5

Food

As with many other glitches in us humans, we aren’t aware of why we do what we do, and when we wake up, as from a dream, we try to blame someone else for the damage we’ve done to ourselves and the world. Just as we’re so surprised about the climate crisis (‘How did this happen? Who did this?’), we are as surprised to find we’re having heart attacks and diabetes, or that one day we’ve woken up just plain old obese. We never think, WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES. We should all wear a T-shirt that says, ‘Who can I blame?’ And here’s the real kicker: for the last fifty years we have known the link between health and food yet, since the 1970s, our consumption of junk food is up. You can’t say you don’t know about the dangers of eating crap because it’s been in every newspaper, on radio, TV, tweeted, on the internet, even pictures on billboards for those who can’t read.

In America, there was a campaign in 1970 that stressed that vegetables and fruit are good for you and advocated eating five a day. Ten years later they found that there had been a 3 per cent decline in the consumption of vegetables and fruit.

Similarly, we have been dumping our trash for decades and can now pay a visit to it on an island called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is about 1.6 million square kilometres in size, more than double the size of Texas and three times the size of France. We don’t think about where our rubbish goes when we toss it out, as if some garbage fairy comes and takes it to a magical land somewhere.

We should know though – after all, it’s written about everywhere – so unless you live in a cave you have no excuse not to know. We put rubbish in our mouths, even though we now know it causes heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, obesity and premature aging to name a few. And many of these happen to younger people; you could lose forty-five years of life compared with people who eat healthy food. Heart disease alone is responsible for 50 per cent of deaths in America. Maybe we could count the number of those who died of heart disease and compare it to the amount of burgers sold at the golden arches. All this for a taste sensation that lasts maybe ten seconds or however long it takes for you to chew and swallow. But we know what we’re like because we’ve been here before.

When cigarette companies started putting pictures of coffins and foetuses with an X through them on the packets, the sales of tobacco actually went up. This is because when we are full of fear our rational brain closes shop and we reach for a cigarette. Remember, we do also have the capacity to use our higher brains, to pull in the reins to control the lower reptilian brain. So if the bad news has a numbing effect on us so that we are deliberately blind and deaf to warnings, maybe a book about good news will persuade people to change.

Now is the time to give you a short but completely accurate history of food.

History of Food

In the beginning, our ancient ancestors just picked from the all-you-can-eat buffet we call earth. We hunted a buffalo here, picked a berry there; nature was not disturbed at all and gave freely, regenerating itself. Everything worked in perfect harmony. Our ancestors did not think about whether food was healthy or not. Food was food and if a mushroom was poisonous so be it. Then maybe they got lazy and didn’t want to move around all day for food (like me, I don’t see the point of wasting my day cooking and shopping for food so I order in) and as there was no delivery service, they had to start farming.

Sometime between 3500–550 BC, Mesopotamia was the ‘place to be’, like Ibiza is now or was ten minutes ago. Hunting and gathering had worked fine for tribes of around 150 but with a growing population it would be a car crash; all those people trying to pick from the same trees which would be stripped bare in minutes. So in order to survive, they got the farmers (the ones who stopped moving) to grow enormous amounts of food for a burgeoning population. The farmers discovered scratching up the soil to plant the many seeds. Nature now began to be gradually depleted by ploughing and overgrazing. The ecosystem, which is the biology of soil (all the microscopic creatures and mycelia where the nutrients are), in the farmed areas of these dry nations began to collapse.

On the other hand, no plough, no civilization; we needed to plant stuff otherwise we’d starve. If a city or town ran out of food because their crop failed, they had no option but to declare war on the next-door town or city to get some. David Montgomery, in his book Dirt, said that all civilizations back then ended because the land that fed everyone became so degraded that people either had to move, conquer new territory or starve.

Meanwhile back in Mesopotamia (modern Syria and Iraq), they had to think of ways of preserving food. In 1200ish BC someone thought, ‘I know, let’s put the food in the sun to dry,’ and it caught on. A simple idea but it worked. You spread out your food in the sun which evaporates the water, and voilà, dried food. Around the same time they also started using other ways to stop food from rotting or poisoning people. In the town square, you’d see them carrying sticks of hanging, salted fish on strings (they could also be used for decoration).

