AP: As a child of the 60s and a Berkeley radical, I know you have done a lot of psychedelics. Tell me about some of your first experiences with these drugs.
GS: Every experience with psychedelics has the potential to be a first experience, but the chronologically first times were at University in Berkeley when I lived near Strawberry Canyon, which rose steeply behind the campus, and overlooked the football stadium. I remember the roaring of the crowd evoking within me scenes of the Roman Coliseum. Walking straight up the side of the canyon, I felt like there were magic boots powering every step. When at the top of the hill I would stare into the Sun for minutes at a time, suffering no damage whatever from it. I still get feelings of enhanced power from LSD, but cannot stare at the Sun and would question my own clear memory of doing this, had I not met several other people who have had the same experience.
AP: What did you learn from psychedelics? (Was it anything specific or just pure creative thought and feeling?)
GS: I've learned everything I know from life, but many of my greatest perceptions and understandings have come about through psychedelic use, or at least been enhanced by them. Many times one will already understand something based upon logic or experience, but in the psychedelic state will come to know it feel it see it clearly. And, of course, the sort of intensive ecstatic joy that can be experienced in a psychedelic state carries tremendous healing powers that can often be directed at particular ailments. I have used them many times to sort out minor and sometimes quite serious problems, though have never gotten my spinal nerves to re-join.
AP: Did you ever meet Timothy Leary?
GS: No, but I know many people who were close to him and tell me that we should have met and would have gotten on well.
AP: What did you think about him and what did you learn from him?
GS: He very clearly shared my own understanding of the huge relevance of chaos theory to human society and culture. I love the way he expressed this understanding as well, in print and on video. In that he was one of the primary instigators of the psychedelic era, I am forever in his debt both spiritually and intellectually.
AP: How did you come up with the VegeBurger®? Describe your first attempts at making it?
GS: Jumping around a bit here. I developed it in 1982 after a bout of hepatitis stopped me from getting into the office for a couple months. Stuck at home I was going stir crazy, and the company was also in deep doo doo financially, so I created this product in order to save our bacon, so to speak. After all the pioneering work from brown rice to pumpkin seeds I realized that there's always somebody else who can put a pound of rice in a bag cheaper that you. We needed something unique, with a name, that nobody else could just copy once it was successful. A vegetarian burger fit the bill, and I chose the name from a list I made up including greenburger, earthburger, plantburger and others. It was not considered descriptive and I got a trade mark on it without difficulty.
VegeBurger was designed to be produced under contract with no increase in company overheads. I spent a few months developing the recipe, trying umpteen different tweaks of formulation and ingredient before getting it right. I knew I was getting close the first time my then-wife Sandy asked for a second bite of the sample I proffered her.
But neither the bank nor investors any faith in some new product that they assumed would be a failure, so after 15 years of building it from scratch I left Harmony Foods/Whole Earth, in order to devote myself to the VegeBurger. I gave my (worthless) shares to brother Craig, who took on the role of MD and Chairman, eventually getting Whole Earth back on track, and using it as the base from which to eventually launch Green and Black's chocolates with his wife Jo Fairley.
AP: What was the famous Portobello road like in the days you had the restaurant and grain shop, Ceres? How have you seen Portobello change over the years?
GS: The best thing about the Portobello Road is that it is always changing. At the time that Craig and I moved Ceres from All Saint's Road to the Portobello, the Portobello Market did not extend past Lancaster Road. Now it proceeds all the way up to and including Goldbourne Road. It's a real market, and has so far resisted the efforts of Kensington and Chelsea council to organize it into neat little units, like the development at Covent Gardens.
AP: In 1990 you read James Gleick's book Chaos about the new science of Chaos Theory, and it inspired you so much that you opened up the first and only shop in the world — Strange Attractions — that was dedicated to Chaos Theory! Tell me about your first reading of that book and the thoughts that were going through your head.
GS: Reading James Gleick's book wove together many of the intellectual strings of my life into one strong cable that made more sense than they ever had individually. I was particularly struck by the relevance of chaos theory to how we run our society, since it clearly demonstrates the fallacy of trying to plan everything out in advance and then passing coercive laws to try and structure an "ideal" society rather than letting it structure itself. It was great that science recognized the self-organization that occurred in complex systems, even though science had no way at all to explain how this organization occurred.
Since I knew that scientists would be unlikely to apply chaos theory to non-scientific arenas such as social activity, I felt it was my duty to expose these ideas to the general public.
AP: Like thousands of others, I read that book too and found it fascinating, but nobody else thought of opening up a shop dedicated to it! You are a person who is not only exciting about ideas, but is actually prepared to get your hands dirty over them.
GS: If you say so. At the time I was racing like mad to be the first person to open such a shop, only to realize later that there had been nobody else in the race. I had ordered up tens of thousands of postcards before I even had a lease for a shop from which to sell them.
AP: What did your friends and family say about you opening a shop dedicated to Chaos Theory?
GS: If they thought I was crazy, they certainly didn't go so far as to tell me. I did try to get help from a couple of banks, who were most certainly not interested.
AP: Strange Attractions was very successful. Tell me about some of the individuals that used to frequent it and some of the connections that you made because of it.
GS: Quite a few eminent scientists made a point of visiting Strange Attractions, and even Arthur C. Clarke dropped by after seeing one of my flyposters on a wall and re-directing his taxi to the shop. I spent some time with him and he was kind enough to look through Uncommon Sense a few years later, and give me the great quote "Lots of good sense — seen nothing I disagree with."
Much of the clientele came from the new psychedelic trance party scene in the UK. Musicians, dj's and promoters were coming in and getting blown away by seeing, in print, the patterns and colours that they had been experiencing in some of their travels as psychonauts. I made friends with many of them, and when they all disappeared to Goa for the winter I ended up joining them and became very involved in that whole Goa party scene, re-immersing myself in a psychedelic culture that I had basically left in the early Seventies. This changed my life in so many positive ways that I have always seen the shop as being successful, despite the money which it lost.
AP: Did you ever have the chance to meet or communicate with James Gleick? Was he ever aware of the existence of Strange Attractions?
GS: We had one exchange of letters, but I never was really in touch with him.
