In her foreword to the Soil Association’s new strategy paper The Road to 2020, the organic charity’s new director, Helen Browning, writes:

“Over the last 65 years we’ve endeavoured to bring the organic principles of care, ecology, fairness and health into a world seemingly determined to ignore these values and put its faith in over-consumption and unqualified growth.”

On the face of it this doesn’t look like a great place to be either strategically or philosophically. But Browning’s qualifier — “seemingly” — offers immediate clues on the way forward.

‘The world’ (as in “a world seemingly determined to ignore” organic values) is just like the ‘consumer society’, or the pervasive ‘they’ – an illusory label.

Having labels for the people or things we think are opposed to our values might be convenient but they end up being misleading and obstructing progress.

It is better surely to ask how can we communicate our values to ordinary people and their friends and family, than trying to influence an artificial construct.

The question is how do you do it. The answer that the Soil Association has come up with in The Road to 2020 is to “start where the people are”. The logic here is straightforward: if you a going to reach out effectively, you can’t expect people to understand organic principles immediately, you are going to need to understand where they are coming from and then engage them in ways that they can relate to.

Much effort has gone into influencing public opinion on organic in the past. But often this has been done without “starting where the people are”. My guess is that by using this fresh approach, and perhaps applying a bit of humility in the process, we will discover that — at the level of the ordinary consumer and citizen — there is more genuine support for the principles of care, fairness and ecology than we think.

Meat Free Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and…) Continue Reading

Over the past few months the Soil Association’s new director, Helen Browning, has been consulting widely on how best to take both the organisation and the wider organic movement forward (see story). Continue Reading

Major airlines and detergent brands runs rings round the ASA while the small guys get hauled up on pedantic points of detail, writes Craig Sams Continue Reading

Last week I visited the brand new £225 million Pembury Hospital, just outside Tunbridge Wells. It’s a genuinely state of the art building, and the country’s first all-single room (512 in all) NHS hospital. Continue Reading

Two thoughts came to mind when I was casting around for something to write about this week.

Thought 1. I’ve just got back from a week in Brittany where I was reminded how every town of any size at all in France seems to boast at least one artisan boulanger and boucher-charcutier. We crave the artisan and the real too but get Greggs and Tesco Metro instead. Why?

Thought 2. A report in The Times this week revealed how reputation management agencies (the ghastly lovechild of PR and marketing comms) are being paid by leading brands to create hundreds of false Facebook friends and Twitter followers to flatter those brands. A timely warning about the downside of the social media revolution?

Which led me to Thought 3. Isn’t it a rich irony that, at the very time marketers are imploring consumers to value the ‘authenticity’ of food products, shopping experiences etc, they are simultaneously developing ever more sophisticated ways of faking it?

We’re so good at fakery in Britain you wonder if it could become one of our leading exports. A typical (and real-life) food retailing example would be the pack of supermarket bacon featuring a photograph of a ruddy-faced British farmer leaning on a five-bar-gate in front of some rolling Sussex downlands — where the Bacon actually came from a Dutch factory farm. But it’s not just fake imagery that we’ve got to deal with, it’s also the breathless ease with which fakers switch from one writing style and vocabulary to another when posting fake customer testimonials. You’d really think that Mrs. E Nibbs was alive and well and totally living in Leighton Buzzard.

Back to matters artisanal. Those French boulangeries and charcuteries have to be part of accredited schemes to use the term ‘artisan’. But the evidence of their authenticity is all there to see, smell and taste. And if you happen to walk past a boulangerie at 3am you’ll probably see some actual artisan boulangers crafting their pain au levain or complet.

Sadly, elsewhere the term artisan is every bit as elastic as that other marketing buzzword ‘ethical’. As well as artisanal bread, cheese and furniture (all fine I’m sure), a quick Google will highlight artisanal chocolate, cupcakes, hairdressers, chewing gum, vinyl flooring and PR (yes siree) — although for my money it’s ‘artisan software’ that takes the craft-baked biscuit.