Between 3000–550 BC, when pharaohs and their queens were buried in the pyramids they had big farewell parties where friends and family buried jewellery and food for the afterlife (you know how hungry you get once you’re dead?). At that time, to preserve the food, they salted it and it ended up lasting longer than they did. When they opened the tombs the pharaohs were all mummified, looking like biltong, while the food was still in great shape.

By the way, around this time (probably because they needed to eat and had run low on meat and fish) suddenly the Egyptians all went on a low-fat, high-carb diet because wholegrain and cereals became the ‘It Girls’ of food. Everyone started eating bread, thinking it was nourishing, but instead of getting healthier, they got sicker, smaller and fatter, their teeth rotted and their lifespan halved. We always think they were so smart; they weren’t.

In 500 BC, the Greeks thought of preserving food inside jars of honey; thus the first jelly (‘jam’ to some of you) was born. That was their final gift to us after giving us arts, sports, medicine, law, language, science, maths and philosophy, before they collapsed.

Wars over territories were won and lost and hungry people looted and pillaged from other people’s farms – you’ve seen the films, I don’t need to spell it out. By the way, war is often instigated by hunger (not, as many believe, because of colour, race or religion but just for wanting dinner and wanting it bad). If you’ve seen Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat you’ll know that Joseph had a dream where he was warned that famine was coming so he advised the Pharaoh to take advantage of the boom time and stock up with food. My point is, if they’d all had refrigeration in those ol’ biblical days, Joseph wouldn’t have sung that song and you never would have heard of the show.

All they had was ice (which was not much use in warmer regions). In the Book of Proverbs we have proof that the Jews used ice to cool their beverages rather than to preserve their food – they had great priorities.

Scroll On a Thousand Years …

In the 1700s various people (including Benjamin Franklin) experimented with how to cool and freeze by a process of evaporation and by 1866 Sir Joe Fridge (that may not have been his name) invented refrigeration as we know it and meat could now be transported and traded around the world. Hurrah! (And also not hurrah as refrigeration is one of the biggest causes of CO2 emissions.)

Meanwhile, in 1809, canning had started. Napoleon rewarded Nicolas Appert for inventing the process of preserving food in vacuum-packed glass. He thought this would be the magic answer to feeding his army, who he believed ‘marched on their stomach’. The theory went, ‘If you feed them, they will kill.’

Fast forward to the twentieth century. By the 1920s nobody ate. All the flappers wanted to have those boyish figures which were the craze so to help them lose their hunger they smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes. An ad at the time read, ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’. So no food was really necessary during these wild and crazy bootlegger times and you didn’t really need to worry about preservatives as they lived on diet pills, chewing gum and laxatives. There were rumours that the ‘flappers’ swallowed pills containing tapeworm eggs. Along with the weight loss, apparently, they would get diarrhoea, nausea and a fever. I don’t know what this diet was called, maybe the ‘Tapeworm egg, diarrhoea, nausea diet’. It would be a huge bestseller. This continued to be a slimming aid; the famous opera singer Maria Callas was rumoured to have swallowed tapeworms to lose weight.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, people became thrifty (when they weren’t starving) so along came the cheap food brigade like Colonel Sanders from Kentucky. He decided to make chicken out of God knows what and flavoured it with his secret ingredient sprinkled on top before frying the fuck out of it; KFC was born.

During the rationing of the Second World War, convenience foods came on the market, i.e. instant coffee and cake mix. Everything was available in powder form, making it light for soldiers to carry. Very important during warfare.

By the way, after the war there was all this leftover nitrogen from explosives and bombs that were no longer needed. So farmers (remember them?) were encouraged to use it for fertilizer to speed up the growth of plants. Before that, they’d had to make do with various excreta from animals; now they added nitrogen into the mix which is still sprinkled on soil today.

The 1950s were a low point for American cuisine. Women were sick of making dishes from scratch so ready-made meals became available. Electric fridges and stoves promised to make life easier for housewives so they had more time for hoovering and doing laundry. What’s odd for many of us (me) is that as we get more and more kitchen equipment and appliances, we cook less and less. We watch more cooking shows than we do cooking. I know of people who watch Bake Off and don’t even listen, they just go up and lick the screen.

They were adding preservatives by the shovelful and no one seemed to mind. Nick Barnard, who started the Rude Health food company, explained this to me: ‘If you try to give food an unnaturally long shelf life, it will give you an unnaturally short human life.’

