World’s Best Burger

Rankin uses fermented veg (right) to create his plant-based burgers.

f you’re a vegan, or a flexitarian, or perhaps, like me, just prefer to swerve bacon rolls now and then, my local supermarket has a place for you.

It’s located, somewhat counter-intuitively, a little way past the many fruits and vegetables on offer in most shops these days. Evidently, the abundant cavolo nero, Jerusalem artichokes, choi sum and Romanesco broccoli are not the right sort of meat-free fare.

Instead, the chilled cabinets marked “Plant-Based and Vegetarian” are directly opposite the processed meats and picnic snacks – pork pies, cocktail sausages and anthropomorphised five-packs of Peperami. As it transpires, this is entirely apt. Very little in the Plant-Based and Vegetarian cabinets is fresh, nor what one might refer to as “everyday edible plant matter”. Certainly, there’s no shortage of choice – you can pick up a couple of Quorn’s Mozzarella & Pesto Escalopes; or maybe some of Wicked Kitchen’s Italian Inspired Amazeballs (really); or, of course, a tray of Beyond Meat’s Plant-Based Burgers. But there’s nothing here that actually resembles a plant, nor something you might hope to find in a vegetarian cookbook. In fact, most of it looks about as salutary as a Big Mac. It’s a sight that’s stranger to behold the more you think about it. And it’s one of the bewildering paradoxes at the heart of the meat versus plant-based debate. There’s a lot to chew on – and not much of it is very palatable.

Raising The Fakes

How did we get here? There can be no doubt that the effects on our environment from global consumption habits and agricultural practice are . . . bad. As a teenager, I would play The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder and nod darkly at Morrissey’s admonitions before tucking into Mum’s cottage pie. Things have changed – or at least, we have caught up. Morrissey was concerned with the animals; now the focus has become the planet. Agriculture is responsible for more water consumption than any other human endeavour, and of this around one-third goes on livestock. Meanwhile, one-third of all arable land is cultivated to feed said livestock, which in turn is accountable for 14.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Beef production is thought to represent just under half of this figure.

Statistics such as these, along with influential documentaries, such as 2014’s Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, have been instrumental in shifting consumer opinion and behaviour, albeit on a relatively micro level in global terms. But it was when they caught the attention of businessmen with rather larger ambitions that we began to see the market shift in unprecedented ways. A 2019 New Yorker profile of Pat Brown, the now 67-year-old biochemist, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, describes

Neil Rankin set out to create a burger with flavour that doesn’t cost the earth.

the entrepreneurial game changer in swashbuckling terms. “The use of animals in food production is by far the most destructive technology on earth” was Brown’s portentous opening gambit. “We see our mission as the last chance to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.”

He’s certainly having a crack. The Impossible Burger is, according to the California-based company’s own literature, a composite of soya and potato proteins, sunflower and coconut oils, plus methylcellulose and food starch as binders – a combo it also describes, contestably, as “packed with nutrients”. Progress has been swift. His first patty launched in restaurants in 2016 and presently counts thousands among them, including Burger King, now home of the Impossible Whopper. Brown’s impact and persistence have been undeniably impressive. Such rapid expansion has led to Impossible Foods receiving a multibilliondollar valuation, though the brand’s mission statement remains true to its founder’s word: “Eat meat. Save the planet”.

There are other players in the game, of course. LA’s Beyond Meat is on a par with – if not bigger than – Impossible Foods,

Like Impossible’s Pat Brown, Rankin has a background in science – he studied physics at Salford University – though this is where any similarity ends. Rankin turned his head to cooking relatively late but quickly made his name as a man who knew his way around a hunk of meat and a naked flame. Having held senior roles at Barbecoa and Pitt Cue, he went on to launch the Smokehouse restaurant brand and Temper, with its focus on “whole-animal barbecue”. However, in 2019, he announced that he would be taking a step back from the Temper operation and spending some time developing a sustainable plant-based project. “It pisses me off that vegan has gone down the processed route,” he said at the time. “I want to be able to grow my own burger in my backyard.”

The rapid conversion from butcher to salad spinner wasn’t as unexpected as it might sound. “Temper was originally my route to sustainability – taking whole animals, breaking them down ourselves, using every last bit,” he says. “But I got a little disenchanted with the solution being meat-based. At the same time, I could see the trajectory the whole plant-based thing was heading in, and I thought, What’s going on? I think it was when I first tried something at Honest Burgers that used a Beyond Meat patty. I was faced with people who I really respect, who have always used great, simple, ingredients, resorting to what I can only describe as being a piece of shit.

“I thought, well, there must be a way to do this better. You know, I make nice food with vegetables at home. There are chefs making amazing vegetable and vegetarian dishes. If you go to L’Enclume or Noma, then you can get incredible food that’s often pretty much vegan-based. Meanwhile, I’d been playing around with fermenting stuff since my days at Pitt Cue. We used to have this fermented mushroom dish on the menu that was as popular as any meat dish. So my thinking was that if there’s going to be an alternative, you’ve got to have a wider choice [than] just either a plate of roasted veg or a highly processed protein burger. For me, there needed to be an element of deliciousness, using ingredients you love, from producers you love, travelling the shortest possible distance from farm to table. So I started to experiment myself.”

both in terms of its reach and the speed at which it has gained traction. Founded in 2009 by the businessman and environmentalist Ethan Brown, the brand’s global market value was estimated to be $9bn by late 2021. You can find its meat substitutes in McDonald’s, Byron Burger and, as said before, in supermarkets. Like Impossible, Beyond Meat’s products are the brainchildren of scientists in white coats (the Beyond Burger contains 18 ingredients), though its backers are rather more high-profile figures – Snoop Dogg is an investor, as is Leonardo DiCaprio. The consensus among market analysts is that the popularity of these brands is greatest among millennials and Gen-Zers because they see them as a way of getting their toothsome fastfood fix in greener, healthier packages. And yet for many, in that one sentence alone, there are at least three bones of contention.

