crops grown in the world and probably the biggest crop grown in Europe, it is very useful grain, used for breads, biscuits, cereals and feeds, of course, and more than any other crop has been manipulated over the years by conventional breeding techniques to suit the purposes of intensive agri-business. When I first started being a farmer, it was a conventional farm and we would grow over 1000 acres of wheat in a continuous mono-culture, yielding sometimes three tons an acre. Nowadays, my neighbours can get four tons an acre some years, but it did require and still does, massive input of fertilisers and pesticides.

To give you some idea, we used to apply four doses of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, they would total ¼ ton on every acre, one hundredweight of potassium sulphate, one hundredweight of super phosphate, three doses of herbicides with two ingredients in each, three doses of fungicide……… thrifty crop to resist pests and diseases and flourish in much lower fertility situations so I got together with ……….Research Centre and their consultant, Dr Martin Wolf, and we made a plan which involved mixing together seven different varieties of wheat, including older varieties with taller straw, more modern with shorter straw, bigger grains and intermediate varieties used over the last thirty years. We mixed them all together in a seed drill, planted them. The fields did look rather strange, they didn’t have that immaculate tabletop look of conventional fields, the modern varieties now don’t come much higher than your knee. The old varieties are chest height, so they look very old-fashioned. The mixture remained healthy and resistant throughout the growing season which was great, the diseases couldn’t spread like wildfire, fungal diseases were at very low levels and the weeds couldn’t grow through the thick canopy and the ladybirds and hoverflies weren’t killed by the insecticide and they sorted out the aphids and the slugs.

Amazingly, and defying what I was told by conventional scientists, all the varieties magically ripened at the same time and the grains produced were fine in all conventional measures of yield and quality. I just couldn’t get any of the large industrial millers to buy any of it, they had policies of only buying single, specifically named varieties, this was a one off, unusual crop not sufficiently uniform so we had to approach a local miller, with an old fashioned water mill and he managed to produce a fantastic range of craft flours suitable for a really wide range of uses and we now have sales to a number of local health food stores and even Selfridges now stock this range. Wheat is winter pollinated and all the varieties interbreed in the field when they flower, so our seven varieties interbreed with each other. We keep the biggest, fattest, cleanest part of the field to plant the next year, this is the fifth year we have been doing it, and so the different varieties now produced is some which I have never done before. What we have out there now is a vibrant, self-selecting, gradually changing and evolving population, stable enough to thrive from year to year if the seasons are different and, at the same time, to provide reliable quality, whatever the climatic conditions. It is a unique population of wheat, which is growing on our fields and reproducing itself from year to year. It is an alternative to GM and farmers are coming round the farm, looking at what we are doing, being quite amazed at the fact that organic fields aren’t full of weeds and they’re not full of disease and that they produce crops of high quality. The yields are going up each year because we choose the best grains and replant them. GM is a path of endless corporate profit, that is why they are pushing it now. We don’t have to go that way, there are alternatives. It is only by looking after the soil and the environment and the eco-systems of the world can we find a long-term sustainability, security and health for everyone.

Thanks very much.

13:20 Chair

Summary of speakers’ ideas. Agenda for action 2002 - 2003 plan. Any further general questions and suggestions from the audience.

13:30 Lunch

Including organic buffet lunch from Daphne Lambert’s kitchen.