Box - what box?

Study finds child obesity due to overeating - who'd have thought?

Next thing they will find out that not eating makes us thin. 

Perhaps not eating might also be the cause of hunger? We need a proper study though, rather than be led by hearsay and conjecture.

The Daily Telegraph describes it as a controversial report . Apparently a debate has been raging "in the scientific communities" about whether obese children result from overeating or not exercising. Must it be one or the other - like they are not both connected and both causative factors? If you sit at a computer all day drinking coffee and smoking you will not get fat, but if you're drinking cola and eating burgers, chips and donuts then you just might. I wonder whether doing idiotic surveys contributes to some weird mental condition.

But now it has been decided - it is overeating and not under exercise to blame. 

Excuse me, I'm going to go beat my head against the nearest wall.

Peanut…peanut butter…yeah! My baby's made it big time!

 

It's nearly forty years since I stumbled into peanut butter making and my little baby is now being advertised on national TV. Whole Earth peanut butter, that's the one.

In the early days of Whole Earth Foods (when it was still Harmony Foods) my brother and I decided that peanut butter had to be one of our product lines. Soon thereafter I spotted a curious looking horizontal stone grinding mill at a used equipment seller's warehouse. It sort of called out to me, as happens. Turns out the stones were marble and it was made for hospital use, from the days when they used to make up ointments and salves in the hospital basement. And it was only £100 so I thought to give it a whirl on some peanuts and if it didn't work then not a lot lost.  

It worked, grinding brilliant peanut butter that was crunchy or smooth depending on how tight the stones were positioned together. I blended three different types of peanut originally, selected for flavour, texture and oil content. At the original Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit we put that mill on the Harmony Foods stall and sold it as fast as we could grind it. The British had never tasted good peanut butter before, the only brand being under-roasted and under-salted with a resultant taste of undercooked beans. Yuk.

We soon had five of those mills grinding away non-stop and I can assure you the next four cost somewhat more than £100 each. But we sold a lot of peanut butter and though I've not been involved with it since 1982 it is satisfying to see it finally hit the big time.

In the Guardian, the history side

There was a nice piece in the Guardian newspaper yesterday about my involvement in the wholefoods story of the UK, changing diets and all that. Plus, their ace photographer, Eamonn McCabe, got an arresting photo to illustrate the stoy. As he put it, "Don't think ego, think we're trying to stop somebody as they are flipping through the food section.

In the final paragraph, my new book Sun of gOd finally gets mentioned - the point of doing  this sort of thing in the first place. I suppose that's the price one has to pay for changing hats every few years.

READ ALL ABOUT IT, at:
The wholefood revolutionary
Gregory Sams talks to John Crace about the FBI, John and Yoko, and inventing the veggieburger 

(by the way, my original spelling of the trademarked name was VegeBurger)