Accounting For Taste

Across the Atlantic, two units on a small industrial estate in a nondescript part of north-west London represent the headquarters of Symplicity Foods, a fledgling albeit pioneering plant-based food business. Sat at a spartan table on a mezzanine above the factory floor, Symplicity’s co-founder, Neil Rankin, is considering my question about the motive behind his transition from acclaimed chef and barbecue aficionado to producer of groundbreaking meat substitutes. What did he initially set out to achieve?

“Well,” he says, his native Edinburgh accent firmly intact, “I just wanted it to taste fucking good.”

Starting Small…

Rankin began, not in a lab, but in his modest home kitchen. He examined every vegetable and plant-based ingredient he’d ever worked with, along with spices and flavour combinations that he knew worked well. He found a particular kind

of relationship between certain tomatoes, beetroots, mushrooms and onions. He dived deep into the fermentation process, playing with various misos and tamaris, going on to produce about 400 different ferments until he settled on a deep umami flavour base that he liked. This living, cultured approach, Rankin reasoned, was preferable because it increased the health benefits, promoting the growth of probiotic bacteria in the gut. It also had the ironic advantage of making vegetables taste less like, well, vegetables – in the same way that wine tastes different to grapes, with more complex, layered flavours. When it came to bringing it all together, he settled on gluten from wheat flour as a base because he knew from age-old bakery techniques that wheat binds.

Eventually he came up with a product that he thought tasted great. What’s more, he had created it in his backyard, or thereabouts. The next step, of course, was to see what other people thought. Rankin opened a small joint on east London’s Brick Lane called Simplicity Burger to try to promote it – or, at least, “to test it out to make sure it wasn’t just bullshit”, he says. “It’s fine me doing it in my own kitchen, then getting excited at 3am and phoning up a neighbour asking them to taste it. But that’s not the real world.” The step change was significant. Rankin’s team had to produce up to 400 burgers a day; come up with salads, sauces, cheese and sides to go with them; and have their food tasted by the press and the public, as well as interested parties. Gratifyingly, the response was positive. Shake Shack was keen. Dishoom came in. Homeslice immediately spotted the potential. “All these people turned up, tried it and were blown away,” he says. “At that point, it was the only zero-chemical vegan burger being sold in that way.”

By this time, Rankin was learning more and more about the wider process, which not only allowed his skills as a chef to prosper, but also increased his dissatisfaction with the approach taken by the likes of Impossible and Beyond Meat. “One of the problems I have with these companies is that the amount of waste is huge,” he says. “We have less waste than them, but it’s there. So what we started to do was construct things from that waste material. For instance, we were making a cheese out of tomato water. But then we’d have leftover pulp, so we started making a ketchup out of that. There was still too much pulp, so then we mixed it with the mince to make a vegan ’nduja. And so on. Some of the burgers were really brittle because we don’t use chemicals, so with that waste we started making a Thai larb salad. We tried to use everything. In truth, it was similar to the approach I had taken with whole-animal butchery and Temper. I just realised that we could be more efficient in terms of waste and cost.” . . . And Thinking Big

Simplicity Burger made its point, but the small scale meant that it wasn’t ever going to be a transformative business. For that to happen, it needed Mark Wogan, founder of Homeslice Pizza, to come on board. “We had been pushing more towards a plant-based menu for some time,” says Wogan, “because pizza is such an obvious vehicle for it. But we found that all we were really doing was cooking vegetables well. What we could never find was a cheese replacement that didn’t taste like cat sick blended with sawdust, frankly. Meanwhile, I’d been an admirer of what Neil had been doing. So we got talking, and we kept coming back to each other, and then ironically [an] opportunity came at the beginning of lockdown. Neil needed somewhere to make this stuff and I had a load of restaurants sitting empty. So that’s where the business partnership – Symplicity Foods – developed from. Our joint starting position was simply: how do you do this properly? Because there’s lots of stuff out there, and you see rows of it in the supermarket, and I don’t want to eat any of it. But I do want to eat less meat, and I want to make actually eating meat a proper occasion. So what do you eat in between?”

Depending on who you ask, the answer to that might be Subway’s T.L.S. sandwich (that’s Tastes. Like. Steak.), or perhaps the imaginatively named McPlant from McDonald’s. But this would rather miss the point. When Burger King first launched the Impossible Whopper in all its US restaurants, the company’s then chief marketing officer, Fernando Machado, said, “Burger King skews male and older, but Impossible brings in young people and women, and puts us in a different spectrum of quality, freshness and health”. This in turn begs the question: compared with what? Impossible’s key selling point is the way in which the burger remains pink in the middle throughout cooking and imitates the juicy, bloody texture of meat. This is achieved through the use of a patented genetically engineered yeast called heme – it may well be ingenious, though it’s more of a stretch to call it fresh. As for health, well, that again is up for debate. Impossible and Beyond burgers have similar amounts of protein and kilojoules as regular beef patties, yet contain around five times as much sodium. Besides, when you’re serving them up with cheese, mayonnaise, chips and a bucket of soft drink, any attempt to play the health card is inevitably going to come up short.

For the record, a Symplicity patty trumps one from Beyond when judged by virtually any nutritional metric you’d care to throw at it – 293 fewer kilojoules, 5g more protein, almost 5g less saturated fat and 4g more fibre. But it’s curious that, in trying to create such a point of difference between his products and those of the big US labs, Rankin should choose to kick off with something as ubiquitous as a burger.

“Look, I just wanted to create something that people could cook with,” he says. “And the burger is so culturally significant. There’s an argument that the best way to adopt a plant-based diet is just to start eating daals and vegetable curries. Which is fucking delicious, by the way, and I do it myself. But with something like a burger, there’s this huge cultural significance that many just aren’t prepared to discount in order to go vegetarian. So I knew this was something I had to recreate in people’s minds in order for them to feel comfortable with it.

“Plus, the vast majority of the beef that you get in burgers tastes like shit on its own. Believe me, I’ve done the research. Go into

The team at Symplicity believes in a zero-waste approach towards plant-based food.

Symplicity now supplies top restaurants and Michelin-star chefs alike.

"VEGETABLES MIGHT HAVE LIMITATIONS, BUT THEY SUCK UP FLAVOUR AND SPICES"

any of the big burger chains in this country and take a bite out of the patty itself – just the meat. It’s grim. Fucking grim. So, for me, beating the taste of that wasn’t hard. Vegetables might have their limitations, but they also have their advantages. They suck up flavour, they suck up spices, they’re easier to cook, and they’re inherently healthy. So I don’t have this retroactive thing of trying to make it healthy – it’s already healthy.”

The Cost Of Going Green

When Pat Brown started out in the plantfood business, he didn’t mention much about improving animal welfare or the health of citizens. He merely wanted to safeguard planet Earth. The success of his succinct message, neatly marketed, has been in large part because the gist of it is broadly supported by the scientific community. “Avoiding meat and dairy, for the large majority of people, is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact,” said Oxford University researcher Joseph Poore, co-author of a report on the global consequences of food production. Very few would contend with this. However, it also masks a more complex, nuanced reality. Plainly, our environmental problems don’t begin and end with the quantity of land and water utilised by beef production. For instance, sustaining biodiversity is arguably more important. Yet mass-producing the likes of soya and pea protein, as used in Impossible and Beyond burgers, means perpetuating the use of monoculture crops, an approach to farming that’s widely understood to be hugely detrimental.

“It all comes down to good agriculture and bad agriculture,” says Rankin. “But you’ve got these guys coming up with ridiculous comments like, ‘our product uses 90 per cent less water than beef’ or whatever. I mean, how the fuck did you come up with that? How do you compare a cow in a field in England, say, with a cow in a field in Australia, which is irrigated extensively, because it’s a fucking desert? It’s not the same thing.

“And how about the 16 factories that made your burger, and the coconut oil and rice flour and pea protein that you’ve flown in from all over the world? These comparisons represent the next level of bullshit that we’ve got to get through.”

Despite his frustration, it’s clear there’s a hunger for the Symplicity approach. Rankin and Wogan are adamant that the right route is to rely on small growers, operations they can visit and sample. Shortly after we met, Symplicity announced that it had gone ‘clean label’, a food-industry term for products made wholly without artificial ingredients. This makes Symplicity the only brand in the market that is totally free of chemicals.

For now, they’re focusing on supplying restaurants because that means they don’t have to worry about compromising themselves with all the excess packaging that comes into play when you go into retail.

But Rankin has ambitions beyond satisfying middle-class lunchers. He’s thinking about schools and offices, even homes. Because that’s where the real habitchanging potential lies. “Chain restaurants, too!” he says. “People discount them. But they’re the most progressive restaurants in the country. They’re the ones thinking about calories right now, because they’re forced to. They’re looking at the labels to see what’s in this stuff. Maybe PR-wise we’d be better off doing some sexy marketing campaign. But in terms of growth, or education, this is a huge, untapped opportunity. And it’s clear it’s better for everyone.”

Father Time: Coe is embraced by his father, Peter, after running a world record mile (3:48.95) in Oslo in 1979.

who says you should never meet your heroes? LORD SEBASTIAN COE, without doubt one of the most beautiful runners who ever graced a track, was one of mine.

I knew him only from afar in his athletics days. But once his racing career was over, he switched to politics, became an MP, then, after losing his seat to New Labour, became an adviser to Tory leader William Hague when I was doing a similar job for Tony Blair.

Acquaintanceship morphed along the way into friendship. As you shall see, he is one of a small number of people who – Paul Simon alert – calls me Al. Having worked on different sides, we were very much on the same side when his considerable talents were judged by Blair to make him the perfect choice to lead the bid to land the Olympic and Paralympic Games for London 2012. Another huge challenge, another win in a lifetime full of them, and his success in presiding over the Games led to him being made a Companion of Honour (there aren’t many of them) to add to his knighthood and peerage.

But even with all that success behind him, he wanted more, and set about becoming president of World Athletics, his current berth, from where he has banned Russia over doping and refused to boycott China over human rights. We will cover all that and more. Coe remains the athlete I love talking to most, about mindset, about resilience, and about the remarkable relationship with his father, Peter, who was also his coach.

The night before our interview, I watched some of his greatest races: the four Olympic triumphs, the 11 world records, and some of the defeats, too; the most famous of which was his loss to Steve Ovett in the 800m final in Moscow 1980. More than 40 years ago. Truly, the stuff of legend. I have talked to him about those days between unexpected defeat in the 800m, followed by unexpected victory in the 1500m a few days later, many times. I find it endlessly fascinating. I hope you do, too.

Golden Glory: Coe wins the 1500m at the Moscow Olympics, with Steve Ovett having to settle for bronze.

Men’s Health: When you were at your peak, how much of your success was down to physical strength, and how much mental? Sebstian Coe: I don’t have a definitive answer for that, Al. In my teens and early twenties, I would have said 80 per cent physical to 20 per cent mental. Towards the end of my career, I was winning races by sheer mental fortitude, and knowing more about myself.

MH Reputation, too, maybe? Opponents being scared of you? SC An element of that, sure. So towards the end of my career, I would say 50-50. But at any stage of my career, I would always have said mental strength came from supreme physical condition.

MH How hard is it to get it? SC There’s no easy way. It’s all about training. I would have winters of three-hour training sessions so hard I felt too tired to drive home. I used to do weights at Hackney Weightlifting Club. I remember training so hard one night it took me half an hour to open my hands enough to grip the steering wheel. If you’ve been through that, and been unaffected by injury, you gain massive comfort from that preparation when you go into

competition. I was always supremely confident based on being in supreme physical condition. For me, the mental strength followed from that.

MH How big was the fear of illness or injury? SC You’re always nervous. I tried to be sociable, but if someone was sitting there struggling with a cold, you’d think, “That could be me in two days”.

MH Would you leave? SC Sometimes, yes. The problem with being at the top in competitive sport is that you’re either 100 per cent fit, or you’re not. Even half a per cent off can take you out of training or out of contention in a race.

MH Did you have sports psychologists as we know them today? SC My dad was my head coach, a really smart guy, and smart enough to have people around him who could do the things he didn’t. He was an engineer, not an expert in physiology, so he recruited the best physiologists. So I worked with a multi-disciplinary team, and though there wasn’t a specific sports psych, they all played part of that role. They knew when to say something, or when not to.

MH But no sports psychologist can get everything right, no matter how well they know the athlete. SC No, and my dad, if he were with us now, and you asked him if he had any regrets in his coaching career, he would say that on the eve of the 800m final at the Moscow Olympics, he sensed that I was not in the right space. To his grave, he would say it was the one thing that gnawed away at him. Should he have said something? Should he have tried to talk it through? MH Was the issue mental or physical? SC Mental. He instinctively knew – he was my dad as well as my coach, don’t forget – that something was wrong. He had a dilemma: do I say something, then risk getting it wrong, and thereby introduce a seed of doubt into his head? Do I risk making him more agitated? He decided to say nothing, but the doubt never left him. For years, he would sit and think: could I have said something? Might we have worked it through?

it would have been the difference between winning and losing. The truth is I ran a really bad race. It was more about my lack of experience at major championships. My dad had talked to me since I was 14 about how I needed to see everything I did as steps towards – preparations for – the Olympics. But no one appreciates the enormity until you get there. It’s almost impossible for a coach to explain that.

MH You were favourite to win the 800m race. SC I know. I had broken three world records in 41 days. I had gone from European bronze at the end of 1978, BBC Sports Personality of the Year 1979, and I was world record holder for 800m, 1500m and the mile. Never been done before. People were hanging the medals round my neck before we even got there. But I was short on major championship experience. It is so different from those one-off races in Oslo, Brussels, Zurich.

MH I watched the Zurich 1500m record race again last night. It was mind-blowing. The crowd, the noise, you out front alone for the last 500m … SC Yeah, it was quite a night. But Moscow was so different. Back then, there was the complication of the politics, and the question of the boycott. [The US boycotted the Moscow Games in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.] The country was divided. None of us knew until April if we would even be going. We had all that, and then there was the question of how I was going to deal with Steve Ovett, the most naturally talented athlete I ever raced. He was undefeated all year, he had beaten me in the European Championships a year earlier, and it seemed unassailable.

MH People expected you to win the 800m and him to win the 1500m. Did losing the first one help you win the second? SC Yes, I think it did. SC They were tough days. The morning after, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I’d had the race, the press conference – that was rough – and I was just lying there with the blankets over my head. Daley Thompson is a close mate. He comes in, doesn’t even knock, and I said something lame like, “What’s the weather like?” And he goes and rips open the curtains and says, “It all looks a bit silver to me”. MH He was kicking you up the backside? SC Yes. We had a laugh, I got up, and then my old man said, “Just go for a run, go and clear your head”. So I did that. I hadn’t spotted some of the photographers in a car, I was so wrapped up in myself I just didn’t see them. The following day one of the papers had a picture of me running and the headline was “COE’S TRAIL OF SHAME” [laughs]. MH No wonder your Dad didn’t like the media much. SC The next day, I’m talking to the journalists and they’re all giving me their views of what I should do in the 1500m. I was watching my old man out of the corner of my eye as I’m getting all these race strategies from journalists [laughs]. He was a mathematician and an engineer. Everything was numbers. He always went around with an old envelope and an old propelling pencil. He

Pain and Gain: Coe gets a massage during training, circa 1980.

was just sitting there, writing down numbers and then he says, very politely, “Okay, I need some time with my athlete”. He never said “my son” when we were in a training or racing setting. So the journos left and my dad said: “Listen, this is really simple, not complicated at all. Given the number of mistakes you made in the 800m, over the distance you made them, and the frequency with which you made them, it is statistically impossible for you to fuck up that badly again in the next decade”.

MH [laughs] Thanks, Dad. SC I swear to God that was the team talk! Then, in the 1500m semi-final, I was beginning to get back into my stride, but I made a silly error. I went on the inside, got boxed in, had to work my way out the back, round the side, then back into it, and eventually I won. So despite the mistake, I felt I was coming back from the abyss. I could remind myself of the grind and the hard work paying off. But when I got to the warm-down track, my dad and I had the most ferocious conversation we would ever have. He just unloaded on me because of that mistake. He said, “If you do that tomorrow you are toast. You know what you have to do. You can win this, and you are the only thing that can prevent you from doing that. I don’t care where that guy [Ovett] is, you follow him, you do not let him out of your fucking sight. If he decides halfway round to go to the khazi, you get in the fucking shitter with him. You do not let him out of your sight, do you understand?”

MH Wow. I’ve always been fascinated by that relationship – how you strike the right balance between father and son, coach and athlete. SC A lot of people misunderstood it. After the 800m, I went to the press conference, and I was on a trestle table with [long-jumper] Lyn Davies and [pentathlete] Mary Peters. Mary was being very maternalistic, looking after me. She adored my dad, they were close friends. Dad walked behind me to take his place at the edge of the press conference, and as he walked past he leaned over and whispered, “You do know you ran like a cunt, don’t you?” I’m sure there are some athletes who would explode at something like that. But he was right, and I knew he was right, and only he could say it. It wasn’t just anger. That was him: an unvarnished, no-nonsense east Londoner. But then later he said to me: “I cannot absolve myself of this either. My athlete is over a second faster than anyone else on paper. He’s the world record holder. I have to ask what I got wrong, too.” He went into the same personal scrutiny that I did.

MH How often do you think about that 800m race now? SC It’s not that I think about it often. But I draw strength from those few days between the two finals. I wince a bit when people in sport talk about pressure and sacrifice. Pressure is working flat out to feed your family. I saw it as a privilege to be able to take part in events like that and here we are still talking about them. And I have been under pressure in all sorts of situations, like when it came to London 2012, but nothing compares with those 45 minutes sitting in a call-up room with nine other people, everyone wondering who is going to win the lottery. You learn a lot about yourself. So yeah, I draw strength from those days, even now.

“I wince when people in sport talk about pressure and sacrifice. I saw it as a privilege”

MH I watched the documentary Born To Run last night, and your mum said you were quite nervy, quite panicky, as a child. SC She was probably right.