By the late 1950s, some mad chemist invented ultra-processed food. For this he used such delicacies as (look on the back of your packets and jars): sodium nitrate, azodicarbonamide (used in bagels – well, I’m a goner, I practically snort them), potassium bromate, propylglate monosodium glutamate, high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, soy protein isolate. The result of this cocktail, Nick told me, is known now as ‘edible food-like substance’; its ingredients are mainly artificial. My grandmother would have no idea what she was looking at; hydrolysed soy protein and autolysed yeast could just as well be aliens.

And there followed Wonder Bread, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Popsicle and Kool-Aid (I was raised on all these, this is probably why I am five feet tall and mentally unbalanced). Lastly, I need a moment of silence for my favourite childhood food of all, Aunt Jemima pancakes.

My Story

When I was a small girl in Evanston, Illinois, every Sunday my family would go to Aunt Jemima’s pancake house – everyone in town did. We would order piles of pancakes under a mountain of bacon and maple syrup. The sign outside was a lit-up image of Aunt Jemima, a smiling African-American woman with a red chequered bandana on her head. In the 1970s it was outlawed to use this image. So (I swear to God this is true) they removed the bandana and put a big brown spot on her nose and changed the name nationally to The Brown Bear. Only in America.

Maybe a particle of what makes us keep eating dangerous food stuff is we remember it with nostalgia from our happy childhood days and when you meet someone else from your era who ate the same crap as you, it bonds you. If I meet someone who ate a Twinkie, I feel almost related. And Joanna, my editor, gets all misty-eyed when she talks about spaghetti hoops, Bird’s Instant Whip and Curly Wurlys. In Australia they will hump you if you mention Tim Tam biscuits.

Nothing is sacred any more, not even bread. In bakeries and supermarkets it’s processed, even when it claims to be ‘multi-seed’ or ‘wholemeal’ and all homey like mama made straight from the oven (not my mother). People have become gluten intolerant because of processed bread.

When bread was untampered with and milled with an old stone, it was made using 100 per cent of the original grain, which was fermented or sprouted. It was full of nutrients, easier to digest and reduced your chances of chronic diseases, as opposed to giving you them. But now that same loaf is stuffed full of maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose, soluble or insoluble fibre, hydrogenated interesterified oil, foaming gels and glazing agents.

Even Jesus couldn’t have turned the processed bread into bread-bread. And, sorry, folks, but worse still for us than bread is cereal.

Yes, I know … we all had it for breakfast growing up and were told it was good for us, but we now know that Corn Flakes and Frosties are full of salt and sugar, which are numbers one and two in breakfast killers. So much for putting tigers in our tanks.

Puffed Rice Sounds Cute But is a Killer

Puffed rice, you may be interested to know, was invented by Alexander P. Anderson. He experimented for many years and eventually in 1901 heated starch granules that were sealed in a glass tube, then smashed the glass, and the resulting explosion produced puffed rice. He became a hero of breakfast cereal and was made the face of Quaker Oats. His discovery really took off at the 1904 St Louis World Fair. Anderson brought eight bronze cannons, loaded them with six pounds of raw rice and applied heat. A blizzard of puffed rice showered the crowds, who squealed with delight.

They didn’t know then that these high carbohydrate foods, when mixed with sugar and milk, are stored as fat in the body, and starting the day with these cereals will set up a craving for another high-carb dose, and a vicious cycle of overeating begins. Also, if you’re not already gluten intolerant, this stuff will really get you there. (I had no idea Tony the Tiger was a drug pusher.)

Main Monster on the Table

Sugar is now considered one of the most toxic ingredients in the Western diet.

A little more bad news … sorry, then I’ll stop.

Once you get a hit of sugar in your bloodstream, it signals dopamine to be released in your brain which, like all drugs of choice, bangs up your craving for more. So a little sugar is okay but it’s addictive, like all good things. (No one gets addicted to kale.) When they talk about sugar they keep going on about glucose, so for those of you, like me, who have no idea about these things, here’s an explanation that you too can google.

When you digest food in your stomach, the carbohydrates (sugar and starches) break down into glucose. Then the stomach and small intestines absorb the glucose and release it into the bloodstream. (So far it’s a good thing because we need glucose for energy.) However, in order for all this to go smoothly we have to make enough insulin (what your pancreas secretes to break down sugar) to store glucose for future use. Think of insulin like a tiny storekeeper (I picture a woman called Wendy, in sensible shoes) who keeps your blood sugar from getting too high. If your body stops producing enough insulin or your cells become resistant to it, it can cause diabetes. It still doesn’t end there …

When you eat excess sugar, the extra insulin in your bloodstream can inflame the walls of your arteries that run throughout your body. They get thicker and stiffer, which damages your heart and, over time, leads to heart disease, heart failure, strokes, etc.

