The harmless notion that good nutrition could aid the human body in fighting illnesses was so threatening in the late ‘60s that the FBI was willing to confiscate and burn books to suppress it.
Two major early champions of natural foods – and indomitable entrepreneurs—were two American brothers, Gregory and Craig Sams. Craig (who now owns Green & Black’s organic chocolate with his wife Josephine Fairley) was the cook who prepared food in his home for the short-lived UFO Club in London. He also imported books and pamphlets on the macrobiotic lifestyle from the Ohsawa Foundation in Los Angeles and sold them through the Indica Bookshop.
Craig was in New York the day the FBI raided a macrobiotic bookshop in the East Village. He wrote in 2005:
I visited [the macrobiotic restaurant Paradox] the same day I visited the macrobiotic bookshop – the day it was investigated by the FBI and told not to sell any books until they had reviewed their content (they contained illegal statements such as that poor diet could cause cancer and healthy diet could help cure cancer). Eventually all the books were taken away and burned.
The macrobiotic diet is not the countercultural revolution it once was, and some of its once radical tenets are now rather mainstream, such as sticking to unrefined, whole, natural food, grown locally and eaten in season. But in the late ‘60s, it was still underground.
The Sams brothers opened the first macrobiotic restaurant in London, Seed, in early 1968. The laid-back, Bedouin tent atmosphere of Seed was described by a visitor as feeling like somewhere he “might get stabbed or something.” Not at all what a typical vegan or raw food restaurant looks like today!
Craig recalled the layout of the restaurant and some of its more famous customers:
Seed had two rooms, in a big rambling basement of the [Gloucester] hotel. One had cushions on the floor set around tables made out of the 4-5 ft diameter reels that mains electrical cable was wound around, so customers met one another as there were no reservations and no exclusivity of tables in that room. In the other room there was a tent style hanging from the ceiling and normal square wooden tables with bentwood chairs.
—snip—
Marc Bolan of Tyrannosaurus Rex walked to Seed to get the free meal and it was at Seed that he met Mickey Finn, an event that rock historians cited when calling for a blue plaque for historical buildings to be put up on the site many years later. Regular visitors included John and Yoko, Terence Stamp, most of the Stones as well as vegetarian/macrobiotic activists and enthusiasts and most of the denizens of the Underground alternative culture that was springing up all over the country.
In his memoir, Jazz Christmas, Al Gromer Khan called Seed “restaurant, Zen monastery and doctor´s practice all in one, a subterranean place where guests sat cross-legged, setting standards for legions of psycho-analysts who came thirty or so years later, for us to get in touch with our inner selves.”
The Sams also started Ceres grain shops (that was how hard it was to find whole grains back then), the U.K.‘s first organic food shop, Ceres Bakery, the U.K.‘s first 100% wholemeal and sugar-free bakery, Ceres Bookshop, Green Genes Café (a “macrobiotic workingman’s café”), Harmony Foods (now Whole Earth Foods), and the original VegeBurger.
They also ambitiously catered the first Glastonbury and Isle of Wight festivals. Craig described the Glastonbury fare from 1970:
We were the only food suppliers at Glastonbury and all the festivalgoers either ate our food (muesli, brown rice, red bean stew, porridge, unleavened bread with tahini/miso spread) or brought their own. We also supplied some food to Sid Rawles, who led the Diggers, who gave out free food from the cowshed near the farmhouse up on the hill.
On the Sunday afternoon the local hot dog and ice cream vendors discovered there was a crowd at the farm and drove down to the site. They were met by the festivalgoers who blocked their route and rocked their vans, shouting ‘Out, Out Out’ until they turned around and disappeared.
Gregory Sams self-published three issues the exhaustively informative newsletter, Harmony, with recipes, vegetarian resources, articles about health, eco-consciousness, and nutrition. It was an ongoing counterdebate to the kinds of alarmist anti-vegetarian articles being published at the time, most notably Harvard professor Frederick Stare’s infamous Reader’s Digest article “The Hippie Diet That’s Killing Our Kids” (which, incidentally, if anyone has a link to the text of that article, please pass it along). John Lennon, a regular at Seed, contributed a cartoon to Harmony extolling the macrobiotic diet and Gregory’s evangelizing. Later the Sams brothers and their father published Seed: The Journal of Organic Living, which ran from 1971 to 1977.
John and Yoko and Chuck Berry assist at a macrobiotic cooking demonstration on The Mike Douglas Show, below: