Food for thought
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From Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food:
What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species coevolve with other species that they eat, and very often there develops a relationship of interdependence: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for an animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal's needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, for example) it needs to make optimal use of the plant.
Similarly, the milk of cows did not start out as a nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until people who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest milk as adults. the gene for the production of a milk-digesting enzyme called lactase used to switch off in humans shortly after weaning until about five thousand years ago, when a mutation that kept the gene switched on appeared and quickly spread through a population of animal herders in north-central Europe. Why? Because the people possessing the new mutation then had access to a terrifically nutritious new food source and as a consequence were able to produce more offspring than the people who lacked it. This development proved much to the advantage of both milk drinkers and the cows, whose numbers and habitat (and health) greatly improved as a result of this new symbiotic relationship.
Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain - a great many such relationships in the case of an omnivorous creature like man. It follows that when the health of one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in it. If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink milk from them. This is precisely what Weston Price and Sir Howard had in mind when they sought to connect the seemingly distant realms of soil and human health. Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web.
What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species coevolve with other species that they eat, and very often there develops a relationship of interdependence: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for an animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal's needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, for example) it needs to make optimal use of the plant.
Similarly, the milk of cows did not start out as a nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until people who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest milk as adults. the gene for the production of a milk-digesting enzyme called lactase used to switch off in humans shortly after weaning until about five thousand years ago, when a mutation that kept the gene switched on appeared and quickly spread through a population of animal herders in north-central Europe. Why? Because the people possessing the new mutation then had access to a terrifically nutritious new food source and as a consequence were able to produce more offspring than the people who lacked it. This development proved much to the advantage of both milk drinkers and the cows, whose numbers and habitat (and health) greatly improved as a result of this new symbiotic relationship.
Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain - a great many such relationships in the case of an omnivorous creature like man. It follows that when the health of one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in it. If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink milk from them. This is precisely what Weston Price and Sir Howard had in mind when they sought to connect the seemingly distant realms of soil and human health. Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web.
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