Peter Deadman

I co-founded and worked with Infinity Foods from the late 1960s until 1978 and co-wrote (with Karen Betteridge) a book called Nature's Foods, a non-Japanese vision of natural and macrobiotic eating inspired by a romantic attachment to English rural and American homesteading traditions ...
 
It was 1966 and I was just eighteen and in my first (and only) year at university. Somebody told me about the brown rice diet and it seemed an interesting way to get pure and high at the same time. Unfortunately I somehow got the idea that the rice had to be eaten raw, so after a day and a half my teeth and stomach hurt and I gave up.

Over the next couple of years I got to know a bit more about brown rice and natural foods, learnt to bake bread and cook a few simple dishes. Then, at the end of an extended trip to Morocco, living the hippy life to the full, I caught a bad case of hepatitis (A). Lying on what felt at times to be my deathbed, I read a book by George Ohsawa that seemed to promise fantastic health in just ten days. When I got back to England, emaciated, still bright yellow and pretty weak, I took myself off in a tent to a local hilltop and cooked brown rice over a camp fire for ten days. I got weaker still, and my body came out in pus-filled boils, but deep down I figured this was the right thing to do, even though at the end my health was still far from perfect.

I had spent the previous couple of years travelling, smoking dope, taking acid, being young, thrilled and ecstatic, but being the child of a Jewish and Scottish protestant mix, my subtext was that I had to do something with my life, and my inability to find a path that I could believe in caused an undercurrent of desperation. Now, fresh from my hilltop retreat, I decided macrobiotics was that path. After failing to get a job at Seed (the UK's first macrobiotic restaurant), maybe because I was still yellow, I drifted back to Brighton - scene of my abortive university career, and wondered how I could start a macrobiotic restaurant with absolutely no money. Fate threw me together with Ian Loeffler who not only burned with the same idea but was the proud possessor of £300 from an insurance claim following a broken leg in a traffic accident.

Somehow we managed to persuade the Sussex University students' union to let us hire a big basement restaurant and opened 'Biting Through' probably the world's first student macrobiotic restaurant. We didn't know much about cooking - certainly in bulk - but after we'd scrubbed the place clean of accumulated hamburger grease, we started serving brown rice, vegetables, seaweed, unyeasted bread and beans to our undiscriminating customers. I say undiscriminating because, blessed with the cast-iron digestions of the young, and with no spare cash, they hoovered up our cheap heavyweight fare by the pot load. As for us, we literally ran for ten hours a day serving up hundreds of meals, assisted by all kinds of volunteers inspired by the idealism (we didn't believe in profit) and the fun.

 As time went by, we found more and more people knocking at the kitchen door asking to buy rice, wholewheat flour and muesli, and decided to open a shop. Once again lack of money seemed an insurmountable barrier until the day Andy the Anarchist turned up to do his voluntary vegetable chopping looking glum. His problem was an aunt who had died and left him some money. As Andy didn't believe in private property, our offer to relieve him of it brought a smile back to his face.

But with such limited funds it took a while to find the perfect shop - tiny, hidden away, and very cheap to rent. As soon as I walked in and saw it I knew it was the one, only to be told by the estate agent that he had just assigned the lease. That was a Friday afternoon, and I walked around town all weekend in a state of agitated disbelief, focused on the single thought that this was our shop and we had to have it. When I rang the agent first thing Monday morning to see if reality had changed I found out that the man who had signed for the lease had died over the weekend and the shop was now available.

That became the first Infinity Foods. To start with we had as few as two or three customers a day, and we knew we had to find a way to supplement our microscopic takings. Festival catering was the answer, and starting with the first Glastonbury Festival, and taking in various megarock events on the way, we took our message of cheap, healthy and plentiful food on the road, cooking up vats of lentil soup and rice and turning out meals by the thousand.

In the years that followed, we moved to a larger shop in a better location (Brighton's famous North Laines, which I think it's fair to say Infinity helped transform from a run-down low-rent neighbourhood to an exciting creative and sadly now high-rent neighbourhood). We ran a small market garden to feed the shop with organic vegetables, took on the shop next door and turned it into a bakery, started a natural foods distribution business, and, from the ruins of a suspicious blaze that burned down the warehouse at the back of the shop, created The Brighton Natural Health Centre (http://www.bnhc.co.uk), a charity whose aims are to teach self-health care - mainly tai chi, qigong, yoga and dance. The BNHC has recently celebrated its 25th birthday, whilst Infinity is close to a venerable 35 years.

I left Infinity Foods in 1978 to start a career in Chinese medicine, but stayed long enough to help with the transition of the business from a de facto co-operative to a legally bound workers co-operative, which it remains today. At the time of the changeover, the business was owned by myself, my wife Jenny, and Robin Bines. Although by this time the business had grown significantly, was employing 10-15 people, and was becoming profitable, we believed that true to the spirit in which it had been founded and its core beliefs, as well as the contribution of so many people over the years, Infinity Foods should not belong to anyone. This means that if Infinity is ever sold, the profits have to be given to another co-operative that has the same ideals. These are the provision of natural and organic foods at prices that people can afford.

