Beyond Eat Your Vegetables
Herbage which appears ideal to the chemist . . . is not necessarily ideal for the cow.
—From Soil, Grass and Cancer, by André Voisin,1959
It is simpler to cure sick soils than sick people, which shall we choose?
—Dr. Charles Northern, 1936
DAN KITTREDGE’S SPRAWLING FARMHOUSE in central Massachusetts is bursting with vitality. The dining room table is a center of commerce. When Tony and I arrive, Dan is in the midst of a transaction with Linda Fuchs, who runs an organic farm in nearby Brimfield, a town known for its vast antiques shows. Dan’s wife, Roshni, is in the kitchen, alternately cooking and typing on a laptop on the counter. Their two children, Anya and Sammy, almost five and almost four respectively, are running around, somewhat hepped up since their dad is finally home after traveling for the better part of several weeks giving workshops on growing nutrient-dense food.
He hands Linda a fifty-pound bag of minerals and a plastic bottle of dark liquid. He explains, talking in a quick-fire, high-energy way that I quickly realize, to my dismay, renders note taking virtually impossible, that this is “rock dust—micronized, plus a bunch of micronized humates and ultra-trace elements from seawater.” He turns to the plastic bottle and unscrews the lid. A smell like molasses floats by. “Keep it on the tab,” Linda says, as she gathers up the soil amendments.
“Oh, that’s right,” Dan says. “I still have some ginger coming to me.” Linda’s farm specializes in yellow ginger, fresh turmeric, and sweet potatoes. Improbable crops for this region, perhaps, but he assures me that they’re terrific.
An air of happy bustle fills the cool March day, with children perched on the table, Anya and a friend spinning and pointing in pink- and-black ballet-lesson clothes, Sammy resisting and finally reconciling to a nap, and intriguing but unfamiliar spice smells drifting from the kitchen. We could hear the moos, bahs, and bleats of the animals in the backyard. As we talk, Dan, barefoot and in loose, well-worn shorts, takes an occasional phone call, registering in his head an ongoing tally of calls to return.
But for sheer vibrancy and robustness, nothing could have prepared me for what we find in the greenhouse.
“I’ll go to the store and pick up some greens,” Roshni says, as she prepares lunch for all of us.
“No, I’ll go get some,” Dan answers casually, and motions for us to follow. We trudge through the mud—it’s been raining lightly on and off—and as he opens the door to the greenhouse we are confronted with salad heaven. The simple plastic-covered hoop house is teeming with gorgeous lettuces of all kinds, each row greener than the last, leaves growing full and upright as if this were high summer rather than winter’s tail end. “It’s not so good now because the greenhouse isn’t heated. If soil is the foundation for a healthy plant, these have been stressed because the soil’s been frozen a few times.” He pulls a leaf, tastes it, and makes an expression that seems to say, Not great, but not bad. I catch Tony looking longingly at the lettuce. “I sell to a high-end restaurant in Cambridge,” says Dan. “Every week or so I drive it down. They tell me, ‘I’ll take what you’ve got.’ People are rabid for fresh greens this time of year.”
I laugh and note the absurdity of Roshni volunteering to buy salad at the store when these amazing greens are just twenty steps from the house. “She’s a city girl,” he says with a shrug. The two met 2004 in Bangalore, where Roshni worked in high tech and Dan was working in the office of food activist Vandana Shiva as India’s coordinator for the global anti-GMO campaign.
I’d come to see Kittredge, who directs the nonprofit Bionutrient Food Association, to learn more about the connection between soil and health. Early on in my quest to learn about the state of our soil, and why it mattered, I’d started to see references to soil mineral depletion. Across the board, levels of key mineral nutrients—zinc, calcium, manganese, iron, copper—in our food crops have declined by an average of 50 to more than 100 percent over the last century. The USDA National Nutrient Database has calcium and vitamin A in broccoli dropping 54 and 75 percent respectively between 1975 and 2010. Over the same time period, levels of iron and vitamin A have fallen 60 and 40 percent. Minerals play numerous roles in the body, from providing material for bone and tissue to facilitating the transmission of nerve impulses to activating metabolic functions. Minerals are present in the soil. Vitamins, also essential for processes that maintain health and vitality, are synthesized by plants.
According to Graeme Sait, an author-educator on nutrition and agriculture in Australia, some nutritionists estimate that the food we eat today has just 30 percent of the nourishment of what our grandparents ate as children. The major reason, says Sait, is declining soil quality, although the way we process, prepare, and transport food also plays a role. Sait notes, for example, that we’re now in a situation where we can buy oranges completely devoid of vitamin C.
I wondered about the correlation between depleted soils and the rising cost of medical care. A 2002 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that nearly half of all Americans have a chronic health condition. The Centers for Disease Control tells us that two-thirds of adults in this country are overweight or obese, and that obesity rates in children continue to rise. A significant number of infants, some as young as six months old, are now classified as overweight. Pediatric specialists say this can delay a baby’s crawling and walking as well as interfere with motor development. Since excess weight puts children at risk for multiple health problems, we can expect that the demand for medical care will increase in tandem with the obesity rates.
Something is wrong with this picture, and I doubt we can place all the blame on McDonald’s burgers and mega-size sugary drinks. Could it be that the food we eat is not truly feeding us—and not just highly processed packaged goods with novel-length ingredients lists, but the vaunted produce section as well? Those of us who can afford it buy organic to avoid chemical residues. But perhaps the bad stuff in food is only part of the problem, the other being that some of the good stuff is missing.
We tend to accept a cultural morality narrative that tells us to eat well and stick to plant-based foods and we’ll be rewarded with good health and, barring lapses of willpower, a slender-enough body. But what use is all the dietary advice we get from health experts if the food we feel so virtuous about eating is nutritionally inert? Could our startlingly high obesity rates be a sign not of gluttony, nor even a reflection of the class-coded, deceptively neutral term lifestyle factors, but a consequence of inadequate nutrition in conventionally grown food? Might people overeat because their bodies are screaming at them that they’re not getting enough minerals and other vital nutrients? Most of this country’s food-growing soil has not been treated very well—how could the state of our health not be affected by the state of our soil? Because, ultimately, quality of health depends on the quality of food, and food can only be as good as the soil on which it is grown.
When I started scrolling around on the topic, the first sources I bumped into were agriculturalists, doctors, and doctor-farmers, mostly from the 1930s and ’40s. They proved such good, informative company that I spent some time with them.
“To be well-fed is to be healthy.” Those are the sage words of William Albrecht (1888–1974), a midwestern agronomist and author whose work inspired Acres USA, an organization and magazine devoted to organic agriculture. He also said, “Food is fabricated soil fertility,” asserting that beneath the food–health dynamic stands the viability of the soil.
There’s the work of Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947) as well—an English botanist and organic pioneer who said that “the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” He observed that “any weakness or defect in the health of any earlier link in the chain is carried on to the next and succeeding links, until it reaches the last, namely, man.” For several decades he was a researcher in the Imperial Department of Agriculture, first in the West Indies and later in India. While working in these colonial outposts he noted that nothing went to waste, especially waste. He became an ardent proponent of composting, believing that fertile soil relies on the “Rule of Return,” the recycling and reuse of organic materials. He expressed concern that “artificial manures” (synthetic, chemical fertilizers) and pest-killing sprays led to a “war in the soil” that compromised the life-sustaining properties of humus-rich earth. “In spite of the fact that we speak of her lavishness,” he wrote, “Nature is not really luxurious: she works on very small margins.”
In his 1945 book Farming & Gardening for Health or Disease (later published as The Soil and Health), he noted several experiments demonstrating that people whose food was grown in rich, organic soil enjoyed superior health, including one he learned about from Lady Eve Balfour, author of The Living Soil and co-founder of the UK Soil Association. In this experiment, students at a New Zealand grammar school were in dreadful condition when they enrolled—nose and throat troubles, gland troubles, dental caries, incipient gout—but became much more robust after they’d been fed from the school’s community garden. Howard quotes the matron of Auckland’s Mount Albert Grammar School: “The first thing to be noted during the twelve months following the change-over to garden produce grown from our humus-treated soil was the declining catarrhal condition among the boys . . . There was also a very marked decline in colds and influenza. Colds are now rare and any cases of influenza very mild.”
André Voisin, a French biochemist and farmer whose observations about rotational grazing inspired Allan Savory (see chapter 3), made the case that animals are invariably a product of the soil on which they live and feed. In Soil, Grass and Cancer, he said that any living cell, plant or animal, is a “biochemical photograph” of its environment, and warned of industrial techniques and treatments that upset the balance of nutrients in the soil and led to deficiencies. He looked not only at minerals but also trace elements, so-called dusts in the soil, that despite minuscule quantities are integral to the health and function of living cells. Since their role is to activate enzymes, they’ve been described as “catalysts of the catalysts.”
I kept digging through websites and found more explorers of the realm of soil and health whose stories shed light on different facets of the topic. A few cameos:
• Sir Robert McCarrison left his home in Northern Ireland in 1901 to join the Indian Medical Services. Stationed in the north, he noted the longevity and robustness of the Hunza tribe, who scarcely suffered even colds and indigestion, and attributed this to a diet of nutrient-rich food grown on fertile soils (sprouted legumes, root and leafy green vegetables, fruit, milk products, whole wheat flour cakes, meat in small portions and only occasionally). In the 1920s and ’30s he performed experiments on rodents: Rats that ate as the Hunza were healthy like their human counterparts, whereas rats on a typical English lower-class diet—white bread and margarine, sugared tea, tinned meat, boiled veg, and the like—had the usual respiratory and digestive ailments of the day and also developed nervous disorders.
