You Are What Your Food Ate

What your food ate is the title of a new and excellent book that connects the dots between the soil, plants, animals and us and why we need a farming revolution for a health revolution. You’ve no doubt often wondered just how much nutrition there is in even ‘healthy’ vegetables, as well as meat, and of course it’s all dependent on the soil in more ways than you can imagine. What Your Food Ate, by David Montgomery and Anne Bikle (published by Norton) goes deeply into the depletion of nutrients in our food, the degradation of top soil, and loss of carbon, accounting for a third of all carbon released into the atmosphere, from degrading organic matter in agricultural soils, as well as the dangers of chemical fertilisers leading to, among other things, the acidification of soil. But it points the way forward, destroying the argument that more ‘organic’ ways of farming doesn’t produce as much food. It argues for a ‘no till’ planting process, with cover crops and diverse crop rotations, that can create a high yielding soil-building enterprise. Organic farms, according to a global analysis, were a quarter to a third more profitable than corresponding conventional systems. But the soil connections, much like the explosion of interest in the microbiome, go much deeper.