MH And she said you failing your eleven-plus was a big thing. SC Not for them, I don’t think. But for me, definitely – though, looking back, it was the best thing that happened to me. I remember kids from leafy shires who failed the eleven-plus and got shipped off to second- and third-rate private schools. Dad was an unreconstructed socialist, so that was never going to happen. I’m probably the only person you will ever interview who went to a secondary-modern, a comprehensive and a grammar school, which is where I did my A-levels. We were in Sheffield then – good schools.

Running For Office: Coe speaks at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool in 1989.

“I’ve always done what I wanted to. I knew I wanted to get involved in politics from my teens”

MH Have you ever had what would be defined as mental health problems? SC I don’t know the answer to that. Have there been moments when I have been under intense pressure? Yes. Ups and downs? Yes. I’ve got friends, including you, Al, who have had to deal with mental health issues. One of my closest, closest friends went through a very dark period, so I am pleased mental health is now a big part of public discourse. But I am a little nervous saying the normal rhythms of life are all about mental health. MH You don’t feel you have ever had what I would define as depression or anxiety? SC I’ve had anxiety. I don’t think I’ve had depression. I’ve had moments when I have been withdrawn and reflective and asking searching questions. But that is not on a par with what I saw my friend go through.

MH How hard was it to know when to give up being an athlete? SC In a way, the decision was made for me. I can tell you exactly where and when I was. It was November 1989. I was running along the towpath from Richmond to Twickenham and I suddenly just stopped. And for the first time in my life, I had this realisation that I would not be able to run faster than I had run before. I competed for a bit, but I knew from that moment it was time to move on.

MH You’ve been an athlete, a businessman, an MP, a sports politician, and you’ve had a whole series of pretty amazing careers. But you admitted nothing can beat elite competitive sport. Have you always been chasing the feeling of winning? SC Maybe, maybe. I have been lucky because I have always done what I wanted to. I knew I wanted to get involved in politics from my teens. I just wasn’t sure if it would be as a frontline politician.

MH Was your dad really upset that you became a Tory? SC He was proper old Labour, my mum was an old-fashioned liberal, but they were both supportive in that they knew I was serious about it. So they were not as mad with me as the rest of Sheffield was!

MH If you had to grade your various careers with marks out of 10 . . . SC That is a great question, Al. Athletics is part of my life, so important to me. Then sport politics, I was involved in that pretty young. I enjoyed being an MP, but I won my seat [Falmouth and Camborne] in 1992 and I was pretty sure I would lose it in 1997. I did have the smallest swing against any Conservative candidate, but you guys were unassailable. Also, it was the right decision. The electorate knows when it is time for change.

MH So then you worked for William Hague. SC Which was interesting – but ultimately four barren years because you lot were Mother Teresa on steroids, you were untouchable. But if you look at all the things I’ve done, everything came together with the bid for the [Olympic and Paralympic] Games in 2012. It wasn’t planned like that. I was a sportsman, but by then knew the international circuit in sports politics, plus I had my own direct experience of politics. Crucially, I was never one of those tribal politicians. I was never, “Our side, right or wrong”. So I always had great support from Tony [Blair] and Tessa [Jowell.]

MH And a grudging acceptance from Gordon Brown and John Prescott? SC Tessa told me she sent [sports minister] Dick Caborn to tell John, because they were good mates. Dick said, “Do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is the American woman [Barbara Cassani, original leader of London bid] is going. The bad news is Tony wants to put Seb Coe in charge”. “Seb Coe! He’s a fucking Tory.”

MH That’s JP. SC But he was brilliant. And very effective on driving through a lot of the planning changes that had to be done.

MH So, a decade on from 2012, how do you see the legacy of the Games? SC In large areas, very good. East London is an enduring positive story. I think in some ways the London boroughs did a better job on legacy than the government. So for London, good. Elite performance was good, there were huge successes in 2012, and that has been followed through in subsequent Games. But where we lost ground was in school sport. Participation has been difficult. I just never understood why school sport became such a political football.

MH Because Michael Gove made a terrible decision to cut it. SC Yeah. I don’t want to go back into the history of it. I spent two years after the Games in the Cabinet Office, and we did get money, and we put the school sports premium in place. But we had lost ground and they knew they had fucked up badly.

MH Why do we have such a problem with obesity? SC A combination of things, though we are not too far out of sync with other developed countries. We eat more processed food than most of Europe. The most sobering stat is that, between the ages of nine and 10 to 12 and 13, the average child loses around half of physical activity. Extrapolate that and it becomes a massive drag anchor, both physically and mentally. Physically inactive means people struggling to climb up a flight of stairs, which is a huge problem. I got stuck into the issue of physical inactivity, and it’s the usual thing in government where they think: “Ah, obesity equals a problem for the NHS to solve”. No, that is where it ends.

It is about planning, it is about how you use space and it is about tax. We zero-rate food and books because we want a nation of healthy readers. But why don’t you zero-rate gym membership and exercise equipment? No one looks at this in a holistic way. The government had a discussion about this a few months ago. Some of them called me and I said we did this after 2012. We had a multi-disciplinary team across treasury, health, schools, transport, planning… but it just stopped. There was no joining the dots.

MH So how goes the current job after a pretty rough start? SC It’s going well. I mean, when your office is raided by 17 police officers shortly after you’ve started, you’re told your predecessor has been arrested in Paris, his son is on the run and on the red list, your legal counsel and head of doping have been arrested, and your CEO has gone backpacking in Australia . . . it’s not easy. If you remember, Al, I did ring you and your advice was that you’re just going to have to weather the storm and deal with the problems. We got through it. I took a flame thrower to the organisation. We brought in reforms which meant that even if we were minded to do some of the things others who were here had done before, we couldn’t. MH How difficult was the decision to kick out Russia? SC We were the only federation to take the decision. We stood alone and there was a lot of challenge to what we did, but we made the right decision. It had to be addressed, it could not just be swept under the carpet. They had 149 positive tests in four years. This was out of control – it was endemic, doping on an industrial scale. When we provisionally suspended the Russian Federation, the world went “You can’t do this” – well, we have, and slowly but surely we have got change, more independence in the process, a sensible dialogue with Russian sport. It has taken longer than I wanted because it is not good to have a country like Russia outside, but it is a cultural shift, and not just in Russia, because there are still coaches who think a bottle or a syringe is where you go to improve performance.

