Now, though, many of the opinions that were held by the Left-leaning devotees of mung beans and carob in my youth have become the preserve of the Right — and especially of its weirder online subcultures. Here, enthusiasm for raw milk and animal protein (especially, for some reason, raw eggs) join an aversion to touching shop receipts and views such as “feminism has harmed men and is actively anti-civilisation” and “democracy is fake“, as well as a range of even more pungent anti-progressive talking-points.

Perhaps the two food chain talking-points that recur most frequently and vehemently, though, are hostility to soy (which has become a metonym for emasculation due to its rumoured feminising content) and to “seed oils” such as canola, palm and sunflower oils.

And when a new California startup announced this week that it’s taking aim at environmentally destructive vegetable oils, it received disgusted pushback from Right-wing health-freaks. Zero Acre Farms, with backers including the Branson family and Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr, said yesterday that it’s raised $37m to launch a new, “healthier” substitute for vegetable oil, made “by fermentation”.

It was launched with a rallying call to the seed oil haters. It didn’t go down well: biotech industrial complex wants to destroy farming and sell you synthetic garbage! It’s a familiar refrain to me, having grown up around eaters of health food. But unlike in my childhood, today this line of argument no longer comes from the Left.

More from this author

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

This reaction, and the broader political realignment on health food, both make more sense when you dig into the business of fat: who makes and sells it, who eats it — and who gains or loses.

Until the industrial era, human-edible fats were mostly obtained from dairy products or rendered meat. The dawn of science and large-scale manufacturing, though, inspired innovators to seek new sources of oil — and new ways to use industrial byproducts. In the process, mechanical methods were invented for extracting palatable vegetable oils, especially from seeds.

In turn, a new ecosystem of scientific research and marketing sprang up to promote the benefits of these new, industrially-produced ingredients. “Tonight’s the night Mrs Ed Flynn starts Polyunsaturating her husband”, declares a mid-Fifties advert for Mazola corn oil in National Geographic. According to this advert, “medical authorities” advise replacing “solid fats” — by which is meant lard and dripping — with “more highly polyunsaturated vegetable oils”, which scientific authorities now declared to be healthier and more beneficial.

I’ve seen the manufacturing of “medical authorities” from the inside. Of all the many jobs I’ve held, in the course of my extremely chequered employment history, hands down the most unpleasant was a brief stint as marketing executive at a small PR outfit that specialised in “nutraceuticals”. That is, chemically-derived additives for the junk-food industry.

The company’s work proceeded roughly as follows: on behalf of nutraceutical manufacturers, it would arrange for scientists to produce “studies” showing that the chemical in question had health benefits, or didn’t cause the harm it was being accused of. Then hapless 20-somethings (me in this case) would try and persuade journalists to write enthusiastic articles about this newly laundered “science”.

Suggested reading

Are diet pills immoral?

By Tom Chivers

Such hapless 20-somethings would also be in charge of responding to angry letters, written in all caps, from consumers suspicious that they were being lied to. Which they weren’t. At least, not exactly. And yet what they were being fed had the same relationship to truth as aspartame does to sugar. The work felt profoundly cynical. I didn’t last long.

What I learned from that brief, inglorious experience was that the tinfoil hatters are, to an extent, right. Big Business really does use scientific discourse to launder the reputation of deeply questionable food additives, in the name of profit. And this was once a standard talking-point for Left-wing junk-food haters.

The rant would segue from grumbling about “processed food” being unhealthy, to a broader attack on the immense, well-funded commercial infrastructure dedicated to pushing high-fat, low-nutrition products into the nation’s shopping trolleys. In other words: the evils of junk food stand for the evils of Big Business, and a scientific establishment seemingly in hock to its commercial interests. In practice, the critique of processed foods is a profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-technology one. But now, the modern Left has expelled anti-capitalist, anti-technology voices entirely, instead embracing science, technology and Big Business as key delivery partners for its vision of utopia.

This has been a long time coming. Back in the mung bean days, the Anglophone Left was still the historic, improbable blend of well-meaning bourgeois idealists and the industrial working class. But as de-industrialisation shrunk and dispossessed that industrial base, the bourgeois half of the coalition grew dominant: a process commentators have for a decade now condemned as “the gentrification of the Left“.

