People weren't as sophisticated as
we are now. Very little of what we did
was organic because the only thing you
could actually get that was organic was
wheat flour, fair trade was... it wasn't
there. Macrobiotic principles are no
sugar, whole grains, eat a diet
predominant in grains and vegetables, don't
eat any processed or factory-farmed meat,
justice - so make sure that what you're
doing hasn't hurt somebody else, yeast
avoidance - these are all things that our
kind of common now but they all sounded
wacky at the time.
We had to make our market you know, one customer at a time.
It was all about education. Now we're in
a situation where you know, I've seen
this with... in the natural food business -
there was a show a couple of weeks ago
at the Excel Centre, there were dozens of
new companies, there must be 20 companies
doing organic chocolate alone. People are
coming up with organic tea organic... the
idea of small brands being able to break
into markets was unheard of in those days.
I think the biggest impacts have
been... are manifested in the way we eat
today... people started
changing the way they ate right then and
there you know, the seeds... we
call the restaurant Seed because we were
planting a seed of something that would
grow but it grew incredibly slowly
compared to what we expected but you
know, we registered the name 'ying yang' because
we thought that philosophical worldview
would predominate and we owned it and we
could put it on our products and that
sort of thing. But it did change you know,
we published a magazine called Seed a
few years later and it all continued to
build and build and then the children of
those people started influencing their
peers and now we have a situation where
people take organic food for granted,
they eat whole grains - brown rice
sales are expanding exponentially -
people have discovered all these other
things like quinoa and chia seeds but
people who actually are
conscious of diet or eating better and
better.
Even people who aren't are just by
default going into Marks and Spencers or
Pret Manger or places like that and getting
food that no longer has hydrogenated fat
and all the additives and colorings and
pesticide residues that we used to just
accept. You know, we got lead out of the
air, that was a hippy who sued BP and
Shell in the eighties for lead poisoning
in his son. All these things we took for
granted in the sixties and just started
to question. The progress has been...
well there has been progress.
It hasn't been as I said quite as
impressive as one would have hoped but
it's happened. The whole environmental
thing started then
and again it was people in a heightened
state of awareness looking around and
thinking 'It shouldn't be like this, it
doesn't have to be like this, how did we
get this numbness?' And then... alright poets
like Blake and Shelley wrote about it
150 years ago but they came from a world
where there was still a clearer,
cleaner world out there. We were in a
world where there wasn't... you know, you go
into Kensington Gardens and that was as
close as you've got to nature unless you
went
out in the country.