MH You’ve been vociferously against a sporting boycott of China. SC Absolutely, I am philosophically opposed to boycotts. I’ve been through them. They just damage the athletes. We cannot be oblivious to human rights, and I’m not. I have had many uncompromising conversations about venues, about construction, about labour rights and about human rights. But I don’t believe that pulling up the drawbridge bears fruit.

MH But that means there is no limit to what the Chinese think they can do. You saw a limit when it came to South Africa, you didn’t race there during apartheid, and you must accept that the sporting boycott played a role in ending apartheid. SC Yes, but I see Moscow and South Africa differently. I went to Moscow because even though the Americans boycotted, there was never a question of me not competing against the best. If I went to South Africa, I would have been competing against white South African athletes – not the best. I did take the first UK Sports Council delegation to South Africa, we met [former state president] de Klerk and others, and we made a strong case. But governments should be doing the heavy lifting, not throwing it all on to sport. Sport does flick the cultural and political and social dial, but if you start picking relations in sport based on transient or even entrenched political systems, that is difficult to maintain. Plenty of countries came to London holding their noses over our Middle East policy, as you know, and some of them used that to vent their concerns. I think the diplomatic boycott [of China] risks being a meaningless gesture that doesn’t understand the impact sport can have.

MH You’ve taken a fair bit of criticism over your stance. Are you sure you’ve got it right? SC I saw a journalist somewhere saying it showed I didn’t understand the Black Power salutes at the 1968 Olympics. Tommie Smith and John Carlos are close friends of mine. I have a picture of the Black Power salute behind my desk at work. I was told off for that and then told I shouldn’t be talking about Jesse Owens. Okay, he didn’t stop the war, he didn’t stop the concentration camps, but you talk to people like Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and a whole generation of athletes who came in his wake, and he was hugely inspirational for what he did in Berlin. Had he not been in Berlin, he would not have had that platform to be that inspiration.

MH Let’s finish with domestic politics. What do you make of the current British government? SC I am going to be charitable. No one would have wanted this deck of cards. It’s easy to say elements could have been done better.

MH Like turning up to meetings, and not lying the whole time? SC I will leave you to say that. People accept tough decisions, but they want to know the decisions follow a pattern, and they want some continuity and there has to be trust.

MH And we have none of that. SC I’ll leave you to say that, too. Politics has been through difficult periods before, whether it’s the MPs’ expenses scandal, or you guys with what happened in the Gulf. But what worries me most at the moment is how many people are switched off from the whole thing. I’m not sure politicians understand how ordinary folk see things. Most think PMQs [Prime Minister’s Questions] is just lots of posh people shouting at each other. I cannot remember a time when people have been less interested in engagement. That worries me.

Mark of a Champion: Coe’s footprint is cast in bronze at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona.

DIS FA

DURING A VISIT TOGRACELAND

a while back, the author JOHANN HARI had a meltdown that led him to write one of the more unforgettable books of the last decade. It’s about how we’ve become a bunch of scatterbrains – and what that could mean for the future of humanity.

Hari had taken his godson, ‘Adam’, to Memphis with the aim of snapping the boy out of his obsession with the digital world. The 15-year-old had “dropped out of school and spent almost all his waking hours at home alternating blankly between screens,” says Hari, who’s speaking to Men’s Health at nearly 1am, London time, but sounds positively exuberant, which he attributes to being heavily caffeinated.

“He was staring either at his phone – an infinite scroll of WhatsApp and Facebook messages – or his iPad, on which he watched a blur of Youtube and porn,” Hari continues. “He struggled to stay with a topic of conversation for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or veering to another topic. He was an intelligent, decent kid, but it was like nothing could gain any traction in his mind.”

Graceland was one half of a deal that Hari, who is BritishSwiss, had struck with Adam: in return for taking him to Elvis’ digs, a place his godson had once longed to visit, Adam promised that for the duration of their trip through the American south he would use his phone only once, at the end of each day. As it turned out, the lure of his device was too strong for Adam to resist. But that’s not what caused Hari’s meltdown. The trigger for that was a ludicrous scene inside Graceland’s Jungle Room (The King’s favourite room, apparently), where Hari overhead a couple marvelling at how they could view the Jungle Room on their iPads. The very room they were inside.

Hari could not stay silent.

“But, sir,” he said, “we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room. You don’t have to see it on your screen. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.”

The couple made a hasty, backwards retreat, eyeing Hari as you might a lunatic.

But who in that scene had lost the plot? Think carefully about your answer. It might reveal how far down the rabbit hole of digital madness you’ve plummeted.

Once he’d calmed down and done some thinking, Hari decided he would do whatever it took to find out why – as he sees it – we’ve lost the ability to focus for any sustained period on experiences and concerns belonging to the real world. “I ended up going on a big journey all over the world,” Hari says, “from Melbourne to Moscow to Miami, and I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on attention.” The result is Stolen Focus (Bloomsbury), Hari’s follow-up to the seminal Lost Connections, for which he applied the same exhaustive methods to exploring the reasons why so many of us get depressed.

If you need numbers to believe that our collective attention span is dwindling, Hari offers plenty of those, sourced from studies. Two examples: the average office worker sticks to one task for three minutes; the average university student switches tasks every 65 seconds. But do you need stats to recognise that technology is changing society, or do you see it every day with your own eyes? Do you see it in your own behaviour? Hari did. Which is why he upped sticks for three months to a room in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, to embark on a digital detox for the ages.

I should stress that Hari identifies numerous factors beyond the explosion in gadgetry and social media to account for collapsing attention spans. These include surging levels of stress, sleeplessness and ADHD, as well as poor nutrition. But my guess is that if you were to read Stolen Focus, you’d put it down convinced that addictive technology is the chief culprit. You’d also realise that rather than being a badge of honour, multitasking is a myth. You’re not capable of doing three tasks at once and doing them well. In fact, when you think you’re multi-tasking, what you’re really doing is hopping from task to task – and doing a substandard job on all of them.