In the old prehistoric days we chased our dinner so we could eat what we needed fatwise; now we sit for a living and there lies the rub – we get fat. (Also, things like trans fat didn’t grow on trees back then.)

Trans fats, patented in 1903, occur in hydrogenated vegetable oil. Adding hydrogen atoms (bombing food) to cooking oils created saturated fats that helped goodies stay moist and chewy longer with a longer shelf life. Crisco was the first company to develop this technique (which is another product I was weaned on), but now it’s banned. Since the 1980s the results of various trials have shown that trans fats were linked to heart attacks and that cholesterol was hardly affected by cutting fat out of the diet, but in an age where the industry was at its most powerful, consumers weren’t informed of this!

In 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a report estimating that about 7,000 deaths a year could be prevented by removing trans fat from margarine and other foods. And later, in 2001, a report confirmed that trans fat was associated with heart disease. We had no way of distinguishing between polyunsaturated fats, which are healthy, and trans fats. For more than a century hydrogenated oil had been seen as a magic ingredient that gave food freshness and crispiness and then, overnight, it was banned by law. So suddenly it has disappeared, no apology, no nothing. Thank God the younger generation demand more transparency than older consumers, who just bought what they saw on TV. (I thought there really was a leprechaun living in my Lucky Charms cereal and I’d still be buying Crisco if it hadn’t been banned. I used to use it as moisturizer when I wasn’t eating it. Who knew?)

Back to Food

From the 1950s on, it was less about what food people ate and more what they didn’t eat because slimming diets now dictated our food choice, not how healthy or good it tasted. In 1953 the American biochemist Ancel Keys thought that the fat in our diet increased our cholesterol levels and that’s why we got heart disease. The theory was that fat clogged your arteries like grease poured down the drain. Everyone bought into this until …

In 1972 the book Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution came out and tens of millions of people ate it up. This kick-started the modern high-fat/low-fat debate. His New Diet Revolution became even more popular, mainly because celebrities went on it. And people eat what famous people eat – maybe they think that if they have the same food in their gullets, they’ll be famous too.

Dr Atkins started the new thinking: that a high-carb, low-fat diet wouldn’t make you lose weight or keep you healthy and insisted that high-fat, low-carb diets are the way to keep trim and alive.

He was inspired by William Banting, a prosperous London undertaker and self-published author of ‘Letter on Corpulence’ (you won’t find his work on Amazon so don’t even look), who way back in 1862 started a new diet. He was overly portly and was told by his doctor that rather than nix out the fat, to eat as much of it as he could but cut out sugar, sweets, potatoes and other carbs. He not only lost weight but his cholesterol levels dropped and he became a convert.

I was told throughout my life that fats were taboo and now, it turns out, that was a lie. So many wasted years tossing away egg yolks, cutting the fat off meat, and now we’re supposed to snort fat. Trials were done and no matter how much fat volunteers ate, their cholesterol levels weren’t affected. Turns out the body lowers its own levels when it has enough.

Banting’s diet was based on the rich-in-fat diet our ancestors ate to survive in the distant past. This storing of the fat gave them tremendous amounts of energy to run at high speeds for long distances, as they chased antelopes and lions. (These days, people in Wisconsin can’t even get out of their chairs. Times have changed.)

Banting had quite a following at the time but for some reason the diet fizzled out and completely disappeared by the end of the Second World War, at which point, for some reason, it became excluded from the medical books and replaced by the low-fat, high-carb diet, maybe because farmers got huge state subsidies, therefore making a large profit from feeding us the same crap they were feeding to cows.

There Followed Craze After Craze

In 1981 we got the Beverly Hills Diet giving people a six-week food-combining regimen and turning Judy Mazel into a Hollywood diet guru. She gave us the idea that we should eat a lot of fat-burning pineapple. That for ten days you could only eat fruit then gradually other foods were introduced. So many people, including the famous, got the runs. Liza Minnelli embraced the diet and became a stick insect almost overnight.

