| “The way you eat becomes the way that you think.”
— Alice Waters, quoted in Who Cares Wins Food is a liminal substance. A product of what’s out there, it is about to become us, in a very visceral way.
Food sits at the intersection of our inner and outer landscapes. Through food, the ecology of the biosphere enters us, influencing and indeed becoming our interior biology, the very substrate of our brains and the culture that our minds create.
The food we eat affects how our bodies respond, how our minds understand, and how our health supports us — but it also determines how the world around us looks, the state of the air, the earth, the water, and the vitality of our social and political systems.
Eating happens all the time. We sit down and nourish ourselves, and every time we do, we are casting a vote for what we want our inner and outer landscapes to be like.
Over the last century, almost without our noticing, food has been turned from a source of nourishment into a commodity, a site of speculation and rent-seeking.
The food industry reaps giant profits even as chronic disease intensifies and hunger persists. Thus food, the most evident vector of our connection to everything, has become an instrument of impoverishment and separation.
But precisely because food sits at the boundary of us and everything else, food holds a special power to be the detonator of a renaissance. A reaction is set off by how we feed ourselves, in more ways than one.
Food can be emancipatory, providing both the literal and the conceptual substrate for human sovereignty, human potential, human evolution: eudaimonia.
For food to fulfil this promise, it must come from and, in turn, nourish the living soil. Then it can serve as a connector, regenerating the biomes of both our bodies and the land, as we will see below.
We must reclaim food as what it really is: nourishment and connection, powering the divine combustion of the human experience. Then it will become the bounty that nature has ordained it to be, and the 21st century can become a real banquet for humanity.
Despite initial gains in yield, the adoption of industrial agriculture shortchanged crops on micronutrients, antioxidants, and phytochemicals that are critical to the body’s processes of healing. The unsubtle metrics of “yield” and “calories” hide as much as they reveal, and an overreliance on them has created a world in which we produce more food than ever but are undernourished.
This is what demographers call the nutrition transition — a shift in people’s eating patterns from a more traditional diet towards an industrial one dominated by food that is ever more processed. There has been a dramatic increase in food-related ailments such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in wealthy nations, even as hunger is experienced elsewhere in the world. Obesity alone has a global economic impact of around $2 trillion annually — 2.8% of global GDP.
The modern health system — which suffers from many of the same myopias, corporate captures, and perverse incentives as the food system — has sought to address this epidemic of chronic disease through prescription. The result of that is evident in the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and a generation of medicated children and adults. But, as the old Ayurvedic adage goes, when the diet is wrong, the medicine is no use. But the saying also prays that when the diet is correct, medicine is of no need.
The health crisis and the food crisis are one and the same.
We are in a crisis of nourishment.
The regeneration of the food landscape is not only about the integrity of the soil ecology but also about the integrity of the human ecology. Our dysregulation starts with the food we eat.
Folk wisdom has long recognised the connection between feeling and food, but modern medicine has only acknowledged it more recently.
Serotonin — one of the body’s most important neurotransmitters — is almost entirely produced in the digestive tract. Serotonin influences sleep, appetite, and mood. It inhibits pain and regulates sexual function. When it is out of balance, it can lead to depression, anxiety, and even more dramatic mental effects. Since at least 90% of serotonin is produced in the gut, and the gut is lined with 100 million neurons, it makes sense that the inner workings of the digestive system affect the mind and emotions. This pathway of influence is what scientists and physicians have begun to call the gut-brain axis.
But the internal ecology gets even more complex. The function of the gut neurons and the production of serotonin are highly influenced by billions of bacteria that make their homes inside of us: the intestinal microbiome.
Much like plants send roots into the soil biome (that community of microscopic bacteria and fungi that allows plants to take nutrients from the ground), our own bodies extend roots called villi into the gut microbiome, a community of tiny creatures that break down our food and shift nutrients. Digestion would be impossible without them. Our health depends on the balance of this internal flora.
How are these human ecologies formed? We inherit a portion of them from our families. But we also ingest millions of microbes with every meal. The biomes from which we take our food feed directly into our gut biome — and thereby our health. The intimate relationship between the microbiomes of the soil and those of our gut has evolved throughout our long development as a species — and is still evolving.
The 30 trillion human cells in a typical human body are outnumbered by the 39 trillion microbial cells of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that live within us and indeed make our lives possible; the human being is a whole ecosystem.
According to the British Gut Project at King’s College London, microbes are more influential in shaping who we are and how we feel than our genes. Depression and anxiety are strongly linked to poor gut flora diversity. Doctors have documented an association between digestive problems and everything from autism spectrum conditions to bipolar disorder.
The overprescription of antibiotics (which wipe out the communities of the gut microbiome), the low fibre in processed foods, the modern emphasis on hygiene, and the generalised use of biocides in agriculture have led to a dramatic loss of beneficial species in our guts. But it is possible to regenerate our guts by eating a diversity of foods from living soils. | | About Farmacy
Farmacy is a restaurant, farm, and educational platform. Founded by Camilla Fayed and based in the UK, Farmacy is on a mission to serve transformational food that offers a different future. Moved by the conviction that food can speak to every major crisis facing humanity, Farmacy collaborates with an array of initiatives that support food system transformation, radical human health, and the cultivation of personal sovereignty. | |
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