• Lionel Picton was a Cheshire physician instrumental in the 1939 Medical Testament, a pamphlet that assessed the then-twenty-five-year-old UK National Health Insurance Act and concluded that given the poor quality of the day’s food, “the efforts of the doctor resemble those of Sisyphus”—a never-ending battle. Picton was a critic of industrial methods of agriculture and food processing, believing that only whole, untreated foods were nutritious. White bread was a particular target; he was known to throw loaves out the window upon finding one in someone’s kitchen. In his 1946 book Thoughts on Feeding, he wrote: “Fresh food, grown [on fertile soil] confers upon the animals and men that consume it the powers of resistance to germs whose function it is to prey upon and even eliminate men and animals who are devoid of those powers.”
• Charles Northern, an Alabama gastroenterologist, came to believe patients’ digestive complaints were caused by poor nutrition, the inevitable consequence of poor growing soil. He was ridiculed for his ideas, he told Cosmopolitan in 1936, “for up to that time people had paid little attention to food deficiencies and even less to soil deficiencies. Men eminent in medicine denied there was any such thing as vegetables and fruits that did not contain sufficient minerals for human needs.” He presented a paper to the US Senate stating the need to restore soil minerals in order to address the nation’s health crisis, and, soon after, left medicine to devote himself to soil restoration. “I gave up medicine because this is a wider and more important work,” he said. “Sick soils mean sick plants, sick animals and sick people. I’m really a doctor of sick soils.”
• Carey Reams (1903–85) was a physician and agronomist raised on a Florida farm, as well as a math prodigy who had a long friendship with Einstein. He practiced nutritional preventive medicine and used nutrition-based treatments on patients with advanced disease—an approach that once landed him in a California jail. (His refusal to join the American Medical Association hardly helped his status vis-à-vis the authorities.) As an agricultural consultant, he helped clients grow nutrient-dense crops free of disease, and as a doctor he opened clinics and created “early warning” diagnostic tools that measured energy levels and that drew on an understanding of soil and crop testing. He said, “All disease is the result of a mineral deficiency.” He developed the Reams Biological Theory of Ionization (RBTI), which assesses the electromagnetic/energetic component of life-forms based on his understanding that growth derives from the interaction of positive and negative charges in minerals and soil.
As I perused these investigations into soil and health and mulled over the questions they raised, I felt as if I were in a time warp. In their critique of commercial agriculture and processed food, these people could have been writing about today—and yet I knew that, with bigger and badder agricultural weapons (courtesy of the now $125-billion-plus global agrochemical industry) and more artificial sweeteners (like the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup) that pretty up taste, things have gotten many times worse since then. If there’s a body of work that makes the case that the caliber of soil helps determine baseline health and it’s acknowledged that our soils aren’t looking too good, why hasn’t soil been brought into discussions of public health? As medical doctors, Picton, Reams, and Northern understood even before the advent of the $200-billion-plus prescription drug industry that throwing pills at illness can be a fool’s errand if we don’t address the problem at its source: food lacking in key elements due to deficiencies in soil.
While I’d never go so far as to suggest that we can simply toss mineral dust on our fields and wave good-bye to cancer, hypertension, and diabetes, you’d think the possibility of heading off even a fraction of disease-caused human suffering by attending to the foundation of our food chain might be worth looking into. Especially since soil can be brought back into balance with minimal expense; by contrast, it can cost upward of $800 million to bring a single new drug to market. Considering the incalculable human toll of illness and chronic disorders, you’d think we’d be peering under every rock in the hope of finding some answers. And I do mean literally searching under rocks.
I was glad that prior to meeting Dan Kittredge I’d read up on this cadre of mid-twentieth-century thinkers. It gave me a context for his comments, since these people form a part of his intellectual heritage, a bank of knowledge and argument, ideas and writings that he frequently refers back to.
Dan and Linda, of the ginger-turmeric-sweet-potato farm, now wrap up their deal with a brief exchange about bolstering “active microbiology” in soil. Which serves as a segue for our subsequent conversation on soil and health. “Once you get a good living system in your soil, it will build the nutrition you need,” Dan begins, having joined me at the wooden table. “By living system I mean bacteria and fungi. There are presumed to be ten million species of soil bacteria, and three million species of soil fungi. Typical cropland has about five thousand species, and we need at least twenty-five thousand for the plants to function anywhere near their potential.”
The plants we grow need a wide range of microorganisms, Dan explains, and these in turn need access to a full complement of minerals. For example, of those multitudes of microorganisms, 80 percent are cobalt-dependent. “Cobalt is at the center of vitamin B12, which acts as an enzyme facilitator, central to the production of a whole number of proteins,” he says. “Most farmers are not addressing the need for cobalt, or other trace elements, and so from the outset [their plants are] facing diminished potential.”
Keeping soil mineralized doesn’t have to be costly, he says. “If you understand what your particular soil needs [are], you can generally address any deficiencies with rock dust and seawater. You could use inexpensive local raw materials. In this region, common rocks are granite and basalt. I would choose basalt, which has the broadest spectrum.” For those less inclined to DIY soil nutrition, there are mineral products, like those he sells, that are selected, processed, and put in formulas to suit different growing conditions.
