Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[su do <speakingbeareturns@yahoo.com>]

Great article! Thanks.
--- TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:

> 
> "To reclaim this much control over one's food, to
> take it back from
> industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in
> our time cooking from
> scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as
> subversive acts." 
> 
>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/08/health.foodanddrink
> How to get back to real food, Michael Pollan
> Tuesday January 8 2008
> 
> In the second and final extract from his new book,
> Michael Pollan says we
> need to rediscover the simple rules for healthy
> eating. Here, he gives his
> recipe for reclaiming control over our disastrous
> diets
> 
> 
> The first time I heard the advice to "just eat food"
> was in a speech by the
> nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled
> me. Of course you
> should eat food - what else is there to eat? But
> Gussow, who grows much of
> her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting
> into the Hudson River,
> refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in
> the supermarket with
> that title. "In the 34 years I've been in the field
> of nutrition," she
> said, "I have watched real food disappear from large
> areas of the
> supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating
> world." Taking its
> place has been an unending stream of food-like
> substitutes - "products
> constructed largely around commerce and hope,
> supported by frighteningly
> little actual knowledge".
> 
> Real food is still out there, however, still being
> grown and even
> occasionally sold in the supermarket. Here are a few
> rules of thumb to help
> you recognise it - and then make the most of it.
> 
> Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother
> wouldn't recognise as food
> 
> Why your great-grandmother? Because at this point
> your mother, and possibly
> even your grandmother, are as confused as the rest
> of us; to be safe we
> need to go back at least a couple generations, to a
> time before the advent
> of most modern foods. Some nutritionists recommend
> going back even further.
> John Yudkin, a British nutritionist whose early
> alarms about the dangers of
> refined carbohydrates were overlooked in the 60s and
> 70s, once advised:
> "Just don't eat anything your Neolithic ancestors
> wouldn't have recognised
> and you'll be OK."
> 
> What would shopping this way mean in the
> supermarket? Well, imagine your
> great-grandmother at your side as you go down the
> aisles. You're standing
> together in front of the dairy cabinet. She picks up
> a pack of Go-Gurt
> Portable Yogurt tubes - and has no idea what this
> could possibly be. Is it
> a food or a toothpaste? You could tell her it is
> just yoghurt in a
> squirtable form, yet if she read the ingredients
> label she would have every
> reason to doubt that was the case. Sure, there is
> some yoghurt in there,
> but there are also a dozen other things that aren't
> remotely yoghurt-like,
> ingredients she would probably fail to recognise as
> foods of any kind,
> including high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn
> starch, kosher gelatin,
> carrageenan, tri-calcium phosphate, natural and
> artificial flavours,
> vitamins, and so forth. How did yoghurt, which once
> consisted simply of
> milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get
> to be so complicated? Is
> a product such as Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a
> wholefood? A food of any
> kind?
> 
> Avoid food products that make health claims
> 
> For a product to make health claims on its package,
> it must first have a
> package, so right off the bat it is more likely to
> be a processed than a
> whole food. Generally speaking, it is only the big
> food companies that have
> the wherewithal to secure officially approved health
> claims for their
> products and then trumpet them to the world.
> Recently, however, some fruits
> and nuts have begun boasting about their
> health-enhancing properties, and
> there will surely be more as each crop council
> scrounges together the money
> to commission its own scientific study. Because all
> plants contain
> antioxidants, all these studies are guaranteed to
> find something on which
> to base a health-oriented marketing campaign. But
> for the most part it is
> the products of food science that make the boldest
> claims, and these are
> often founded on incomplete or erroneous science.
> Don't forget that
> trans-fat-rich margarine, one of the first
> industrial foods to claim it was
> healthier than the traditional food it replaced,
> turned out to cause heart
> attacks.
> 
> Get out of the supermarket
> 
> The surest way to escape the overprocessed,
> life-shortening western diet is
> simply to depart the realms it rules: the
> supermarket, the convenience
> store, the fast-food outlet. It is hard to eat badly
> from a farmers'
> market, from a weekly organic vegetable box or from
> your garden. It is true
> that most farmers' markets operate only seasonally,
> and you won't find
> everything you need there. But nor will you find
> elaborately processed food
> products, long lists of unpronounceable ingredients,
> or ageing food from
> far away. Eating in season also tends to diversify
> your diet - because you
> can't buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes 12
> months of the year, you
> will find yourself experimenting with other foods
> when they come into the
> market. The weekly veg box does an even better job
> of forcing you out of
> your rut because you will find things in your
> delivery that you would never
> buy on your own.
> 
> If you are concerned about chemicals in your
> produce, simply ask the farmer
> at the market how he or she deals with pests and
> fertility and begin the
> sort of conversation that, in the end, is the best
> guarantee of quality in
> your food. So here is a subclause to the
> get-out-of-the-supermarket rule:
> Shake the hand that feeds you.
> 
> Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
> 
> Scientists may disagree about what is so good about
> eating plants - is it
> the antioxidants in them? The fibre? The omega-3
> fatty acids? - but they do
> agree that plants are probably really good for you,
> and certainly can't
> hurt. Without plants, for example, we would be
> hard-pressed to get enough
> vitamin C, an essential nutrient that humans long
> ago lost the ability to
> synthesise themselves. Like other antioxidants,
> vitamin C contributes to
> our health in at least two important ways. Several
> of the body's routine
> processes, including cell metabolism and the defence
> mechanism of
> inflammation, produce "oxygen radicals" - atoms of
> oxygen with an extra
> unpaired electron that make them particularly eager
> to react with other
> molecules in ways that can create all kinds of
> health problems, including
> cancer. Antioxidants such as vitamin C harmlessly
> absorb and stabilise
> these free radicals before they can do their
> mischief.
> 
> But antioxidants do something else for us as well:
> they stimulate the liver
> to produce the enzymes necessary to break down the
> antioxidant itself,
> enzymes that, once produced, go on to break down
> other 
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