What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, Norton Publishing, 2022.
Flip through the table of contents of this new book by David Montgomery and Anne Biklé and you’ll find an outline that will be very familiar to readers of this magazine. Healthy soil (Section 1) begets healthy plants (Section 2), which feed healthy animals (Section 3), which can be consumed by people to improve their health (Section 4).
This is the aim of this book: to provide proof of this connection from soil to humans.
To do this, Montgomery and Biklé describe the work of many familiar farmers and scientists. In fact, a quick scan through the index reveals the names of a multitude of people who have been written about — or have themselves been published — in the pages of this magazine. The authors talk with Dan Kittredge of the Bionutrient Food Association about nutrient density meters. Gabe Brown provided them data. They visited the farms of Bryan and Anita O’Hara, Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser, and Jonathan Lundgren. Ray Archuleta provided counsel and company during their travels. The work of André Voisin and Fred Provenza on animals and human health is highlighted. Even long-gone figures whose stories have been featured here in recent years are invoked: Lady Eve Balfour, William Albrecht, J. I. Rodale, Sir Albert Howard.
What Your Food Ate was published by W. W. Norton, which is a major publishing house. It’s almost enough to lead a supporter of regenerative agriculture start to think … have we made it? If the conventional world is starting to notice people who have been featured in Acres U.S.A. … are we becoming respectable?
Good farmers should be naturally grounded and cautious enough to not get too excited. While Montgomery and Biklé present loads of evidence and make their case well, regenerative agriculture is still in the process of moving from the borderline to the sideline (not yet the mainline).
Still, there’s reason to be optimistic about regenerative agriculture’s chances. Soil health is definitely becoming a thing. It’s a topic that scientists and salespeople and businesses in the conventional world are starting to have to reckon with. It’s threatening to them, of course — they have no incentive to say that farmers don’t really need their chemicals — but the evidence that Montgomery and Biklé and many others are assembling about the importance of soil biology is becoming overwhelming. The question practitioners of conventional agriculture need to ask themselves is how destructive their synthetic chemicals are and if these tools need to be completely removed from a farm ecosystem or only tempered.
What Your Food Ate raises some interesting questions about modern scientific research and how well it can prove the connection between soil and human health. No one is opposed to what is empirically true, of course, but the modern scientific method that relies on isolating single factors is inherently limited when it comes to systems of such complexity as the soil, the plant, the animal and the human body.
Montgomery and Biklé definitely acknowledge this constraint and lament such simplistic thinking. They write, “Despite the collective scientific and practical efforts that have uncovered how conventional farming practices compromise the mix and abundance of phytochemicals, fats, and other compounds in food, we still have an incomplete understanding of their synergies and effects on health.” While there is an “inherent nutritional wisdom of whole food-based cuisines,” it “remains challenging to conduct dietary research.” Food frequency questionnaires can skew results; there are ethical issues with some types of human-based research; the vast complexity of the human body makes single-factor analysis (what effect a single input had on the body) reductionistic and nearly impossible.
There are thus limits to what science can truly prove, at least related to human health. While there is a growing body of research showing the positive effects of regenerative agriculture on human wellbeing, there are plenty of contrary studies that a person could choose to believe instead.
The same is true with on-farm research. With the thousands of variables at play — many of which scientists can’t control and don’t fully understand within the holistic environment of a regenerative farm — we need to perhaps re-evaluate the balance of power between farmers and scientists in favor of farmers. Both have a role, but there are regenerative farmers actually doing things that many scientists say isn’t possible. Something isn’t only true if it’s backed by a published study. There are factors influencing farming that science can’t yet explain — and may never be able to.
In light of this, we need to be careful to not only promote the studies that back our side. We at Acres U.S.A. know that we’re guilty of this from time to time ourselves — it’s not like we regularly publicize studies in the Eco-update that are contrary to our narrative. We recognize that it’s a bit bipolar to criticize the methodology of modern science while simultaneously highlighting studies that use this approach to prove the point we want to make. This is a paradox that we all need to be conscious of.
One other note on the authors’ conclusion — besides of course recommending regenerative farming practices, they also advocate changing agricultural policy to subsidize farmers who use regenerative practices. This is of course a matter of huge debate, but perhaps a simpler — albeit less likely — solution would be to simply stop subsidizing conventional methods of farming.
In short, though, What Your Food Ate makes the case for what this magazine has stood for since its inception: that to be economical — and health-giving — agriculture must be ecological.