People in glass houses are famously advised not to throw stones. And as the progressive worldview has become more monolithically elite in class terms, it’s also lost its antagonism to Big Business. Perhaps the hinge decade for this was the Blair era, when “social enterprise” emerged as a policy watchword and everyone sincerely believed that business could and should be a force for good. And in the grisly aftermath the 2008 Great Crash, the radical, anti-capitalist Left of yore both enjoyed its last hurrah and suffered utter defeat.

Far from helping to hold Big Finance to account, progressive ideology instead served to kill the anti-capitalist Left as a political force. The Occupy movement famously found itself paralysed by woke purity spirals: its participants spent so much time arguing about identity they never coordinated any kind of effective political action.

Suggested reading

What vegan propaganda ignores

By John Lewis-Stempel

With anti-capitalism now effectively neutered, wokeness has been domesticated as the house ideology for a new, socially-conscious capitalism — the kind that today receives full-throated endorsement in the Financial Times. Unsurprising, then, that the food industry is falling enthusiastically on new ways to dress the marketing of ultra-processed foods in the garb of scientifically-endorsed health — which now gives it a progressive sheen. The populist twentieth-century junk-food marketing message of healthy, affordable abundance has given way to an anxious twenty-first-century one of health, environmentalism and moral purity.

Consider “Veganuary“: a kind of secular Lent founded in 2014, that encourages people to eschew animal-origin foodstuffs in favour of a “plant-based” diet, in the name of saving the planet. This festival is enthusiastically promoted by retailers of “plant-based” foodstuffs, a market predicted to see explosive growth by 2030. Whether “mycoprotein” (aka fungus grown in vats) or synthetic “meat” made from soya, such products frequently contain large volumes of just the industrially-produced oils once heavily criticised by Left-wing opponents of junk food. So “Veganuary” is, in truth, a month-long PR festival for the ultra-processed food industry, complete with articles citing scientific studies that underline the health benefits of this way of eating.

Who can tell how many such studies are “sold in” by hapless 20-somethings miserably employed in food PR firms? Certainly the progressive emphasis rarely seems to be on cooking from scratch. That’s the preserve of dissident mutterers, expelled from polite discourse to fulminate out in the badlands about Big Business, Big Pharma, fake science and the perils of junk food. As one response to Zero Acre put it: “you want us cooking our fake vat-grown “meat” in fake microbe-extruded oil product in a pod somewhere”.

“Health” subcultures are increasingly Right-inflected, because what’s left of the resistance to industrial capitalism is also Right-inflected. But will the new defenders of natural food against the ravages of technocapital give up to commerce, like their progressive predecessors? Perhaps in another decade, this backlash will have been assimilated and regurgitated as Based Gainz Ready Meals. Let’s hope the new anti-capitalists are nimbler in avoiding this fate than their mung bean-eating forebears.

Back in 2006, Brafman had co-authored a popular book on organisational structures, The Starfish and the Spider, in which he compared the difference between biological organisms like the spider, which have a small head that controls its body, and the much stranger organisms, like the starfish, that don’t have a centralised structure but whose limbs can regenerate, even when severed from the main body. Chop off the spider’s head and the spider is dead. But the starfish doesn’t have a head and many of its functions have been decentralised, allowing it to keep going even when a major part of it has been cut off.

It turns out that the US Army was much taken with the spider and the starfish as metaphors for different organisational structures, mainly because of the trouble they were having with ISIS. The Army was a spider, with a strong command and control structure, while many terrorist organisations were radically decentralised, specifically designed to avoid infiltration or decapitation. And it worked – they were proving extremely difficult to destroy.

Writing a thesis at the US Military Academy at West Point a few years later, Major Luciano Picco explained why the US Army was having such trouble dealing with the starfish way of doing things.

“Due to a long history of success by embracing the hierarchical structure,” he wrote: “indications are that as a whole, the Army has a hard time conceptualising the decentralised ideas presented by Mission Command and inculcating those notions throughout the Army.”

But it wasn’t just the Army that was getting interested in Brafman’s ideas. Ten years ago this month the Occupy movement first arrived at Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district, proclaiming the slogan “We are the 99%”.

