Food is Medicine

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”

― Hippocrates

 “Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?” – Jane Goodall

Food is medicine. Hippocrates knew it 2,500 years ago, and inherently we know it now. As sustenance, nourishment and remedy, the right foods have invaluable preventative and restorative power: protecting us from illness and preserving our quality of life. 

So how can we eat food that humans have to wear protective clothing to cultivate? Put in our mouths what farmers won’t hold in their hands? 

Well, it’s a long story. But let’s begin with four established starting points:

1) that we, humankind, had – and always have – the best intentions. That we just wanted to feed people, keeping up with the population growth, and do what we *thought* was practical.

2) that the miracle of life doesn’t “belong” to anyone, and that we all have the right to be nourished. 

3) that food feeds more than our physical bodies. It also feeds us on an energetic level – a level which cannot be mass produced or cloned.

4) that humankind’s biggest error has been in forgetting that we are part of nature, not users of it – and thinking that its basic laws, seasons and structures don’t apply to us. Instead of working with it, we tried to colonise it – an initial fallacy that led to an unequal, unsustainable system of exchange with nature, and one that quickly got out of hand. Because nature is infinitely generous, but not actually infinite. 

To explain in more detail, many date the shift in how we farm our food to the 1950’s and 60’s “green revolution” – an era in which we adopted new technologies and initiatives to increase agricultural production to feed a growing population. Enter: high-yield crops, chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and international import/exports. Yes, our intention was to feed ourselves –  essentially to avoid famine – but let’s look at some of the outcomes: 

Nature is, naturally, diverse – diversity is its default mode. Industrial farming, however, favours monocultures. Monocultures literally defy nature; they are unnatural. And when we produce masses of food by segregated means, cannot cope with it – it panics, tries to right our wrongs, rectify the unhealthy environment, ultimately introducing weeds. But industrial farmers don’t like weeds. So we started adding in herbicides to keep our monocultures “clean”, and fertilisers to up production. At the same time, an unhealthy environment like this attracts “pests”. Industrial farming don’t like insects, so in come pesticides.

By basically playing god, creating unnatural industrial farms that need chemicals to function, we keep upping the ante, introducing more and more chemicals as nature tried to undo our mistakes – creating an endless, devastating game of one-upmanship. It’s not natural, not energy efficient and, at worse, not safe – poisoning and degrading the precious soil.

The same goes for our shift from vital seed variety to an obsession with cultivating only the highest yield or highest resistance seeds, and genetically modifying crops to fit this brief too. From wheat to bananas, we disregarded dozens of precious varieties, breeding transgenics seeds without the proper safety studies, and throwing away millenias of life and natural data.

The other thing about monocultures is that they rely on certain things to grow in certain places – reducing food diversity in entire countries or, even, continents; think of the Caribbean banana republics. The outcome: we stopped eating locally, instead importing, overpackaging and leaving a big old carbon footprint and an awful lot of waste (most of which we have no idea what to do with). And, at the same time, we started demanding all of our foods all-year round; so seasonality gave way to even more unnatural farming methods and energy-sucking storage to meet perennial demand. 

Ultimately, we ransacked, deforested and created an awful lot of waste. We detached ourselves from our environment. Poisoned seas, fields and our own water supply, depleting oceans, creating horror stories out of meat and dairy and killing off life-giving bees. Then we were shocked when our climate went into meltdown and we didn’t get the nutrients we needed. Undernourished yet often overfed, eating over-processed, barely recognisable “food”, we put even more strain on our health system, and panicked when a pandemic hit and shortages threatened shops. 

If it sounds grim, that’s because it is. But it isn’t un-undoable. So let’s stop panicking and start repairing…

How? 

Let’s all agree: going against nature hasn’t really worked for us. So we suggest we kick things off by letting nature lead the way; following her wisdom by respecting seasonality, locality and diversity – thus reducing waste, energy use and chemicals.

Part of eating locally is also about us being part of the production of the food that feeds us, connecting with the energetics of our food and medicines by growing our own. This extends to hunting, fishing and farming too. It’s about the energetics received and connection with nature achieved by eating food that has been cultivated with love and care – eggs from happy chickens, honey from bees that have been treated kindness – and cultivated around us. Food grown under the same sun, fed in the same circles as us, naturally has the properties we most need to thrive in our environment – consider vitamin C-rich Seville oranges, ripe and ready for harvest in high winter, when we need vitamins most. It’s just more proof of nature’s marvellous masterplan, and something we just can’t replicate when we mass produce or genetically modify.

Another key element of keeping it local is in helping cultivate our communities and supporting local businesses by buying and exchanging locally; using food to connect on a human level in supporting our neighbours and benefitting from their gifts. Between us, our neighbours and nature, we create a collaborative system: one that honours our intrinsic interconnectedness as lifeforms. 

Of course, we know we’ve got some making up to do, so we must regenerate, not simply sustain –integrating land reparation into everything we do as a species. It’s our moral obligation to regenerate the earth for our own children, to re-gift them the right to inhabit a place that is liveable and edible and energetically balanced. So future farming, planting and planning must combine reforestation, restoration and preservation with circle-closing permaculture principles and sound forestry management to undo some of that damage. 

We also believe in embracing the beautiful chaos of nature: letting it grow free and do its thing towards diversity – giving it space to self-maintain. So foraging for wild-grown foods will become as a big part of our food system. In regaining our understanding of the local wisdom on what grows around us, we can better connect with our environments, and the heritage of our communities. 

Similarly, there’s a lot we can learn from the slow food movement in connecting to our food. Honouring the process of making it from scratch, and the energetics of something made with love whilst avoiding preservatives, artificial flavourings and packaging. In eating, too, we ask to take time to experience our food, to honour the flavours and our culinary traditions – the wisdom of centuries, the generations of goatherds, cheesemakers and cooks contained in one glorious goats cheese dish, say.  

The more we do these things, the more we act like stewards of our land (not its clients). The more we take responsibility for our legacy. The healthier our planet, diets and bodies become. And the more we can enjoy the nutritious, delicious, medicinal potential of food. After all: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” ― Virginia Woolf