Whenever he’s lamenting the effects of social media, Hari, in me, is addressing a sympathetic fellow traveller. I made my last Instagram post on 10 February 2016. It’s a shot of me standing next to the former champion swimmer Grant Hackett. We’re both smiling and it’s harmless and even quite nice in its way, and it garnered the typical kind of upbeat comments from well-meaning ‘friends’. But when I thought about why I’d posted it, I couldn’t draw any conclusion other than that I was trying to impress people; that I was basking in the reflected glow of an Olympic gold medallist and implying that I must be worthy of respect because, look, I’m with this guy! While I didn’t resolve on the spot never to post again, so far that’s been the effect.

Of course, it’s wise to think twice before bemoaning the new. You can reach the point of believing that staring at a television is somehow nobler than staring at a smartphone. With TV, at least others can see what you’re watching, and can join you if they like. Buried in your phone, you’re a lone wolf. But, hell, they’re both screens. (Nostalgia alert: not so long ago, to get your mate or girlfriend on the phone, you used to have to dial the landline in their house, and as often as not one of their parents would pick up and the two of you would have a slightly awkward, roughly 60-second exchange. But it wasn’t torture. And what mobile phones have done is eliminate that type of intergenerational chitchat, which was surely a kind of societal glue.)

Anyway, back in the present, devices and apps aren’t going anywhere. Knowing this, Hari wants you to take seriously the threat addictive technology poses to your health and wellbeing – and to the world. Because if we can’t pay attention even to the things that could destroy us, this caper called life isn’t going to end well, regardless of what you’re hearing on that podcast you’re hooked into or from the influencer you swear by.

MH Let’s accept the premise that we’re losing our ability to focus. Why should we care? Johann Hari: Think about anything you’ve ever achieved in your life that you’re proud of, whether it’s starting a business, being a good dad, learning to play the guitar. Whatever it is, that thing that you’re proud of required a huge amount of focus and attention, and when your ability to focus and pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down. Your ability to solve your problems breaks down.

MH When do you think this mental fragmentation started? JH Humans have always struggled with attention, but things have gotten significantly worse in recent years. And I could feel it happening to me. I’m 43. And I felt like, with each year that passed, certain things requiring a deep focus that are so important to me – reading books, having proper, long conversations – were becoming more and more like running up a down escalator.

MH You say one casualty for the individual of a disintegrating attention span is the loss of the flow state. Why should that worry guys? JH Because a flow state – when you’re doing something and you really get into it, when your sense of time and ego falls away – is the background to many of the highlights of your life, and the more flow you experience, the better you feel. Different people get into flow states doing different things. For some people it’s making bagels. For others it’s brain surgery. It’s the deepest form of attention, but it will come only when you’re monotasking – when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing.

MH You also say that mind wandering is becoming rarer. But is that any great loss? JH Yes. I thought I went to Provincetown to rediscover deep focus – and my ability to do that massively came back. But what benefitted me most was not actually the return of deep focus; it was the return of mind wandering. I started going for really long walks, with nothing to distract me because I had nothing to distract me, and I found that my mind became so much more fertile, so much more alive and awake. I started seeing the connections between things. I’d thought of mind wandering as the opposite of focus, but it turns out that mind wandering is a really precious form of thinking in which breakthroughs and discoveries are often made. For now, we’re in the worst of both worlds: we’re neither focusing nor mind wandering. We’re jammed up with switching.

Too much digital input is tying your brain in knots. MH If you’re someone who scrolls your social media feeds for hours daily, who posts often and hasn’t read a book since high school, should you regard yourself as a victim or part of the problem? JH For any of your readers who are struggling to pay attention, I would say to them, this is not your fault. When I felt my attention getting worse, initially I blamed myself. I was like, well, what’s wrong with you? Why are you so weak? Why aren’t you strong enough to resist this? What I realised is that your attention didn’t collapse. Your attention was stolen from you by some very big forces. Only once we understand those forces can we begin to deal with them.

MH Your digital detox in Provincetown didn’t seem to be a linear experience – a straight line from the pain of withdrawal to seeing the light. What, ultimately, were your main insights from that time in seclusion? JH You’re right. It was much more complicated than just, Oh, I’ve been set free! I went to Provincetown because I was tired of being wired. And before I went, I had two stories in my head about why my attention had gotten worse, both of which I now realise were oversimplified. The first was, you’re weak. The second was, well, someone invented the smartphone and that’s what has screwed you over. Because they were the two stories in my head, the solution seemed clear: I’m going to use a lot of willpower and I’m going to separate myself from my phone and the internet.

I’d thought maybe my attention was getting worse with age. But it went back to being as good as it was when I was 17. I could sit and read books, including War and Peace, Volume 3, for eight hours a day, and my attention didn’t waver. I

Cut loose from the prison of digital-world obsession.

wrote 92,000 words of a novel. I was stunned by the extent to which my attention came back.

MH That’s great.

JH Yes. But the other big thing I learned is the limits of the digital detox. On my last day, from the lighthouse looking back on the whole of Provincetown, I thought, I’m never going to go back to how I was before this. Because when you get your sense of focus back as I did, you get flooded with this sense of competence, this sense of being able to think clearly again. You can see ahead. You can do things. So, why would I ever go back to how I lived before? And yet . . . I got the ferry across to Boston, which is where I’d left my phone and my laptop, and within a few months I was back [to old habits]. I never went back to quite as bad as I’d been, but I’d say I went back to 80 per cent of where I’d been. And for a while I was despairing. I thought, what’s happened here?

MH And what had happened? What was the pull?

JH I only really understood it when I went to Moscow and interviewed a guy named

James Williams, who had worked at the heart of

Google, quit, and become, I’d argue, the world’s leading expert on the philosophy of attention. He said to me, “The mistake you’ve made, Johann, is akin to thinking the solution to air pollution is for you to wear a gas mask”. And he was right. I’ve got nothing against gas masks, but they’re not the solution to air pollution. And in the same way, digital detoxes can help people, they’re worth trying, but they’re not the solution to the problem of attention being corroded by the environment. MH The environment? JH Yes. In Provincetown, I realised that, yes, changing your environment can massively improve your attention. But if you’ve got to go back to your old environment, then you’re going to slide back. So, what do we do to change the environment going forward that could strengthen our attention? I concluded we need to tackle the causes at two levels. I think of them as defence and offence. Defence is what we do as individuals. I’ll give you a simple example. In a corner of the room that I’m in now, I have a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you replace the lid, and you turn the dial, and you lock away your phone for anything from five minutes to the whole day. When my friends come around for dinner, they’ve got to put their phones in the phone jail. And I won’t sit down to watch a film with my partner unless we both imprison our phones. That’s an individual, defensive measure.

