Let’s be honest: It’s near impossible to imagine how we as individuals can do anything significant to stop global warming. You can recycle this magazine or turn down your heat in winter, but as for believing such a daunting problem can actually be solved—well, that’s for dreamers. Craig Sams, one of the world’s leading eco-entrepreneurs, has one suggestion, however: Eat dark chocolate.
It would be easy to dismiss that idea as a cynical marketing ploy. Sams is, after all, the founder of Green & Black’s, the company that introduced the $4 organic dark chocolate bar to the United States. But as the recently retired three-term chairman of Britain’s highly influential Soil Association, he does command some respect. He helped turn what was once a sleepy $500,000-a-year organization into one with an annual budget of $20 million, and he made it the guardian of the rigorous organic standards that now govern the U.K.’s food supply. He’s not a religious man (ex-hippies tend not to be), but he does have faith in our ability to reverse the degradation of the environment by altering what we eat. “In the 1960s,” he says, “people were meditating for world peace or joining the Weathermen, but I thought changing the food system would be the most revolutionary thing we could do.”
Hippies get a bad rap these days. But in terms of travel and certain eating habits, they actually got a lot right. They decamped to places like Goa, Phuket, Mendocino, and Kabul long before the tourists, marketers, millionaires, and Soviets invaded, and they discovered the virtues of brown rice, yogurt, and sugar-free jams well before those foods became staples. But it was during the reigns of Margaret Thatcher and Bush 41 that a few enterprising hippies cut their hair, washed their clothes, quit (okay, modified) their drug use, and revived the term “enlightened self-interest” to describe their unique form of spread-the-wealth capitalism. As Sams frames it, “I like to make a profit—it’s nature’s way of saying, ‘You’re doing something right.’ ”
The son of a Syrian American marine and a midwestern farm girl, Sams grew up in Nebraska, Los Angeles, and London and attended the Wharton Business School, where he may have spent as much time dropping acid (“It was legal then”), playing chess, and listening to John Coltrane as he did studying. The LSD apparently left most of his brain cells intact—he graduated on the dean’s list in 1966. Between his junior and senior years, he’d traveled from Tangiers to Kabul, and after getting his degree he settled in London. Soon after arriving there, he imported a few embroidered Afghani coats and sold them to a groovy shop on the Kings Road called Granny Takes a Trip. “I hope you’ve got a lot of those coats, mate,” the owner said to him one day, “because the Beatles just bought four of them.” When the coats appeared on the cover of Magical Mystery Tour, in 1967, Sams understood just how profitable being ahead of the curve could be.
Somewhere in his travels, Sams had contracted hepatitis, and in his attempts to heal himself, he discovered organic foods, and, in particular, the wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free diet known as macrobiotics. It wasn’t long before he’d opened a string of macrobiotic restaurants in Notting Hill, and, soon after, introduced brown rice, organic peanut butter, and fruit-sweetened jams to the consumer market. With these enterprises, as well as with others, he managed to turn a profit but was eventually muscled out by companies with deeper pockets. “My history has been that of being first. I’m not the kind who goes out and tries to undercut the competition. But I’ve always done the stuff that other people aren’t doing and ended up being destroyed by people with more money.”
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.
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.