The Sleeping Beauty Diet came somewhere in this time, based on an idea that when a person is sleeping, they are not eating (duh). The advocates of this diet use sedatives to go to sleep during the day to avoid consuming food. Elvis Presley for one used this method; for several days he went into a medically induced coma in an attempt to lose weight. Michael Jackson seemed to also be on this diet for other reasons than weight loss.

My Story

There followed more and more diets that worked less and less. I went on one where I ate only grapefruit and ended up in hospital having the pulp removed from my stomach. Not long ago, I went big time into the juicing diet. Whole gardens were pulverized in my blender. I almost exploded while on a train, I was so sick. I had been drinking my flask of vegetables like water; someone told me later I had drunk the equivalent of four football fields filled with broccoli.

Now, foods are labelled with the words ‘healthy’, ‘organic’, ‘eco-friendly’ as if nature is going to say, ‘Look! Ruby’s eating an eco-friendly chocolate bar, that’s going to stop the ice cap melting. Thank you, Ruby.’ I recently saw in LA a few ‘organic’ nail bars; I wasn’t planning on eating my nails, I just wanted them clipped. My favourite diet that I’ve heard about is the Breatharian Diet where no food is involved, you just breathe. Again in LA, someone told me about a Breatharian Restaurant. Imagine the profit margin!

Fasting took off in 2012 but is still popular today and I’m not talking about people in countries with no food. Maybe it is so embraced in the West because it’s not just cheap, it’s free. It’s sometimes known as the 5.2 diet; you eat normally for five days then restrict calories to 500 for women (which is about half a breadstick) and 600 for men, on two non-consecutive days. There are claims it can reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease and that you can live past a hundred.

Starving seems to work based on the fact that when your body realizes there is no food incoming (in other words, zero calories), your body calls a code-red emergency and raids your fat stores to keep you alive.

Now once your body has emptied the cupboard (after about two days) it switches on an emergency source of energy – the ketonic system. Ketosis will power your body for days, because this system is designed to get us through famine or being in a state of fight or flight. It’s an emergency generator so your brain actually works better when it is operating. The body is now in a state of autophagy (Greek for eating itself). The good news about eating yourself means your insulin levels have hit the dust, so you’ll be free of diabetes, heart disease and high cholesterol but you may be dead.

The Banting Diet had a resurgence a few years ago in the disguise of the Paleo Diet except with this one there’s no carbs. Just fat.

Vegetarianism/Veganism

The Buddha, Gandhi, Bernard Shaw and Shelley were all advocates of living without meat so it’s been going for a while and can hardly be described as a health fad. And now there’s evidence that meat is unsustainable partly because farmers have to take up huge tracts of land to grow maize or wheat, purely to feed animals and not us. Also, animals are cute and our friends and who wants to eat a friend? Vegetarians don’t eat pigs, chickens, cows or fish (some cheat and eat fish but don’t tell anyone).

The story goes that in 1944 a small group of vegetarians broke away from the Vegetarian Society of England and formed the Vegan Society. (I’m wondering if there was a war between them? I want to be a member of both sides immediately.) Vegans (named from the first and last letters of vegetarian) choose not to consume dairy, eggs or any other products of animal origin because they don’t want to see them suffer but also for ethical, health and environmental reasons. They believe going plant-based reduces the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and premature death.

There are nutritional problems being discovered with this new vegan processed food that you see in the supermarkets as they have lots of additives and are often sugary or full of salt, so the jury is out on how healthy the diet is. The worry is that many vegans eat chips, biscuits and ready-made meals pumped full of chemicals and saturated fats. These are not healthier than their meat-filled alternatives despite the marketing, as they are still processed.

Tim Spector advocates choosing healthy food (that includes whatever food you most enjoy) and cutting down on meat and dairy is probably a good idea for the environment so being a part-time vegan (or flexitarian) ensures you don’t become deficient in things like vitamin B12.

Michael Pollan, one of the main influencers on diet, says that most of what we eat now is not food; it was he who named it ‘food-like substance’ and said that we should follow his maxim: ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.’ The vegetarian/vegan global market was worth $51 billion in 2016 and has leapt to $140 billion in just four years. Money talks and now, whatever the reservations of the food gurus, it’s the coolest thing to be vegan. You cannot be a hipster without it. I’ve tried – even with a fake beard I can’t pass.