MH Sounds good. JH Yes. But I want to be honest with people because I don’t think most books about attention are honest with people. I’m passionately in favour of these individual changes. They’ve made a big difference in my life. But on their own they will get you only so far because at the moment it’s like someone is pouring itching powder all over us, all day, and then leaning forward and going, “You know what, mate? You might want to learn how to meditate and then you wouldn’t scratch so much”. And you might go, “Well, fuck you! I’ll learn to meditate – that’s valuable – but you need to stop pouring itching powder on me”. So that’s why we need to go on the offensive against the forces that are doing this to us.

MH You take aim at the inbuilt shallowness of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you could wave a wand and make social media disappear – disappear in the sense that it’s not only gone but never existed – would you do it?

JH No. And there’s an analogy that would help us think about this. A bit before my time, it was normal for people to paint their homes with leaded paint. And then it was discovered that exposure to lead harms people’s brains and in particular children’s ability to focus and pay attention. What happened was that a group of ordinary people banded together and said, “Why are we allowing this? Why are we allowing the lead industry to fuck up our children’s brains?” It’s important to note what those people didn’t demand. They didn’t say let’s ban all paint. They said let’s ban the specific component in the paint that’s harming our ability to pay attention. They fought for years to get the lead out of the paint, and they succeeded. It was banned.

MH When it comes to social media, then, what’s the ‘lead’? JH It’s the business model. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing people who’d designed key aspects of the technologies we’re using all the time. And I had this fascinating moment with James Williams, who’d spoken at a tech conference to an audience that was literally people who’d designed the apps. And he said to them, “If there’s anyone here who wants to live in the world we’re designing, please put up your hand”. And not one hand went up.

These are tech designers, right? They love technology. The way big tech wants us to frame this debate is, are you pro tech or anti tech? And, of course, if you hear that you think, quite rightly, I’m not going to give up my laptop or my phone, I’m not going to join the Amish, so I guess I’m pro tech. But that’s not the right question. The right question is, what tech do we want designed for what purposes and working in whose interests?

MH What’s the model as of now? JH When you open Facebook, TikTok or Instagram, those apps immediately begin to make money out of you in two ways. The first is obvious: you see ads. The second way is much more important: everything you do on those apps is scanned and sorted by the artificial-intelligence algorithms. They are figuring out who you are. They are hoovering up information about you. They’re learning in immense detail what kind of person you are – what you like, what you don’t like, what turns you on, what keeps you scrolling, what makes you angry. You are the product that they sell to the real customer – the advertisers. But just as importantly, they’re learning all this info about you so they can keep you scrolling. They’re figuring out what the weaknesses are in your attention to keep you scrolling. Every time you pick up your phone and open those apps, they make money. And the longer you scroll, the more money they make. Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook, says they designed Facebook to be maximally addictive – they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. What I say is, you can have social media that’s not designed around this model. MH Hmmm. At school, there were the various groups – the jocks, the high achievers, the geeks. Well, it feels like the geeks have won the battle for world domination. They’ve largely transferred life from the physical world to the world of screens, where they were always most comfortable. So why would they change anything now ? JH It’s interesting because those geeks have a lot to offer. They’re often great people. The tragedy is that we could have had all the technological benefit – and going forward, we certainly can – without being tied to this model of hacking our attention. MH But do they know when to stop? Can they ever leave well enough alone? JH I totally get the point you’re making, but I’d be careful about who we’re calling the ‘they’ because most people who work in Silicon Valley don’t want the current business model. Most of them would be much happier working in a model that was serving and aiding people’s attention. Oh, it turns out you feel good when you meet up with actual human beings and look into their eyes rather than fucking doom-scrolling? The technology to do that exists today. My friends in Silicon Valley could design it in a week. [Ideally, big tech would decide], You know what, guys? We’ve made enough money. Let’s stop fucking up people’s brains. And it’s important that this happens soon because we’re in a race. Many of the factors I write about that are harming our attention, many of them are going to get worse on the current trajectory. We should choose lives where we can think deeply, where we can work deeply, where we can achieve our goals. We can choose a better life. But we’ve got to fight for it. MH What are the stakes, do you think? JH I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the world is having its biggest crisis of democracy since the 1930s at the same time as we’re having this enormous crisis in our ability to pay attention. If we can’t listen to each other, if we can’t think clearly, we’re not going to be able to achieve collective goals. The climate crisis can be solved. But

where we can think deeply, and achieve our goals” “ We should choose lives work deeply,

we will need to be able to focus, to have sane conversations with each other, and to think clearly. The solutions are not going to be achieved by an addled population who are switching tasks every three minutes and screaming at each other all the time in an algorithmpumped fury. Think about the ozone-layer crisis of the 1980s. I remember as a kid being terrified by it. There were these chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were in hairsprays and fridges that were going into the atmosphere and destroying the layer of ozone that protects the Earth from the sun. And it was interesting what happened. Ordinary people absorbed the science; they distinguished science from lies, bullshit and conspiracy theories, and then in a very sustained way, pressured their governments – very different governments – to ban CFCs. They succeeded, and as a result the ozone layer is almost completely healed. I don’t think anyone thinks that would happen now. A lot of people would say, “Well, how do we even know that the ozone layer exists?” We would tribalise on both sides around crazy, aggravating identities and we wouldn’t solve the problem. The factors that are destroying our individual attention are the same factors destroying our collective attention, so we need to deal with these parallel crises. It’s not that the attention crisis is the biggest problem in the world. Sure, there are bigger problems. But if we don’t deal with that, we can’t deal with anything else.