Dan grew up on an organic farm, Many Hands Farm in Barre, Massachusetts, about twenty miles away. “My parents have been running the Massachusetts chapter of NOFA [Northeast Organic Farm Association] since the 1980s,” he says, with a hint of pride. “I can say things about organic farms that others can’t. Just because you’re an organic farmer doesn’t mean you have the nutrition right. You’re not necessarily getting the biology. Often farms are doing the NPK thing [the nitrogen–phosphorus–potassium fertilizer regimen that’s the standard in conventional agriculture] by other means, taking the conventional model and substituting organic materials. But not building a biological system. For me, it comes down to whether you’re choosing the chemical model or the biological model. To get high-quality nutrition, it’s got to be the biological model.”
While this might sound like jargon-y shop talk, Dan is making a powerful statement: He’s challenging the approach to growing crops that today dominates nearly all sectors of the agricultural economy, the emphasis on the ratios of the macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. He’s saying that soil fertility, or growability, is not about a list of static components furnished to a plant; rather, it arises through a combination of ongoing, interrelated biological processes in the soil.
Let’s take a brief historical detour for some background. While strategies to prod the soil to deliver greater yields are as old as farming itself, the practice was traditionally considered more art than science. In the early nineteenth century most scientists accepted the “humus theory” of plant nutrition: that decaying plants and animal manures, the stuff of organic matter, provided food for living plants, which took what they needed via their roots. Since farmers did well enough by amending with composts and rotating crops (so as not to run out of important nutrients), this seemed to make sense. Minerals, or “salts,” remained a bit of a wild card.
This all changed with Justus von Liebig’s monograph Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture in 1840. The celebrity chemist of his day, Liebig brought two key concepts to the project of growing food: First, using plant ash he analyzed the composition of vegetation, and identified its chief contents to be carbon, nitrogen, and mineral salts, namely phosphate and potash. Second, drawing on the work of fellow German botanist Carl Sprengel, he promoted the “Law of the Minimum” (mentioned in chapter 2 in relation to nitrogen fertilizer). This maintains that yield is determined not by the totality of available resources, but by the scarcest nutrient—the limiting factor. Peter Donovan noted in his talk on the carbon cycle that from a business standpoint Liebig would have seen no franchise in carbon since carbon dioxide is free and plentiful in the air. Nitrogen, too, is plentiful in the air, but not in a form immediately available to plants. He directed his attention to nitrogen, and developed a means of applying nitrogen to plants at the roots via ammonia (NH3), earning himself the moniker Father of Fertilizer.
We now had our first artificial fertilizer. The next step was to generate it on an industrial scale. The breakthrough came in 1915, when German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were able to fix atmospheric nitrogen using high-pressure equipment. In another historical game changer, the synthetic production of ammonia also lent itself to the manufacture of armaments. Germany availed itself of this opportunity during World War I, in the form of explosives and chemical warfare; and, later, in World War II, as it enabled the production of Zyklon A and B, poison gases used in the concentration camps—a dark irony since, like most German Jews, all of Haber’s family were exiled or faced death in the Holocaust.
The versatility of this process meant that after and between wars there was excess production capacity. So as not to let factories fall idle, chemical fertilizer was aggressively marketed to the public. Writes Albert Howard: “The new process of fixing, i.e. combining, nitrogen from the air had been invented and had been extensively employed in the manufacture of explosives. When peace came, some use had to be found for the huge plants set up and it was obvious to turn them over to the manufacture of sulphate of ammonia for the land. This manure soon began to flood the market.” As Howard says, the use of chemical fertilizer “was laid on the farmer almost as a moral duty.” Fertilizers pumped up crop yields, but at the expense of other (non-NPK) nutrients that were not replenished. Blanketing the soil with “artificials” could mask such deficiencies—for a while.
By emphasizing the importance of soil biology in lieu of the reductive chemical model, Dan Kittredge is harking back to the wisdom of his philosophical forebears. In a chapter aptly called “The Intrusion of Science,” Sir Albert Howard refers to the “present-day . . . failure to realize that the problems of the farm and garden are biological rather than chemical.”
While the chemical–biological rift might seem a philosophical or even semantic matter, Lady Eve Balfour alluded to the high stakes inherent in the divide when she outright called chemical treatments a threat to “the living soil.” As mentioned, chemical fertilizers have the effect of depleting soil compounds that they don’t contain, including soil organic carbon and trace minerals. But since nitrogen fertilizers were relatively cheap (especially since these were often subsidized), the path of least resistance was often to add more chemicals. As time went on, crops grown on heavily treated, mineral-poor soil became susceptible to pests and disease. By the 1940s there were inexpensive pesticides and herbicides on the market. For many farmers, each progression along the chemical path meant more dependency, more expense, and less resilience in the soil and the crops that reside there. Wrote Balfour: “If it is the life in the soil that is its most important property, then obviously we must stop killing it with lethal chemical salts.”
John Kempf, a farming consultant based in Middlefield, Ohio, and the source of Dan’s products, would agree. Kempf, twenty-four, grew up on a fruit-and-vegetable farm less than an hour from Cleveland. His father was the chemical supplier for the local community, and they were, he says, “very heavy chemical users” on the farm. “When I graduated from school after eighth grade, I was given responsibility for doing all the nutrient and chemical applications. When I was sixteen, I was licensed as a professional pesticide applier.”