In the early 1970s I co-wrote (with Karen Betteridge) a book called Nature's Foods. It was our contribution to a non-Japanese vision of natural and macrobiotic eating and was inspired by a romantic attachment to English rural and American homesteading traditions. Beautifully handwritten by Karen and full of her lovely drawings (all very quaint now) it sold reasonably well and helped fund my way through acupuncture college.

My own experience of macrobiotic eating and philosophy was mixed. It was certainly a tool which helped turn my life around, and expressing my enthusiasm for it through the channel of Infinity Foods further changed my life. It probably helped change my health too but that was more of a mixed experience since I suspect the mixture of unremitting hard labour (humping sacks day and night) and low protein food may have contributed to periods of chronic fatigue that I suffered intermittently. Perhaps like others, the sicker I felt, the more strictly I tried to apply the diet.

I was pretty keen on the ideology at the time and went to several Michio Kushi seminars. But slowly I began to turn away from strict macrobiotics. There were two events I remember very clearly, both whilst I was at seminars. The first was the final Michio Kushi seminar I went to. He was demonstrating facial diagnosis on students and was pointing to one guy's particularly long nose and asking the class what dietary excess the poor guy had indulged in to produce it. As the class shouted out the usual culprits 'sugar', 'dairy', 'meat', Michio shook his head knowingly. Finally he put us out of our misery. "Too many cucumbers" he said, ignoring the subject's assertions that he'd hardly ever eaten a cucumber in his life. I suddenly realised I had too much intelligence and self-respect to listen to this kind of stuff any more.

The second seminar was with Dr. John Shen, a great 'old doctor' of Chinese medicine. Interviewing a patient in front of the class, he was dismayed to find that she would not take his remedy of chicken boiled with Dang Gui (Chinese angelica, a blood nourishing herb) because she was vegetarian. Perhaps deliberately acting dumb, he lamented that she was "too weak" to eat chicken, told us how when he was a young man he could eat ten eggs at a sitting because he had such a good digestion, and reluctantly prescribed an all-vegetarian alternative to the patient. This was an important glimpse into a radically different view of diet, one in which every substance that could be eaten had its own special property that one could use well, and one which also celebrated the pleasures of eating to the full.

For me, there was a paradox at the heart of my macrobiotic phase. On the one hand I believed, and still do, that a healthy diet is a fundamental part of a healthy life. I was, and still am, passionate about organic food, and although I eat considerably more animal food than I used to, I cannot deny the fairness and justice of eating mostly vegetarian foods. I am also very much aware how dietary research over the last decade has dramatically confirmed that eating a diet rich in organically grown whole grains, vegetables, fruits and nuts, and low in dairy foods and red meat, is the healthiest diet for the majority of people. And I am saddened that the stampede towards natural and organic foods over the last few years has increasingly become another consumer indulgence, divorced from the wider context of social and economic justice and environmental awareness (oh look, organic guava juice just flown in from the far east).

However I also think that macrobiotics - at least as I knew it - was dangerously narrow. As Mencken famously said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails". Disease can be caused by numerous factors, of which diet is only one. Whilst an improvement in diet will help most people, it is not necessarily the primary tool for helping many people with their health problems. And for some people, a dietary regimen can be part of the problem rather than the solution. When certain kinds of disharmonies prevail (Liver qi stagnation for example), we are prone to obsessive behaviour, and an obsession with diet, for example, can just exacerbate the problem. It can also prolong avoidance of what might be much more important issues.

In fact I sometimes feel that there is a fine line between the desire to control diet on the one hand and an eating disorder on the other. Eating radically differently from one's family, friends and the culture we live in can be a mark of the anorexic as much as the vegan/raw food eater/macrobiotic, offering a similar sense of uniqueness, separation and control. During the stricter periods of my own macrobiotic phase, I couldn't even sit down and eat at friends' tables.

And as something of a gourmet in my later years, I wonder why choosing the vegetarian dishes in, for example Arab, Indian or Thai restaurants, can be so much more delicious and enjoyable than eating in many vegetarian or macrobiotic restaurants. I suspect there may be a self-flagellating tendency (so easy to get into in a Judeo-Christian culture) than finds virtue in the self-denial of dull, bland and heavy food. Or maybe it's just that when people start cooking certain kinds of food for ideological reasons, they forget the basic arts of the chef.

Clearly, and happily, my thoughts on food and diet have changed over the years, and I hope they will continue to do so, as with all aspect of my life.

Since I don't know how to end this piece with a resounding phrase, I'll quote something I particularly like from Romeo & Juliet by Mr. W. Shakespeare:

O mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones and their true qualities.
For nought so vile, that on the earth doth live,
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor ought so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified."