And Mr Sams believes those eating habits are now in the process of irreversible change

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Published: July 29, 2010

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And Mr Sams believes those eating habits are now in the process of “irreversible” change.”We had a letter last week from a family saying they had started just eating organic, they had known about it for years and they didn’t know why it had taken so long for the penny to drop. More recently, in 1991, Mr Sams, with his wife, Jo Fairley, co-founded Green and Black’s Organic Chocolate, makers of Maya Gold, the first “fair-trade” chocolate in the UK. It is probably best known for its peanut butters (hence his concern for radioactive nuts) and fruit spreads – one of which was prosecuted in the Seventies because it contained no sugar. Operating from London’s Portobello Road, Whole Earth and its related companies makes a range of products from breakfast cereals to canned foods.

We now know this to be true – indeed a leading Harvard nutritionist was recently advocating a largely macrobiotic diet. But if wholefood has come a long way in the last three decades, so has Mr Sams.Yin Yang closed not long after it opened, but in 1967 Mr Sams also founded Whole Earth Foods, which in the UK helped pioneer the introduction of a mass audience to healthy eating. Once, after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, he bought a radioactivity testing machine to analyse the becquerel levels of imported hazelnuts Officials assured him the nuts weren’t radioactive. The machine said otherwise.
Mr Sams, American-born and educated but a British resident since the Sixties, has often been proved right since. In 1967, when he started Yin Yang, macrobiotics were labelled, by one Harvard authority, the “hippie death diet”, and the FBI raided and closed down the macrobiotic book shop in New York for preaching the message that cancer might be prevented by a healthy diet. Craig Sams is a man of many parts.

Inventor of the Herbal Burble soft drink, once-contributor to Oz magazine and founder of Yin Yang, London’s first macrobiotic restaurant, he takes his guardianship of good food very seriously indeed. They are based on European rules but no other European country is said to be implementing them so harshly. If these reforms go ahead, producers say, the dream of a local organic economy, supplying meat on a small scale to high street butchers and farmers’ markets – not merely on a large scale to the supermarkets – could prove stillborn.. The Government is introducing new veterinary inspection standards for abattoirs that will, the organic movement argues, result in the closure of hundreds of small local slaughter houses and may make it impossible for many smaller farmers now considering the switch to make a living. So it’s perhaps not surprising that a chicken which forages for its food and picks up a range of trace nutrients from grasses and soils will taste better than one living virtually immobile in a battery unit and subsisting on standardised feed.It’s not all rosy for organic producers, however. The taste of meat, he says, has been shown to improve with age, but conventional meat producers slaughter their animals young It’s also dependent on diet and exercise. Much mass- produced meat, complain the cognoscenti, tastes like polystyrene.

By contrast, Mr Kennard speaks of vanished delicacies such as “salt-marsh lamb”, so- called because of the wild marshland herbs the animals fed on while grazing. Concerns about antibiotic residues in conventionally produced meat look certain to fuel further growth.Although, as Mr Kennard says, there’s not much magic or mystery about organic meat – it’s the way livestock farming used to be, before it began relying on drugs, chemicals and factory units – the legal definitions introduced by the EU in the early Nineties have given the market stability and confidence, and they have also persuaded the supermarkets that organic meat is here to stay.But for many meat eaters, it’s the taste that seems to matter. It’s the industry’s boast that BSE has never occurred in an animal reared on an organic farm, and the BSE crisis is one factors driving consumer demand for organic meat, which is in turn driving the supermarkets to demand it. He hasn’t regretted his decision to go organic: during the past three years his business has been growing at an annual rate of 60 per cent.Organic meat represents a tiny fraction of the organic market – five per cent, according to the Soil Association’s organic food and farming report, compared with 54 per cent for fruit and vegetables – but it is busy catching up.By next year, compared with 1997, organic beef output will have more than trebled, lamb production will be up nearly sevenfold and pig output will have increased more than ninefold.The reasons for the growth are not hard to come by. From his base at Graig Farm in the Welsh hills near Llandrindod Wells, he supplies retailers and also operates a mail order and delivery service, specialising in a range of high quality produce from Speckles and Derbyshire Gritstones (breeds of sheep) to what is said to be the world’s first organically registered wild fish, imported from the British island of St Helena in the south Atlantic. But his favourite reply was from an elderly lady and it concerned his chicken. She declared that she hadn’t tasted anything like it since 1943.”We’re quite proud of that letter,” he says.
Mr Kennard is one of a rapidly growing band of producers who have realised the potential of organic meat.


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