[lit-ideas] Soil and Food







We all take things for granted, like water and soil.  Well, I got my nutrition 
newsletter recently, one of them, and did you know that soil is much more 
complex than it looks?  It is not just plain old dirt.  It's quite the 
ecosystem.  In one teaspoon of soil, there are roughly between 600 and 800 
million individual organisms, not all even identified, with several miles of 
fungi, over 10,000 individual protozoa, and 20 to 30 beneficial nematodes.  
Soil supports microscopic plant life that uses the sun to convert carbon 
dioxide into oxygen.  And of course there is no waste in nature.  As organisms 
decompose they become food for other organisms and for the plants that grow in 
the soil that animals eventually eat.
 
Unfortunately, today's mostly mono culture factory farming practices are very 
destructive of soil.  We grow a handful of plants, primarily corn and soybeans, 
which are primarily feed to animals (which the animals weren't designed to eat) 
which we in turn eat at high ecological cost to air, soil and water.  We use 
pesticides that can in no way take into account all the microlife in soil, and 
we then apply synthetic nitrogens to spur growth of these few crops.  Paul 
Roberts in The End of Food makes the point that our factory farming requires 
that all plants be exactly alike so that when the combines roll through the 
fields they can harvest the plants uniformly.  That requires that weeds not get 
in the way, so Monsanto and others have engineered pesticides (and growth 
parameters) into the plants themselves.  Those are the unnatural proteins that 
may be causing the veritable epidemic of food allergies, ADHD and asthma among 
American children.  
 
Recently the University of Texas analyzed nutritional content of crops between 
1950 and 1999.  They found that 6 out of 13 nutrients have declined by between 
6 and 38% in that time.  Organic produce is much healthier.  A study on 
tomatoes found that organic tomatoes had levels of two phytonutrients (micro 
plant nutrients) that were measured, quercetin and kaempferol, on average 79% 
and 97% higher than conventionally grown tomatoes.  
 
In The End of Food by Paul Roberts he talks about our just-in-time food system 
and how huge retailers are driving the food industry.  It has an 
unfortunate title that will keep it from being a best seller.  It's a companion 
book to his 2005 book The End of Oil.  He's a peak oil believer but he doesn't 
think peak oil is quite as imminent as some fear.  
 
Sort of as a P.S., in Europe apparently what we call organic food they call 
food.  They label when things are added or structurally modified, we label when 
things aren't added.  This is from the book Unhealthy Truth, How Our Food is 
Making us Sick by Robyn O'Brien.  I haven't read this book but have 
every reason to think she's right.
 
Andy
 
 
 

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