Okay, this is why so many of us are driven insane. Have you noticed that every diet I’ve discussed has groupies who insist that theirs is the key to the kingdom of healthiness? One week I can eat an egg, the next week I’m told it’s like dropping an A-bomb on my innards. Is cholesterol a good witch or a wicked witch? The Atkins Diet tells me to swallow whole herds, vegans would rather kill me than a chicken. Butter? Cookies? Cancer or what? WHO DO WE BELIEVE? EVERYONE CAN’T BE RIGHT!

Enter Probiotics – Very Good News

Again, everything I believed in the past has been turned on its head. I haven’t eaten an egg since I was thirty-two because I was told I’d have a heart attack (unless I just ate the white part and chucked the poison part, the yolk). Now I’m told an egg a day makes you live to 106 and gives you nice hair.

It’s the same when I hear the word ‘bacteria’; I was under the impression that it was something that needed to be scraped, soaped or deodorized immediately. Turns out microbes, meaning bacteria, yeasts and fungi, are all over us, inside and out, and are running the show. There are trillions and trillions of tiny living things in our eyes, ears, nose and other crevices but mostly in our gastrointestinal tract, all of them making sure we keep on ticking.

I found out about the importance of microbes from an interview I did with Tim Spector, one of the world’s great gut gurus, for my Audible series No Brainer. He says, ‘The state of our gut biome affects our physical and psychological health.’ Apparently, microbes help us fight cancer, digest food, turn what we eat into B2 and B12, and control our moods by changing what happens chemically inside of us. (They don’t know for sure yet, but depression just might be influenced by activity in the gut rather than the brain.) Microbes are like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, running us.

We are all part of a planet full of these things. Don’t get grossed out, they are keeping you alive. Now they tell us, instead of washing our hands, we should stick them in soil because dirt is our best friend. Things like gardening (which I’m allergic to) are a wonderful bacteria-picker-upper and when the baby drops its dummy, don’t grab it in mid-air or sterilize it, let it drop on the ground so the baby acquires an army of microscopic crawly things to build up the immune system. Tim told me that babies get natural microbes from the mother during that trip (agonizing for the mother) down the birth canal. If they’re born through caesarean section (as mine were), the kids have more chance of getting allergies and more problems with weight, later in life. This is why in some hospitals, when a woman has a caesarean, they often rub vaginal fluids on the baby to compensate for the lack of bacteria. It’s called swabbing. I asked him if it was too late to swab my son. Tim asked how old my son was, I said thirty; there was a long silence.

I asked him to recommend a practitioner who would analyse the state of my gut. He put me in touch with Miguel Toribio-Mateas, a nutritionist who is also a clinical neuroscientist, specializing in probiotics and mental health. Tim told me he was the top nutritionist for testing and manipulating my gut biome. Here’s the bad news: you have to somehow get your faeces into a small tube which is one of the more horrible experiences in my life. I won’t give you the details but using a spoon or shoehorn doesn’t work. Anyway, you send your samples away (imagine if they went to the wrong address what the receiver would think) and then, a few weeks later, Miguel gives you the results of your gut condition.

Miguel told me our gut bacteria share information with the rest of the body by producing molecules that work a bit like Wi-Fi. These signals from the gut are picked up by different systems around the body, which form a kind of information-sharing network, making minute adjustments as a result. He told me that in your gut microbiome there are opportunistic bacteria (the not-so-friendly guys) probing your immune system which, to defend itself, is learning and changing all the time. The microbiome is a collection of living organisms, communicating the whole time with your immune system; telling it to attack or not to attack. Around 70 per cent of your immune system is in your gut. In fact, the thin layer of mucus that protects your gut lining is the bit which picks up information from gut bugs, translating it into messages that give instructions to various parts of the immune system to become active and fight. Different foods activate or deactivate these messages by feeding different gut bugs.

The thinking is that in order to keep our gut biome healthy, we need to eat food that feeds beneficial or health-promoting bacteria. You need to look at your biome as a team of different gut bugs working together and the aim is to make the team more efficient.

Luckily, my faeces went to the right address so Miguel called me to report on the diversity of my biome. I had an average diversity of bacteria for a person in the UK, but higher than average in America; meaning they are less healthy over there, gut-wise. He suggested a fibre-rich, Mediterranean-style, ‘rainbow-coloured’ diet, with plenty of probiotic foods, largely based on Tim’s book, The Diet Myth, and said he’d test me again after six weeks.

