Thoughts on Food

I thought that I would make a brief departure from the normal blog posts that are here to wax philosophically about food and health. One of my Christmas presents from my children to me (I asked for it and made the purchase but they were quite pleased with the outcome) was a book called One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka a scientist, organic farmer, and philosopher published in 1978. The book is a philosophical book about the act of farming by using natural methods and limiting human inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery) and eating according to season. It is less of a how to and more of a mind set about growing according to place and time. It was a refreshing read and it confirmed a few thoughts that I had about where I was going with our farm production and some ideas that were developing in my mind.
He mentions eating according to season in Japan and how different herbs, plants and animals have a season and they are eaten to accommodate that time of the year. He speaks of consumers wanting food products out of season. He espouses the idea that we should eat in season for healthfulness. One of the examples he mentions is the light levels being insufficient in the winter time to produce certain vegetables in greenhouses so the addition of light must be used. They are grown in the greenhouse to make an early entry to the market to get a better price. His thoughts are that now you will need to burn more carbon to grow the vegetables and they will be less healthful when consumed. Another example he gives is chicken eggs. He mentions that the eggs that are bought in the store are nothing more than a man made manufacturing process. The chickens are not out foraging they are couped up, given artificial light, hormones, antibiotics and nutritional inputs. What we are eating is really all those man made inputs using the biology of a chicken and wrapped up in the form of an egg. How is the nutrition of that egg compared to a chicken that actually sees the light of day and can forage on natural foods? Our eggs have such a different taste and consistency (more yellow and stiffer yolk) than store bought. This is as good an explanation as I can find. They might be slightly smaller but I will pick ours over store bought when they start to lay again.
Fukuoka talks about eating according to time and what the place has to offer. I have been thinking about this for some time. I have been thinking that man co evolved to the place of his origins. Lets take two examples, an Irish man and a Native American in the Southeast. Both places have different food items that are available at different times of the year. Vastly different climate, light levels, mineral make up of soils, flora, fauna, water, etc. If you take a plant from SE US and transplant into Ireland or vice-versa they will ultimately do poorly without the constant manipulation of factors to overcome what it would naturally experience in the new environment. Man however is more resilient and can adapt. But these two men lets say 500 years ago would not travel as far afield. Thousands of years have gone into generation after generation for that man to exist in his own place while eating from his surrounds and cultivating what he could. The plants and animals of the surroundings have also co evolved with the harvesting of fruits, animals, and seeds in season. I find it fascinating that each season and each generation man is slightly influencing his local flora and fauna to some degree and that his surroundings were doing the same to him. I often wonder if man might be more healthy if he returned to his evolved origins and drank the water, ate the plants produced in the soils, ate the fish of his native oceans, experienced the climate to which he had generationally been conditioned. I think this might be why I crave salt on my foods as my origins take me to coastal west Ireland. I wonder if certain minerals, food components, or the right mix of foods are present or absent in diets of humans who have emigrated from home. I know that plants show symptoms when they are not given what they should have where they grow naturally. Maybe man is not that different from other biology. Maybe healthful "original diets" designed according to historical place of origins could make a difference in preventative medicine. Maybe I should eat less salt. Maybe I should not blog after reading philosophical books.