For all the changes, though, Sams preaches the same gospel he’s been promoting for four decades. Among his basic tenets are eating organically and eating less. “If you buy organic, you become part of a system that replenishes its soil by putting carbon back into it. If you choose nonorganic, you contribute to the millions of tons of nitrous oxide released into the air each year from crop production and nitrate fertilizers.” As for how to go about reducing consumption, he suggests skipping breakfast. “If you eat a few pieces of dark organic chocolate before lunch,” he says, “your appetite will be suppressed. And if you eat less, you’ll create less demand for farmed and pastured foods.”
He also advocates cutting down on meat, eating more whole grains, and shopping more frequently. “This is counterintuitive, but I think the mega-market is not the way of the future. When the price of gas goes up, the price of food goes up, and the price of wasting food goes up, and people are more likely to shop more locally, more often.” And, finally, Sams suggests that we all drink more vermouth. A few times a week, he himself slugs back a tonic he blends from vermouth (or wormwood) and other herbs. The result, he says, is greatly improved digestion. “There’s a parallel between the microflora that live in the soil and produce food for plants, and those that live in our intestines to help us to digest. If they’re working well, you get the maximum nutrition from food and you don’t need as much of it.”
In hopes of pushing their own community in the right direction, Sams and Fairley recently bought a small bakery, Judges, and turned it entirely organic. They also opened the town’s first “wellness center.” As Sams and I amble through the winding side streets, he points out this trendy new restaurant and that new club. Paul McCartney has a recording studio a few miles out of town, in an old windmill, he says, and Andy Bell (of the group Erasure) some-times sells Judges’ bread at the farmers market. Jo Wood, wife of Rolling Stone Ron, is a friend, as is Sting’s wife, Trudie Styler.
Good local food, fresh sea air, a smattering of celebrity—I can almost hear the wheels of enterprise turning inside Sams’s head. After all, his term with the Soil Association has ended. And although he’s got the wellness center, the bakery, and those few acres where he grows organic fruits and vegetables, he’s got too much energy, too much optimism—and too much capital—to stop now. There’s a mansion on a nearby cliff, he says, with a porch and a sweeping beach view, that he sometimes imagines peopling with aging rock stars. Groovy old people’s homes? If Craig Sams says they’re the way to go, you’d do well to take note.
Pinterest