Probiotic Foods

Probiotics are living organisms found in foods such as natural yogurt, kefir (fermented milk), cheese (especially with blue veins – which are caused by probiotic fungi), raw milk, kombucha (fermented tea), algae, kimchi (fermented cabbage, often hot/spicy). You probably guessed that fermented is good for you; I used to think it was like eating acid and would give me ulcers. Wrong again.

The more diverse your microbes, the more different chemicals they can produce to protect you. Miguel told me to eat as many different foods as possible, meaning as many different-coloured vegetables and fruit. Oh, more good news, certain natural chemicals are like rocket fuel for microbes, they have funky names (like polyphenols and flavanols) and they’re trapped in the bright pigments that make berries blue, red or pink. They’re also in coffee and dark (over 70 per cent) chocolate. I can eat chocolate, how happy am I on this diet?

This gut biome theory is in its infancy but so far medical and scientific evidence shows that it’s a highly accurate system of testing our health as it involves looking at the whole picture. We have 20,000 genes that determine who we are, but we have around 20 million bacterial genes, so from that point of view, you’re about 99 per cent bacterial and not quite 1 per cent you. It’s difficult to change genes but you can change the composition of your microbes immediately, by eating the right foods. And because we still don’t know for certain which foods are best, eating a rainbow of brightly coloured fruit and veg every day is your best bet.

Good News for the Future of Food

There is a change in the air – over the last few years many people have voted with their feet and started programmes and initiatives to prevent waste and promote better quality food. Twenty years ago, councils were putting up posters to encourage people to take an allotment and grow their own vegetables, now there is usually a five-year waiting list. Gardening groups and allotments are blooming and, along with cooking, crafting, sewing and repairing stuff, there are TV shows all day to get your fix of planting stuff. Recently, too, organizations like the Skip Garden have started to create urban spaces where people can grow veg and who also organize pot-luck suppers where you bring your own contributions and make a banquet together.

Everyone is now getting the connection between what you eat and whether it is healthy for you – even if knowing it is all, it’s still better than wolfing down stuff without realizing it’s harmful as we have been for so many years; give us time and we’ll get there.

These Beacons of Hope are the people who are regenerating landscapes, enhancing livelihoods and restoring people’s health and well-being; not just in their own backyards but globally (because they care about the world these days). Here are a few examples (I wish we had thought of these rather than wolfing burgers):

This change in the air isn’t just happening here, it’s happening globally.

Food Waste

Food production has the single greatest man-made environmental impact on the planet. What’s more, wasted food, if it were a country, would rank as the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the US. How about them apples (which now come from Venezuela)?

But coming to the rescue is a food campaign group called Feedback who have been researching this phenomenon and have come up with some solutions.

Feedback has found that farmers waste around 16 per cent of their crop before it even leaves the field or barn because the produce is not the right shape or size for supermarket tastes. So they have started a Gleaning Network. (Gleaning is an archaic word for gathering the leftover grain in the field after harvest.) This gives volunteers an opportunity to engage with the food system hands-on by rescuing fresh, surplus fruit and veg (which is just bent out of shape) from farms where it would otherwise be wasted, and get it to people’s plates.

Their research also shows that the problem here is not just the misshapen veg but lies with the chains of supermarkets which dominate the food market and control the farmers’ livelihoods. The main issue is that they can’t be specific enough about how much they need so they set up orders with farms but then, if the demand fluctuates (maybe it’s raining and they don’t need so many strawberries), they simply pull the plug on the grower, who is left with a shed of mouldy fruit.

A conservative estimate of farm-level food waste is 2.5 million tonnes, representing a lost produce value of £0.8 billion (The Grocer, 2017). This is why there is pressure now on supermarkets to sell wonky-shaped veg and to buy more local food. With the increased numbers of farmers markets, let’s hope the future is ‘farm to fork’ food.

Which is a good way to lead into talking about what is new and exciting in the farming world.

Farming: Where the Food Comes From

I’ve already mentioned that since the end of the Second World War there has been a massive increase in cereal being grown industrially because it was vital we could ‘feed the nation’. Farmers were encouraged to tear out the hedges separating their fields and make room for the enormous new machines which were going to revolutionize the production of food.

When the farmers needed to plant acres of the wheat, maize and barley that make up cereal, they had to add chemicals to kill the large amounts of weeds. Genetic engineering also came in to ‘improve’ the crop, making it resistant to various weeds and pests but also making the plants toxic.