Around that time, Kempf recalls, “something happened” on the farm. “We noticed degraded soil fertility, declining soil health, increasing weed pressure, and poor soil aggregation, all the while disease and insect pressure continued to escalate. From 2002 to 2004 we had unusual weather conditions, very wet. Our yields were only 30 to 50 percent of what we expected. We looked to chemicals because that’s what we knew to do.”
It soon became clear that chemicals weren’t helping. “We rented some neighboring fields, land we hadn’t farmed in the past, and I started seeing anomalies,” he says. “We’d have cantaloupe, the same variety, planted at the same time, and on our fields we lost most to powdery mildew. Others on new land showed no sign of it. I began to question: what is the difference between healthy and unhealthy plants? What makes some have natural immunity while others don’t?” He sought out books on plant nutrition and physiology, learned from biological consultants, and arrived at a holistic system of plant nutrition. “We applied that in 2006 and went completely chemical free. No herbicides. Disease and insect pressure gradually became less problematic. Our yield and quality began to improve.”
Kempf and Dan Kittredge met seven years ago at an Acres USA conference. Kempf has since launched a consulting firm, Advancing Eco-Agriculture, and Dan is a dealer-distributor of his products, including the soil amendments he sold to (or bartered with) Linda. The company manufactures liquid nutritional blends and micronized (meaning broken down into extremely small particles, to ease assimilation by plants) minerals and micronutrient blends. Kempf’s approach centers on supporting plants through stages of health so that they form complete proteins. This makes them resistant to typical crop pests, which have simple digestive systems and can only break down amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The next stage of plant health allows for excess energy to be stored as fats (such as omega-3s and omega-6s) and oils, which adds greater resilience and, as crops, nutrition.
“Most people think that plant disease and insect pests are normal, curses of a Creator,” Kempf says. “Disease and harmful insects are not normal in healthy plants. If we have, say, tomato plants, and they begin to get mold growth, that’s termed a ‘disease’ and sprayed with a fungicide. Now, if we have bread on the counter and it has mold, it’s no longer fit to be consumed. Yet when a fruit expresses those symptoms we think that’s normal and we spray with a fungicide and we eat it. How normal is that?
“When you use an herbicide, pesticide or fungicide—that ‘cide’ part means ‘to kill.’ With each application, we impact hundreds of species. The biggest single problem with the agricultural paradigm of the day is the warring mentality. It’s us against nature: let’s kill all these pests. I’m sorry, nature always bats last. It will always circumvent the inventiveness of our attempts to play God. The biological paradigm works with nature, and this seems to produce high-quality, healthy plants with mineral nutrition derived from the soil and air. When the system works, you get functional immunity in plants that is transferred to people in the form of food. We as farmers are responsible for the health profile of this nation. As farmers we can do more to keep people healthy than all the doctors and hospitals combined. Human health is agricultural.”
As for how most farmers today are faring with their crops, Dan Kittredge says without hesitation that “most are doing a poor job. There’s an easy way to tell: Look at the plants. Are they healthy?” He asks if I grow tomatoes, and I nod. “Are they healthy and vigorous at frost? Or are they dying from pests or disease?”
Now we’re getting personal. Apparently, tomatoes should be popping fruit until the third frost in the fall. I had no idea. I thought Tony and I were doing well because a few years back we somehow managed to avoid the widespread tomato blight. But plants should keep budding and fruiting until they’ve run out of something—such as a specific nutrient, or water. “There are limiting factors within the system, and when those limitations begin to show up, you get disease and then plants die.”
Dan says healthy plants have within them compounds that keep them healthy: their own immune systems. As it happens, these are compounds that we humans require in order to thrive. “A friend of mine who farms said she was taking a look at her son’s multi-vitamin and their soil test—every mineral in the vitamin was on the test. For her this correlation really brought it home.”
For example, among the small-print list of vitamin ingredients are the trace elements copper and zinc. Among their many roles, says Dan, these minerals are “critical in building [the] immune system and maintaining its strength and vitality.” Another micronutrient, manganese, is “directly correlated to plant reproduction and human reproduction. If you have a garden and there’s a deficiency, your tomatoes don’t fruit. For humans, a manganese deficiency could lead to a low sperm count or the inability to get pregnant.” These minerals, he says, “function along the same pathways in plants as they do in humans.”
I was getting it now: We humans are but another set of biological beings, dependent on the same soil-derived substances and processes as those lower down the food chain. At a cellular level, we’ve got plenty in common with plants.
“When we don’t have the basic minerals in our bodies, it’s because they’re not in our food, because the crops didn’t have access to them in the soil,” he says. If the plants that feed us, either directly or by way of the livestock that graze on them, are deficient, we’ll be deficient—and so many of us turn to supplements to provide what we should be getting from a balanced diet. “Sometimes the minerals are in the soil but locked up, not available to plants. The only way to release the minerals is through the activity of bacteria and fungi. If there are pollutants or agricultural inputs you don’t get high levels of soil activity. That’s the case with organic farms as well.”
