You hear it all the time: life is tough; we have food, health, climate, housing, migration, poverty or some other crisis. We are all doomed unless we do x, y or z.

There is no doubt we need to innovate to survive, but how do we get the right innovation?

Now, I am not a builder, so I cannot help with the housing crisis, but I have been involved in growing food for most of my eighty-six years, so I do know a bit about how to grow food.

Victory gardens

As a toddler, I was used as child labour in one of the great innovations of the time: Victory gardens, which are sadly one of the great forgotten triumphs of innovation and change.

It was crisis time, and sometimes it needs a crisis to sweep away old thinking and allow change to occur. People, almost exclusively women who had no experience in growing food, were given crash courses in growing food and were let loose in groups to dig up any available land where grass was growing, verges, lawns and, Donald Trump, please note, even golf courses.

And it worked, and soon much of the fresh food was being produced by these female land armies.

It was a time of crisis, and people responded, changed how they operated, and were victorious.

Today’s food crisis

We are now in another food crisis. We may not see it, as the shops are full of food, but look at the people in the shops, count the number of people who are overweight, the number with a diabetic amputation; there are actually eight million diabetic amputations a year, and each amputation costs about $40,000.

Multiply 8 million by $40,000, and you get a big number with lots of zeros. Now you and I are paying for this through our Government taxes, and it is due to food. Now tell me there is no food crisis and there is no need for change.

Human beings are highly successful for two reasons: we are intelligent and naturally cooperative. All our great creations happen because we work together as united teams, and no one likes to upset the apple cart by saying we are doing it wrong.

So let me stick my neck out and say our food system is wrong, and we need to change it before we are in an even deeper crisis.

Innovation is a process

Now I have been in the innovation business for a long time and have been recognised as one of Australia’s leading innovators. Still, sadly, innovation is seen as some act of extreme brilliance, but it is not. It is a process and a skill that has to be learned, just like playing a violin.

One of the great innovators, Thomas Edison, laid down the rules of innovation over a hundred years ago.

The first stage is to study everything that is known about the topic, then put the books down and define what the problem actually is.

Almost certainly, there are preconceived ideas or paradigms that are widely accepted but wrong.

These old paradigms, or ways of thinking, need to be replaced by new paradigms that work.

Innovation is not about some brilliant idea that comes by magic, but by changing paradigms; the way we think and getting people to change the way they think is the biggest challenge any innovator faces.

The calorie paradigm

Let me give you one example of a paradigm that is firmly entrenched, but it's just plain wrong.

Virtually every book on diet says people get fat because they eat more calories than they burn. It sounds so obviously true, so how can it be wrong?

It sounds convincing because eating more than we burn is the mechanism that people get fat, but it is not the cause.

The cause is failure of the intelligent control system that regulates our bodies and decides how much fat we should store. It sends signals that make us feel hungry, and then we eat more than we burn.

Are you looking for evidence? Look at the number of people who go on a diet, loose weight then a few months later they are as fat or even fatter than before.

A total failure.

GLP-1 and our intelligent control system

I am not a proponent of GLP-1, but look what happens when you start using it.

GLP-1 is a hormone our bodies naturally produce that stops us from feeling hungry; it is part of the natural, intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.

But take this as a synthetic hormone and people stop feeling hungry and eating and turn into broomsticks.

Our bodies naturally exude GLP-1 for a short time but the synthetic versions are long term.

Why people should want to be broomsticks and whether it is healthy to be a weak and wobbly broomstick is another question. Still, it shows that people get fat and sick because of instructions from our intelligent control system and not simply because we eat more than we burn.

The innovation business

Innovation is never a pleasant business.

Many people resist change; there is an old saying that science advances one funeral at a time.

Most people are happy to wait and watch, but a few pioneers with vision understand the importance of change and are willing participants.

These pioneers are more than welcome into the Gbiota club because they will help create the change.

But the food industry's structure is dominated by giant corporations whose financial strength rivals that of a nation, and they operate on the principle of maximising profits for their shareholders.

As you may read in the article on energy and metabolic foods, they have a vested interest in promoting energy food over metabolic food.

The basic inputs for energy food are simple - sunlight, carbon dioxide from the air and rain, which are free or involve minimal management costs.

By contrast, metabolic food is complex and requires skill.

But these giant corporations are not responsible for what economists call externalities. If you need to have a foot amputated, they are not held responsible even though deficiencies in their products were the underlying cause.

Something, apart from the pioneers, would rather not think about.

How to get going

You can read a few articles on metabolic food for free in the header Why metabolic food, then decide whether to join.

If you join, you get access to articles on how to grow metabolic food under the heading growing metabolic food.

I have written hundreds of articles over the last thirty years, which you can access in the library. There are also many videos which you can watch directly from my YouTube channel ‘Gbiota’ or the more relevant ones from the section on videos.

And yes, I may be old but I am real person and always pleased to hear from like minded people so you can always email me.