If I’m sounding a tad sensitive, perhaps a little tiny bit John Humphreys-ish about this, it’s only out of sheer frustration that another perfectly good word that has been hijacked by marketers* and left for dead through shameless opportunism and overuse.

Just don’t even get me started on ‘iconic’.

* Apologies to 100% ethical, unfalteringly professional and non-cynical marketers everywhere

Nuclear power threatens everything that all living plants and creatures have struggled for since the miracle of life began, writes Craig Sams

I had a chat with a Belarusian cabbie while in Tallinn Estonia to give a speech at a marketing conference. He had lived in Estonia for 25 years.

“Why’d you move to Estonia?”

“I worked in the MInistry of Commerce and so had access to confidential government papers. When I saw how bad the radiation contamination from Chernobyl really was I took my family and got the hell out.”

“Are your kids healthy?”

“Yes, thank you, no thyroid cancer or other problems.”

The nuclear industry will never tell you the truth. There were frozen Welsh lambs that were condemned for being too radioactive that had been frozen before Chernobyl blew up. It came from the Windscale (Sellafield) fire in 1957. We’d been eating radionucleides since the 50s in lamb and dairy products and nobody told us. It’s still there. Welsh hill sheep have to come down to less radioactive valley pastures for their final months of grazing to get their radioactivity below the maximum limit.

Imagine if you had some disease where you continuously excreted a toxic substance that would kill any living being. You then collected it and injected it into your mum. That’s what we’re doing to our mother – Earth – so that we can advertise chewing gum all night in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

The electricity that was billed as ‘too cheap to meter’ has turned out to be costing us the Earth. Fukushima isn’t over yet – a huge area of Japan will be uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years. If it had been Dungeness then all of Kent and Sussex would have had to be evacuated. The French have already banned eating or selling fish from the river Rhone because of radioactivity from a nuclear power station near Lyons. Now it’s leaking into the Mediterranean.

Sellafield disposed of 250 tonnes of Plutonium-239 onto the floor of the Irish Sea. Now it’s moving its way up the food chain through microorganisms from shellfish to fish.  It’s turning up in farmed salmon.  It has a half life of 24,000 years. That means in 24,000 years it will ‘only’ be equivalent to 125 tonnes. In other words, it’s there forever.

Every year we create another 12,000 tonnes of HLW – High Level Waste – stuff that is toxic forever.

What can we do? If I ruled the world (not such a bad idea) I’d:

• Earmark five prer cent of global GDP for energy security.  Real energy security.

• Tax fossil fuels at their real cost of £140 tonne of CO2 emitted, starting with the US, where six per cent of the world’s population use 30 per cent of the world’s energy.

• Insulate, insulate, insulate – it saves in air conditioning as well as heating.

• Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal – just spend the money.

• Never burn wood – turn it into biochar and sequester it in the soil.

• Close every nuclear power station and ship the waste to Russia. Then pay the Russians to build 20,000 of their 25 tonne payload rockets. It costs $4000 a kilogram to chuck this deadly crap into space, so the 500,000 tonnes of High Level Waste we now have on the planet would cost a mere $2 trillion to get rid of permanently. What a bargain! The IMF estimates the financial crash cost us $12 trillion and we’re still alive.

Let’s do it now, before the waste is irretrievably buried in underground storage. Sorry if there’s life out there in space, but it’s us or them.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as evil as nuclear power. Nothing else threatens everything that all living plants and creatures have struggled for since the miracle of life began on this planet. It was always just an excuse to build atom bombs.

If you had the choice: double your electricity bill or die a horrible lingering death watching the skin peel off the faces of your children – what would you choose?

I’m not sure which consumer behavior experts were being referenced in your May editorial who concluded that “the messier and more confusing a shop looks, the better the value it projects”, but I would beg to differ with them.

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