I say, “Then what? We have to get food from somewhere.” I was getting frustrated. I was hoping for a little simplicity, a clear line drawn between organic and conventional. I’d hate to think we need an advanced degree in horticulture to locate decent food.
Dan says he’s creating tools to help people discern quality in produce. This will drive higher quality in the food supply: Once they’re able to identify better food, consumers will demand it. He says a “bionutrient meter” is in the works: a near-infrared spectrometer that looks like a flashlight or pointer. You’d aim the device at, say, samples of carrots; the reflected light would allow you to gauge levels and ratios of minerals and nutritional compounds in the respective specimens. “The light that bounces back contains the vibration of the minerals in compounds,” he says. “Each plant has a spectral signature—the frequency of the life that’s coming out of the product. The objective is to correlate that spectral signature with mineral and compound levels and ratios, and use that information to determine relative quality.” The Bionutrient Food Association has started researching carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes to assemble the data sets and algorithms to make this possible.
What our bodies need and, through our senses, seek out are “plant secondary metabolites,” he says, which depend on the presence of trace minerals. “These are tannins, essential oils. That which makes basil smell like basil, leeks smell like leeks.”
These compounds are called “secondary” in that they don’t play a known role in a plant’s primary, necessary-for-life functions such as photosynthesis, growth, reproduction. What do they do? Support immunity, attract pollinators, repel pests, detoxify pollutants, promote tissue repair and resistance to stress, and act as antioxidants and antiviral/-fungal/-bacterial agents. Using John Kempf’s model for plant health, they are what plants produce when they reach the third stage of health, after they’ve achieved the capacity to produce carbohydrates and complete proteins. Embodied in the fruits and vegetables we eat, these substances convey similar benefits to us. So far about a hundred thousand plant secondary metabolites have been identified.
Jerry Brunetti, founder of Agri-Dynamics, a soil and crop consulting firm geared to livestock operations, and a speaker on soil, human, and animal health, calls this conveyance a nutrient “cascade effect.” For example, the curcumin in turmeric is an anti-inflammatory for the growing plant and, subsequently, for whoever (or whatever) consumes it. Anthocyanins enhance cell growth and immunity in cherries, elder-berries, blueberries, and more. These health benefits of plant secondary metabolites explain why every five minutes another miracle food is discovered and everyone runs out to buy, for example, acai berries and pomegranates.
In 1999, Brunetti was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and told that without aggressive chemotherapy he might not live more than six months. Based on his understanding of minerals and micronutrients and how soil quality affects nutrition, he devised a holistic healing program for himself. Since the cancer he has attacks the immune system, Brunetti worked systematically to bolster immunity, building his diet around foods like raw grass-fed dairy products (rich in conjugated linoleic acids, or CLAs; the minerals calcium, magnesium, and potassium; vitamins D, A, E, K, and the B vitamins; probiotics; and enzymes), free-range eggs, fermented vegetables and soy products, sprouted grains, and highly pigmented fruits. He avoided sugar and refined carbohydrates (which feed cancer cells and prompt insulin production, which spurs cancer growth), many common vegetable oils (which are prone to oxidize and trigger processes that damage cells), processed dairy and conventionally raised meats, and refined soy products.
His health steadily improved. Now, more than a decade later, he gives talks on topics like “Body and Soil” and “Farm as Farmacy.” (Several of Brunetti’s lectures are available in audio and video form through Acres USA.) He’s the one who originally put me in touch with Dan Kittredge.
Smell and taste are “very useful and powerful indicators” of plant secondary metabolites, Dan says, but this isn’t sufficient in an industrial food system marked by manipulation at every step. “Nutrient testing will expose the food supply for what it is. Before industrial agriculture and big tilling, we had massive levels of life in the soil with biologically available minerals. We’ve basically been using it up. We’re at a low level of vitality in our soil and our health. It’s all connected. If we’re willing to be honest about what soil life does, we can re-create a functioning biological system.”
He sets a gray plastic box on the dining room table and takes out two pieces. This, he says, will have to do until we get our state-of-the-art bionutrient meter. The two pieces are a refractometer to measure brix and a metal clamp to draw juice so you can put it in the refractometer. When I look confused, he explains that refractometers, developed in the 1830s, measure the extent to which light bends when it passes through liquid. “German vintners used them to decide which grapes make vinegar and which make wine—the quality of the juice. People mistake brix for sugar, but it’s not. Brix tells you about the presence of higher-order compounds, which generally correlates with sugar.” By “higher-order compounds,” he means what plants produce when there’s energy left after the building blocks—carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids. As in plant secondary metabolites. The chart with brix scores of the most common fruits, vegetables, and forage crops was formulated by Carey Reams, and so is often called the Reams Chart.
