Are you familiar with Patagonia the company and its founder and Philosopher King Yvon Chouinard? In addition to their inspiring catalog, I received a colorful publication titled Provisions 2020 with the copy We’re In Business To Save Our Home Planet. It’s all about caring for ourselves and caring for our planet and how those two efforts are inextricably linked. “I think the path forward is pretty clear”, writes Chouinard. “What’s good for us humans is also what’s good for the planet we live on. And the best bet for saving both is to change the way we produce our food.” As he cites, food grown in ways that regenerate the environment, that produce biodiversity, that deliver the most nutrition, are one and the same. And the best part for all of us is that these foods also hold the most spectacular flavors. Chouinard and Patagonia’s focus is on large-scale farming, but I loved their awareness and ideas, finding hem relevant in light of our upcoming Nature Walk and foraging event, as we seek and find healing, natural remedies from the forest floor. And well be getting into the garden this week.
“Have you ever traveled and been advised to avoid fruits and vegetables, sketchy road side stands, and no matter what, don’t drink the water!? I didn’t know anything about the gut microbiome or the immune system a few years back, but I recognized that the locals in far-away places ate and drank without worry and stayed healthy. It’s not like there was something inherently wrong with Mexican food and water, but rather that our American guts, fed a steady diet of commercially produced food and chlorinated water, hadn’t built up any resistance to naturally occurring microbes. And if you look into it, it’s pretty disturbingly bad news for a world that subsists, for the most part, on the products of industrial agriculture, a system that’s robbing our food of essential nutrients, and at the same time, flavor. Worse, our reliance on monocrop food production and chemical pesticides may be degrading the diversity of our natural gut microbiome, leaving us susceptible to a host of health issues.
With our current industrial food chain being broken, modern food, pushed to maximize yield, and grown on soil depleted of organic matter and microbes by decades of tilling, chemical fertilizer and pesticides, is losing its nutritional value. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutritioncomparing the nutrients in 43 crops from 1950 to the same crops in 1999 shows that modern vegetables demonstrate “statistically reliable declines” in essential nutrients, including protein, calcium, riboflavin, iron and vitamin C. Compare the nutrients in free-roaming buffalo to feedlot-raised buffalo or cattle and you’ll find the same thing. When you sit down to dinner tonight, it’s most likely a lot less nutritious than the same meal eaten by your parents or grandparents fifty years ago. A study conducted by Mother Earth News found that free-range chickens, with their complex diet of seeds, insects, worms and plants, produce eggs with one-third less cholesterol and saturated fat, two times more omega-3 fatty acids, and three times more vitamin E, beta carotene and vitamin D than standard commercial eggs. One theory of why bees are dying from viral outbreaks around the world is that their immune systems are depleted from feeding on the same industrial crops we eat. That’s a frightening canary-in-a-coal-mine scenario.
The emphasis agribusiness industry places on speed, efficiency and size has caused our food to lose its naturally intense flavors. At the grocery store, you can now find strawberries the size of your fist, but they have about as much flavor as Styrofoam packing peanuts. Modern chickens mature to market size in about 40 days, which means we can produce a lot of chickens in very little time. But the birds, confined to cages and fed a diet of commercial chicken chow are tasteless and watery. In contrast, I once ate a carrot that was grown in organic soil and didn’t mature until it had survived two hard frosts – the complexity and concentration of flavor blew my mind! Compare a bite of free roaming buffalo, full of exquisite flavors from the diversity of native plants they feed on, to the insipid blandness of feedlot buffalo or beef. It’s no surprise that the foods with more flavor are the ones with significantly more nutritional value. We are what we eat eats.
When we look ahead to new ways of producing food, ways that are better for us and our home planet, the solutions often turn out to be The Old Ways. We search for ancient perennial grains that build soil health and stop erosion; we choose livestock native to the land and let them roam freely to feed on, and increase the health of, the native grasses they evolved with; we fish for mackerel, a naturally abundant species, with centuries old hook and line techniques that keep the population strong and prevent bycatch.” Note that many of these ideas are on a global scale, but we’re doing what we can here by teaming with local Chef and culinary light Chris Ferris of The Farm House Deli, tending to our garden, and exploring the nexus between flavor, nutrition and soil health. More soon on where the food industry and our farm is going — more local, more nutritious, and 100 percent more delicious.