When you continually add pesticides, there are chemical reactions that burn off the soil, and as it degrades, it becomes harder and harder to work so you need heavier ploughs which damage the soil even more. Eventually it’s transformed into clay or sand (creating deserts). In the last twenty years an area the size of France has been made barren this way.

These ploughs churned up the soil, breaking the topsoil, which is known as the skin of the planet, releasing huge amounts of CO2 into the air. A third of all man-made CO2 has been released this way. (The world’s ploughed soils have lost over 50 per cent of their original carbon.) Ploughing also damages the biodiversity in the soil, which is nature’s way of supplying different nutrients for the soil to be healthy. In one tablespoon, there are more creatures than there have ever been humans walking on the earth and 98 per cent of the genetic diversity of land-based life.

John Cherry, a regenerative farmer, told me: ‘We can massively reduce global warming by capturing carbon dioxide from the air using living plants. It’s really simple and it happens really fast. All you have to do is keep the soil covered at all times by having living plants growing and not disturbing it. Undisturbed plants growing in healthy soil take in high amounts of CO2 from the air and put it back into the ground. Because there’s so much of it, farmland has the potential to store far more than the world’s forests. So farming in this way means we don’t need new tech to remove CO2 from air; to prevent more climate change we just need to restore earth’s green carpet.’

There’s a movement going on now which recognizes that ploughing and intensive farming is not good for the health of the soil or what’s growing in it. The less you meddle with the soil, the more it thrives with all its microscopic life that adds nutrients to whatever you’re growing. So if you farm as though you are copying nature instead of controlling it, you’re going to grow the healthiest possible plants.

John added: ‘The good news is that it can be restored to health in a matter of a few years and it can also be turned into a carbon-capturing sink. So land that was leaking carbon into the air can recover and act like a carbon sponge to soak it back up again.’

Healthy Soil – Healthy Food

John and a growing number of forward-thinking farmers are part of a new movement called Regenerative Agriculture where you can plant crops without ploughing up the soil. They’ve invented ‘no-till’ machines which plant the seeds straight into the ground without disturbing it.

For regenerating the soil, these are the golden rules:

Humans and the Humus are Connected

Every animal, plant and microorganism is full of bacteria. In the soil, they beaver away, making sure plants stay healthy by fighting off harmful enemies and keeping the atmosphere and earth stable. In humans, bacteria also declare war on invading microbes, and keep us stable inside. Bacteria are everywhere, from the moon (yes, some were found on the lens of a camera someone left there) to about 100 trillion tonnes of them below our feet; meaning there is probably more life under the earth than on top of it (so much for feeling you’re special).

In between each and every plant, there’s a web of fungus and mitochondria that works as a kind of answering- and room-service system. So if a fern gets sick because, for example, it’s dying from lack of nitrogen, it sends out SOS signals to other plants through its roots, like broadband, and some plant far away will pick up the message and send the exact formula of nutrients the sick fern needs to flourish. What’s incredible is that they don’t just help their own species; the soil web doesn’t care or know which plants it’s helping.

What goes for the soil, goes for us. The new thinking is that when we reduce our microbes through eating less diverse food or killing them with things like antibiotics, we become unwell. Similarly, when we kill off microbes and insects in the soil (which break down organic matter while supplying and distributing nutrients), we’re destroying the earth and what we eat.

We are related to the earth, biologically. If you put one of our cells and a fungal cell from the soil under a microscope, they’re nearly the same. In South Africa they found mycelium infused in the lava from 1.4 billion years ago. Think about it, we’re only separated from fungi by a mere 650 million years and they’ve had their form longer than we’ve had ours by about a billion years. Fungi was there before us and will be there long after we’re gone.

Understanding that we’re connected to the earth, we need to become aware of how we treat it. Daniel Goleman in his book Ecological Intelligence says:

We need to recognize the hidden web of connections between human activity and nature’s systems and the subtle complexities of their interaction. So we need to be vigilant about monitoring our behaviour in commerce and industry as well as our individual actions and behaviours and how they interact with nature; that’s ecological intelligence. If we keep alert to all of this, then we will see interconnections between our actions and their hidden impact on planet health and social systems.

I realize that all the green shoots I’ve discovered from writing this book really stem from similar beliefs; we are waking up and finding ways ‘to connect human activity to the larger flow of nature’.