Dan runs a few quick brix measures. It looks easy enough: You need only squeeze out a few drops on the refractometer’s glass lens, and then look for the spot where light meets shadow. The number at the line is the brix. A lettuce leaf from the greenhouse measured 7. (Slightly higher than average. Kittredge shrugs: What do you expect at the end of the winter?) A piece of papaya from the fridge: 14, between average and good for this fruit. “You can get a higher brix when something’s been around and dried out some,” he says. That’s simply because with less water, the nutrients are more concentrated. It’s also an indication of why brix alone is not a sufficient measure of nutrient value.
I think: Uh-oh. This brix could be dangerous in the hands of someone with a high compulsiveness potential. I pictured vendors at our farmer’s market cringing at the sight of me. Much later at home, Tony and I test a red onion from our garden that we’d been storing since late last summer. It scores a 6, average. Then we try a ramp (wild leek), hours after Tony had picked it from the woods. It measures 11. I can’t find leeks on the brix chart, but figure it would be in the onion family. Perhaps all it tells me is that ramps have more nutrition than red onions. (The thing with brix is that measurements are compared to similar species, apples to apples as it were.) But still, solidly excellent!
Our brixing is interrupted when Roshni shouts: “Dan! They got out again!”
Several animals—goats, sheep, and a young bull—have gotten out of the fenced area, a problem since the house sits on the edge of the road. Dan leaps up and sprints out in pursuit, bare feet and all. Tony, seeming to think it good form, follows. For a few chaotic minutes Dan coaxes, confronts, and throws chunks of wood at the animals—“this lets me blow off a little steam,” he confides to Tony—and manages to herd them back behind the fence, though not without much snorting and braying and complaining on their part.
Dan sits back down as though nothing has happened. If anything, he seems refreshed. He continues: “A good way to make sure you have pests and diseases is to do everything we’re told to do. Plenty of organic farms have DDT that’s washed down from elsewhere. Also, organically approved pesticides still destroy insect life and throw soil dynamics off balance. Go to some organic farms and you’ll see there are no insects. People don’t know that.
“But I’m optimistic: Restoring life in the soil and in our food is very doable. We can take areas that can’t grow crops, identify the limiting biological factors, and work with that. Stone dust and seawater: That’s all you need. No one’s going to be able to corner the market on these. Revitalizing growing land is cheap per acre. Look at all the money we’re spending per month in Afghanistan.” For several years Dan was president of the nonprofit Remineralize the Earth; the Bionutrient Food Association, previously called the Real Food Campaign, is an offshoot of Remineralize the Earth.
I raise the topic of GMOs, expecting a long diatribe. Dan mentions one concern, that because the substance is biochemically unfamiliar (not recognizable to our digestive system’s software), this activates the body’s immune system. He says, “Essentially, your body tries to kill that food. If your immune system is constantly being stimulated, that’s a lot of physiological stress.” (I look at GMOs from a soil perspective in chapter 7.) Then he shifts gears. “There’s no way to get a high-quality crop with GMOs. The answer to GMOs is metrics. At bottom is the matter of quality. They won’t be able to compete in the market.
“The farmers growing GMO crops are seeing their plants die earlier every year. Yields are low. They’re supposed to save crops from pests, but they’re crashing under their own non-living weight. Let’s use that. Let’s outcompete, and bring transparency in.”
The answer to better food, he says, comes from nurture, not nature, which is the genetics. “We’re not getting the genetic potential of most of our crops. Only 6 percent to 8 percent is being realized now. We’ve been lowballing it for a while now. One tomato seed has the potential to make 150 pounds of tomatoes. We are so used to sickly, puny plants that we forget this. Once we start to do a couple of things right we’ll see yields double, triple, quadruple; give us several cuttings when we’re used to one. The key is working with nature. When you work with nature, the cost per plant goes down.
“If farmers are growing healthy crops using naturally occurring materials, we won’t need fungicides and herbicides. If that’s true,” he adds as an aside, “the money made by industrial agriculture conglomerates can no longer be used to buy senators. If that’s true, the food bill won’t be written by Monsanto. All that money from agribusiness takes the knees out of our system.”
He again draws a line from chemical additives through sluggish soil to poor-quality food and then to poor health, physical and emotional. “In one study, lab rats had calcium taken out of their diet. They started fighting and killing each other. Then they put calcium back and the rats were cuddly and playful again. We can never understand all the various interactions. Nature is complex, functioning at a level beyond our perception. If basic degenerative diseases go down, the demands for pharmaceuticals are lower. If children have better nutrition, they have a greater capacity to learn. If people have greater intelligence, the better our political debates will be. If we’re not using nitrogen-heavy fertilizers, we won’t have dead zones in the oceans. We can solve a lot of systemic problems through agriculture.”
Dan says that bettering the world through farming became his mission over two trips to India in his early twenties. “As someone raised in Western culture I’d never gotten a good answer to the question why—what are we here for?” he tells me. “I read Eastern philosophy. The basic concepts, of consciousness, love, and transcendence, made sense to me. I went to an ashram in the Himalayas and studied ancient meditation techniques. I got to a point where I could tune into other frequency ranges, like the chakras and prana, and could do hands-on healing. It became a part of reality, like picking up a cucumber is a part of reality. I felt so much power and force and potential in that frequency that I felt I could hurt my body—burn the circuits. My basic insight was that while I may have inherent capacities, my body was not in a good enough state to fully explore them without doing damage. If I wanted to follow this path, it was imperative that I rebuild my body in a more functional form.
“When I came back I reengaged in organic agriculture. I’d been managing my parents’ farm, but that was because that’s what I knew how to do. I didn’t have a personal interest in the process. This time I said, ‘I’m an organic farmer, young, and I’m still not in good enough condition. We need to improve our food.’ In the Himalayas I’d experienced a moment of grace, a profound state of consciousness when it was clear to me that life’s purpose was to seek profound love and compassion in every moment, and that this work was part and parcel of that larger objective.”
The best means to improve our food supply, he says, is via free markets. “For me, money talks. When the economic driver is quality, our food will improve. Now the emphasis is on quantity. At this point we don’t have the empirical metrics to discern quality.”
This is precisely what he hopes to change. “Today our quality metrics are volume, rancidity—meaning, shelf life—and protein level,” he says. “No one’s looking at the higher-order nutrients.” Tools like refractometers and the bionutrient spectrometer can calibrate the presence of complete proteins and other nutrients. Which, he says, tends to tally with crops that are healthy and resilient. And this, in turn, makes growing for quality good business.
“You earn more money if you can grow more than two crops in a season. If you get sick greens, you can only pick once or twice before you get flea beetles.” He says that just as people accept poor-quality food because they think that’s all there is, farmers have become fatalistic about diseased and pest-ridden crops, regarding them as inescapable. “Pests and diseases are life’s cleanup crew. This gets rid of the not-good stuff. If it’s food for insects, it’s not fit for animal consumption. When you’ve got disease or insects on crops, to me that’s the end of the story. That tells you there are incomplete compounds. I’ve grown up on a farm and brushed potato beetles off the potato plants. The compounds in those potato leaves were lacking, and perhaps only had simple nitrates rather than a full complement of amino acids. The plants would get beetles because they didn’t have access to what they needed.”
The same holds true for sugars, he says. Insects can digest simple sugars, but not the complex sugars that characterize a vigorous plant. Insects have their own internal bionutrient meter equivalent, and sense the electromagnetic frequencies of the plants they flit past so as to know which to home in on. When plants lack the mineral array with which to build higher-order nutrients, says Dan, “the result is biological breakdown. Let’s hold ourselves to a high standard.”
The bionutrient spectrometer currently costs several thousand dollars (the technology is already used in the pharmaceutical industry). Kittredge expects this to drop to the $200 to $300 price point within a few years. “I talked to a regional director of Whole Foods, who expressed interest in the bionutrient meter,” says Kittredge. “His take was, ‘We’ll tell our farmers that if their product isn’t up to par they’ve got two years to make it.’ It’s enlightened self-interest. The public doesn’t know about the amazing decrease in the quality of the food supply in the last seventy years. But where we are now is the bottom of the scale. We can only go up. Let’s create a better reality. We’re all in this together.”
Arden Andersen is an Indiana-based farmer/agricultural consultant and doctor who’s a proponent of nutrient density as a rubric for enhancing health, and whose work has influenced both Dan and John Kempf. He’s long been frustrated with the medical field’s typical nutritional advice—eat a balanced diet—as this ignores minerals and other factors contingent on soil. “The thing . . . to understand is that every organism is dependent on its environment,” Dr. Andersen said in an interview with Organic Connections magazine. “As we change the environment, we change which organisms will survive or perish. As we change the nutrition in the soil and the dynamics of what’s going on in the soil, we can set up the appropriate environment for the beneficial microorganisms to survive, not the disease organisms. They don’t like the same environment, particularly as it deals with oxygen; it’s a question of an anaerobic (oxygen-deprived) environment versus an aerobic (oxygen-rich) environment. The beneficial organisms are dominantly aerobic organisms. Our pathogens, or harmful organisms, are dominantly anaerobic-loving. The environments that conventional agriculture has set up are predominantly anaerobic environments, so they’re most conducive to disease organisms.”
Once important factors such as aeration, mineral levels, and microbial activity in the soil are addressed, the nutrition will follow, says Dan. And yield, even if this wasn’t the initial goal. “Until you grow a seven-foot-tall eggplant, you won’t believe it,” he says. “What’s possible is better than what we have now. The genetics/yield differential is where we can make things happen.” This is the space between the genetic potential of a plant and what that plant tends to give us, an interval that until now has often been filled in with chemicals.
It was midafternoon and I felt I’d taken enough of Dan’s time. But one thing before we left: I wanted to try the mineral treatment on our own small vegetable garden. Dan led us to a barn next to the house. “We bought this property as a run-down fixer-upper,” he says, as we climb over wooden boards. “I put up all the rafters in here myself.” Bags of mineral products are piled high against the walls. He deftly clambers up and tosses two different bags down to Tony, who catches them. I am already mentally arranging the garden, as if merely making the purchase will make our patch bloom with crops. But as Dan says, our harvests can only get better.