Green & Black’s was the exception. Sams first came across a 70-percent-cacao bar in Spain, in 1988. Although he’s not a candy lover, the chocolate’s coffee-like intensity inspired him to write to the manufacturer, Lindt, and beg them to sell it in England. Luckily for Sams, Lindt ignored him. Still obsessed with the idea a few years later, he made his way to Belize and cut some deals with local cocoa growers. Today, Green & Black’s is a market leader (Cadbury bought the company in 2005 for $52 million), with sales in the U.S. doubling for the past five years and annual growth in the U.K. at 20 percent.
The nice thing about this story is that everyone seems to have profited. The cocoa farmers have seen new schools and clinics go up, and concrete has replaced the dirt floors in their homes. When we met last May, Sams had just returned from the Toledo Cacao Festival, down a cratered road near Punta Gorda, Belize, where the talk had centered on turning that town into a tourist destination. “It’s a gorgeous place to learn about cocoa production,” he says. “And it’s the only thing that will get foreigners to go down there. Cacao will never make these farmers rich,” he continues, “but tourism may.”
At 64, Sams is handsome, with a thick shock of white hair and a glint of mischief in his bright green eyes. He maintains his six-foot, 185-pound frame by swimming and working out on a Prop Cycle, a video-enhanced contraption that enables you to pedal your way through a virtual landscape (compensation, perhaps, for the fact that he limits his driving to 2,000 miles a year in order to reduce his carbon footprint). Sams doesn’t just dabble in an “alternative lifestyle”; he is fully committed to living life as New Organic Man. He has all his shirts tailored, for example, but not on Savile Row. Instead, he buys organic linens, then sends the fabric to an old-fashioned factory called Seymour Shirts, in Yorkshire. “When you buy from a chain,” he says, “there’s always a compromise.” And it’s not fishing from the deck of a 100-foot yacht that gets him juiced; it’s the fish compost he’s making by layering the scraps from last night’s Dover sole dinner between sheets of ivy and hay. He’s going to use the results to nourish some saplings of Saltcote Pippin apples that he grafted from the county’s three remaining Saltcote trees and recently planted in his small orchard up the road.
“Craig is not as other men,” says Josephine Fairley, his wife of 17 years. A beauty writer, the author of the Organic Beauty Bible, and a cofounder of Green & Black’s, Fairley recalls the time she offered to knit her husband a vest as a birthday gift. “Most men would say, ‘I like this pattern,’ and that would be that,” she says. But Sams sourced organic wool from Orkney Islands sheep that eat mostly seaweed. It arrived unspun, so he took lessons on how to spin it. He then made woad, a dye, from plants he grew and hand-dyed the skeins different shades of blue. “If you added up our labor, the sweater cost about $7,000,” says Fairley, who adds, with a wince, that Sams also set the dyes with his own fermented urine. “The most hideous smell wafted up from the ground floor of our house, so I evicted him and the dye bath to the garden.”
Today, the two live in a charmingly shabby three-story Georgian house with a charmingly overgrown backyard in the charmingly shabby seaside town of Hastings, on England’s south coast. The many high-ceilinged rooms are piled with unopened mail and boxes of moisturizers, shampoos, and soaps, submissions for a new edition of Fairley’s book. This is the home of two people in the midst.
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