Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Food as Relationship

Food as Relationship What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?1 —Michael Pollan In his classic study of soil fertility, An Agricultural Testament, first published in 1940, Sir Albert Howard presented his case for connecting problems with food and health to a failure in soil management. The key to proper soil management, he argued, was “the law of return,” which is returning all wastes to the land (preferably properly composted). It was the return of wastes to the land that insured proper levels of humus in the soil. The effect of humus on the crop, and ultimately on human health, he asserted, is “nothing short of profound.”2 Humus is the “well-decomposed part of soil organic matter which holds on to some essential nutrients, storing them for slow release to plants.”3 Our failure to attend to this critical component of soil stewardship, Howard argued, is the source of disease in the soil, plants, animals, and eventually ourselves. In 1947 Howard published his second classic volume, The Soil and Health, in which he warned that the industrialization of agriculture was taking us in the wrong direction. Industrial agriculture, which focuses on “quantity at all costs” by adding artificial fertilizers to the soil (the “NPK mentality”), paid almost no attention to the health of the soil. The lack of attention to managing soil for health, he argued, led to “mining the land,” which he considered a “form of banditry.”4 This led Howard to assert “a simple principle” that “underlies the vast accumulation of disease” that affects our world. That principle 214 A version of this article first appeared in the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition 2–3 (2008): 106–21. 215 Food as Relationship “operates in the soil, the crop, the animal, and ourselves” and “the power of all these four to resist disease appears to be bound up with the circulation of properly synthesized protein in Nature. The proteins are the agencies which confer immunity on plant, animal, and man.”5 Howard reminds us that nature evolved no means of shielding us from disease, and therefore all of our efforts to develop therapies to ward off diseases are unlikely to keep us healthy. What did evolve in nature was the means to produce health-promoting foods from healthy soils that invigorate our immune systems, which can keep us healthy. Based on these ecological observations, Howard asserted that if we would manage our soils to “build up proteins of the right type,” there would be “little disease in soil or crop or livestock, and the foundations of the preventive medicine of tomorrow will be laid.”6 Today, of course, we know that a complex set of nutrients and proteins are involved in healthy soil, but the overall principle that Howard proposed is still an interesting health-promoting option to explore. Simply stated, Howard proposed that proper soil fertility that builds appropriate levels of humus in the soil “is the basis of the public health system of the future.”7 Spending on health care keeps increasing as spending on food decreases , suggesting Howard was right. The proportion of personal income spent on health care for a typical U.S. citizen (when Medicare taxes are included) has increased to 18 percent, while the percent spent on food decreased to 10 percent.8 Of course, health problems are exacerbated by undernourishment, which often accompanies poverty. Astonishingly, in the sixty years since Howard made his case for the connections between soil health and human health, very little has been done to test his thesis. A few studies have been conducted to determine whether “organic” foods are more nutritious or health-promoting than “conventional” foods, but we have not explored whether soils with appropriate humus levels have an impact on human health. Because farms today can obtain organic certification simply by substituting natural inputs for synthetic ones, soil humus levels could be ignored just as easily on an organic farm as on a conventional farm. Given Howard’s perspective , I doubt that he would have presumed any beneficial health effects in products from an “organic” farm that ignored humus enrichment. Injecting natural inputs while ignoring the law of return would still yield “artificial” returns. Hence, it is unsurprising when such studies show mixed results. 216 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience The truly provocative idea in Howard...