The Health of Soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” – Sir Albert Howard
As Wendell Barry, the prolific and iconic academic, cultural, economic critic, and farmer, wrote in in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays back in 1993: “There is no connection between food and health. People are fed by a food industry that pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry which pays no attention to food.” Little has changed in the intervening almost three decades.
The intention of this joint venture white paper is to finally – and hopefully – jumpstart that change. It outlines the connection between industrial agriculture and the epidemic of lifestyle diseases and focus on the ongoing prioritization of pharmaceuticals over diet and nutrition. As long as shelf-life and mono-cropped yields trump healthful nutrition, the processed-food-heavy Standard American Diet will continue to foster lifestyle diseases like diabetes, cardiac diseases and obesity.
Industrial farming also harms the planet and its inhabitants through exposure to toxic pesticides and other chemicals and pollutants. The answer is regenerative agriculture – organic on steroids. It uses no synthetic chemicals or salt-based fertilizers and improves the soil through the sequestration of carbon. Some pundits hypothesize that a world-wide conversion to no-till regenerative agriculture could sequester all the carbon and halt global warming.
The white paper’s solution: “We could increase the availability of nutrient-dense foods and initiate regeneration of the soil by shifting to a regenerative organic farming system that eliminates toxic inputs and focuses on foods optimal for our health. A shift in our medical system to an integrative system founded on lifestyle medicine—supported by regenerative, whole, nutrient-dense foods—could dramatically alter the trajectory of chronic disease and create a healthier future.”
Read the very impressive deep dive here: