What Your Food Ate
How to Restore Our Land and Reclaim Our Health
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2023 IACP Award for Food Issues & Matters
Are you really what you eat?
David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé take us far beyond the well-worn adage to deliver a new truth: the roots of good health start on farms. What Your Food Ate marshals evidence from recent and forgotten science to illustrate how the health of the soil ripples through to that of crops, livestock, and ultimately us.
The long-running partnerships through which crops and soil life nourish one another suffuse plant and animal foods in the human diet with an array of compounds and nutrients our bodies need to protect us from pathogens and chronic ailments. Unfortunately, conventional agricultural practices unravel these vital partnerships and thereby undercut our well-being. Can farmers and ranchers produce enough nutrient-dense food to feed us all? Can we have quality and quantity?
With their trademark thoroughness and knack for integrating information across numerous scientific fields, Montgomery and Biklé chart the way forward. Navigating discoveries and epiphanies about the world beneath our feet, they reveal why regenerative farming practices hold the key to healing sick soil and untapped potential for improving human health.
Humanity’s hallmark endeavors of agriculture and medicine emerged from our understanding of the natural world—and still depend on it. Montgomery and Biklé eloquently update this fundamental reality and show us why what’s good for the land is good for us, too. What Your Food Ate is a must-read for farmers, eaters, chefs, doctors, and anyone concerned with reversing the modern epidemic of chronic diseases and mitigating climate change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Geologist Montgomery and biologist Biklé (Hidden Half of Nature) bemoan the loss of soil nutrients in this insightful look at regenerative farming. Produce is significantly less nutrient-dense than in the past, and while consumers believe that organic farming yields more nutritious results than conventional agriculture, "what's typically missing from the framing of dietary choices," the authors write, "is how we grow what we eat." As they show, while modern agriculture produces "cheap, abundant" food thanks to "mechanized plowing, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides," it has wrecked soil and degraded the nutrients within it to the point where, "globally, micronutrient malnutrition is now more common than inadequate calories." Meat eaters aren't off the hook, either, as "what cows eat ripples through to the nutritional quality of the meat, milk, and cheese we consume." The authors offer a bevy of ideas for reviving soil, namely no-till planting, the usage of cover crops, and crop rotation. Trips to farms in Connecticut and California show regenerative farming in action (at one farm, it took just one year of not plowing for the soil to begin improving), and the authors make a case for subsidizing farms that use such practices. The result is a deep dive that's convincing and well reported.