But it wasn’t just the message that was radical, it was also the way they organised themselves — the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone “in charge”. Despite the need of the media to isolate leaders around whom to tell the story of a movement, Occupy operated on starfish principles. It was held together not by some central leadership group, but by a shared sense of conviction. Policies would not be handed down from a central committee, but would emerge from assemblies of the faithful.

This was a real headache for those tasked with negotiating with the protesters. When I was involved with the dispute between Occupy and St Paul’s Cathedral, it was clear that the City of London authorities, the Police and the Cathedral couldn’t quite understand what they were up against.

Their instinct was to approach Occupy with the familiar request “take me to your leader” — after which they would negotiate with them and perhaps strike some sort of deal. But there wasn’t a leader, and because of this the authorities had little idea what to do. From the Occupy perspective this meant there was no one who could sell them out, no central figure(s) who could be discredited or strong-armed into compromise. The spider had no idea how to deal with the starfish.

More from this author

The Church is on the brink of revolt

By Giles Fraser

The police eventually cleared the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in February 2012, evicting the protestors. But that was not the last that the police saw of these faces. Over the years, many of the same people who were there went on to help set up Extinction Rebellion and were also influential in other protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

The aims morphed and adapted, and new limbs to the protest movement were grown – ideas were “emergent”, to use the organisational jargon. You cannot evict an idea. And this model is not just a feature of the Left. The Tea Party movement was just as horizontally organised. After all, who was its leader? It’s hard to say. Does it even matter?

Unfortunately, the Church of England learned very little from its encounter with Occupy. Just this week it was unveiling a new plan for its future organisational structure, and it is a doubling down on the whole centralising tendency that has been going on for the last 30 or so years. Just as protest movements were out there “taking the knee”, Church leaders were poring over their spread-sheets and flow charts.

More from this author

Why I'll never vote Tory again

By Giles Fraser

Organisationally, the Church of England is a mess of overlapping and competing powers — bishops, synods, councils, pension boards, parliament, parishes — which is a real irritation to the pathologically tidy-minded. Formed as a shotgun marriage between two very different, perhaps incommensurable, approaches to religious authority — the Catholic and the Protestant — it’s little wonder the Church of England is an organisational hotchpotch.

Calling for greater “clarity”, this new plan announces that there is a “considerable confusion… about decision-making authority, a lack of understanding about which decisions different bodies are empowered to make and how those decisions are reached.”

So this review proposes a new body to take over most of the central functions of the Church. And inevitably it has an organisational flow chart and an acronym CENS – the Church of England National Services. Now there’s a rallying point to stir the blood and drop the faithful to their knees in wonder!

It’s as if the Church has decided to invest in Blockbuster Videos just as everyone else is switching to Netflix. All over the world, decentralised systems are on the ascendency. The Taliban have seen off the US Army. Blockchain technology has allowed radically decentralised crypto currencies like Bitcoin to flourish. eBay may have a CEO, but its real power lies in the millions on mini-encounters between buyers and sellers.

As Brafman observes in a more recent book, The Chaos Imperative, it is often from the edge of human networks that the serendipitous encounters driving innovation and creativity take place. In Church terms, these edges are called parishes — often small, semi-independent pockets of half-organised goodness, spreading out into their communities rhizomatically.

Suggested reading

Why I gave up on Extinction Rebellion

By Poppy Coburn

On this traditional model, the bishop is not primarily a leader or a manager. He or she is concerned with the promulgation of doctrine, renewing the core message with inspiration, and the care of the clergy — a vicar to the vicars. These days, unfortunately, we have too often dulled their spirit by locking them in committees and chaining them to laptops to write bloodless reports. And the parishes are becoming sucked into this whole top-down managerialism led by bishops who go on leadership courses and do half-baked MBAs. God save us from people with MBAs.

What Brafman maintains is that the crucial thing keeping inherently messy organisations together is a belief in the cause. They don’t even need better management flow charts, they don’t need more command and control – often less of it – they need better preachers. And the Holy Spirit has no need of acronyms.

The Church is becoming more spider-like just as everyone else is learning the power of being more like a starfish.