Di•et (di´ et) n. One’s usual food and drink.
It is a criticism that just won’t seem to go away. Doggedly persistent acolytes of “conventional” agriculture continue (and with good standing) to remind us that there is little to no scientific research to support many of the touted benefits of vegetables produced with organic, or so-called “natural systems” methods. You’ve heard the claims—fresher is more nutritious, heirloom varieties are more nutritious, unpasteurized milk is more nutritious. That these claims are largely unsubstantiated is unfortunate, yet undeniable, and the result is just more uncertainty about what we should eat.
This is not for a lack of legitimate plant science, mind you. In fact the reverse is true: the agricultural sciences continue to provide a bounty of data on the benefits of natural farming systems. My personal favorite is a 2004 study on the positive interactions of planting tomatoes following a fallow of hairy vetch. Several indicators of plant quality and production showed marked improvements for tomato plants grown on a mulch of the vetch, over the same variety grown with chemical fertilizers and black polyethylene mulch. The plants lived longer, produced longer, and had greater tolerance to disease than their industrialized counterparts. The biochemistry and plant genetics behind the results are complicated, but the skinny is that natural systems result in natural soil building and ratios of nutrients and nutrient availability for which plants are, well, naturally optimized. Go figure.
Then what is the problem? Whereas plant scientists seem to have no problem agreeing on what drives plant health, human health and nutrition scientists are far more than divided on the food-nutrition-human health equation. I am sure that you all have experienced the chaos first hand: one study shows antioxidants to be the king of cancer prevention, another exposes them as the culprit; one diet expert says eat more fat, another says eat less. Most human health researchers and epidemiologists admit—you usually have to prod them some—that these are questions that research may never be able to answer. The reason is that people’s eating habits and lifestyle activities are just too nuanced and variable to track over the course of their lives with the kind of rigor that controlled scientific experimentation requires. Imagine getting thousands of people to agree to eat only what is given them for their entire lives! Imagine the logistics required to make sure they don’t sneak a Snickers bar! The costs alone associated with so massive a controlled study are enough to boggle the mind.
So, despite the fact that the evidence continues to mount that organic practices make for healthier plants, we just can’t take the logical next step and assert that these healthier plants make for healthier people.
What to do? When faced with such a dilemma I ask myself, what would Michael Pollan do? Quite fortunately for all of us, he has just written a book on the question, with a fresh argument that just may bring the industrial food system peanut gallery to its knees. Hang on while I dance a little jig.
In the book In Defense of Food, Pollan enlightens us to the oddly conspiratorial history of how nutrients came to take center stage over food in the American diet. It’s a fascinating read and I recommend it to all. The take-home idea: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Only since the switch from foods to nutrients have we been confronted with dietary confusion and epidemic health problems. The industrialization and globalization of our food systems have allowed us to cut eating out from the rest of our lives, indeed they have promoted it. Eating has become a wholly isolated activity: a chore to fulfill our pesky biophysical needs that we approach with a set of recommended daily guidelines. But by treating it as such we’ve committed the same mistake as the conventional tomato growers: we’ve tried to boil down a complex, integrated cultural system into one or three or ten essential nutrients. However, food and health are linked for humans in the same way that they’re linked for plants. Plants lived on soil, not N, P and K, as a part of an integrated ecological system. For most of human history we have lived on food, not B12, C, and D, as part of a larger cultural system that linked our food, lifestyles, physical activity, even spirituality. I call this natural systems eating, or diet in its original, unadulterated sense.
There’s a lesson in this, I think. Rather than become embroiled in the potentially never-ending controversy over nutrition, we can effectively side-step the debate, and focus on reconnecting ourselves to our food and our diet, getting healthier, happier, and building stronger communities in the process.
