We’re in trouble. Our over-reliance on fossil fuels and our taste for foods with a high carbon footprint is causing disruptive climate change. Our throwaway society has flooded the land and seas with plastic pollution. And we face a growing public health crisis triggered by the rise of disease-causing microbes that we cannot kill with antibiotics.
Now for the good news. Living Ground is entering the busy-ness of selling food…but our primary intention to provide a system where people can have ready and affordable access to gut food – that is food grown in microbe rich soils.
Our guts are a real brain. They form part of an intelligent control system which manages our bodies, particularly our appetite and so decides how much and what food we want to eat and how much and where we store fat. Our guts are also home to the bulk of our immune system. Poor guts health is at the source of modern chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and its related heart attacks, dementia etc. A health gut is really important.
But to have a healthy gut means we need the right biology in the first place and we need to feed it the right sort of food. When people find out how gut food is grown the whole idea puts most people off, which is why you can’t buy gut food from the supermarket or in a bottle from the chemist.
Healthy gut biology starts in the guts of creatures that live in the soil. Read that again! This microbe biology passes from the guts of the microbes and into the plants where if we eat them soon after they are harvested they will enter out guts and the plants will provide them with food so they will flourish.
We, and all animals, have been doing this for millions of years but the whole idea is totally at odds with our modern antiseptic society so eating gut food will always be for a minority group. And, humans will diminish! We can not duplicate Nature as much as science and technology tries.
We know how to grow gut food, you have to have soil which is full of creature of the soil. To feed the creatures, the soils must be full of organic matter. We don’t have to be concerned with minerals..there is plenty of that!
And we have to avoid chemicals which will harm the beneficial biology – modern chemicals may not hurt us but they can be a disaster for micro-biology. And, I will add that Natural insecticides also are harmful.
And we have to eat the plants shortly after they are harvested before the beneficial biology dies.
All this is a more expensive process than modern chemical industrial farming and supermarket system and to many people quite revolting, which is why we don’t see gut food products on super market shelves.
Good and nourishing food is really about growing food to feed our brain. To do that we have to feed the microbes that already are living in our gut – that’s a pre-biotic.
But we also have to breed new microbes in the soil, which will go into the plants that we will eat and hence from part of our gut brain – that’s a pro-biotic.
To breed these microbes we have to feed and water them – for that we need plants that take the energy from the sun and covert it into microbe food. The plant will exchange this food for the food it needs. So, the microbes go get the plants food. Now the snag is that there are good bugs which will make us strong and healthy and bad bugs which at best just want to use as a comfy home to breed in – but unfortunately they often get it wrong and kill us.
To breed the good bugs – without the bad bugs taking over – we have to manage the conditions, which means food and water. The good bugs like oxygen and a little water….but not too wet (aerobic) while the bad bugs breed when it is wetter and no oxygen (anaerobic). How is oxygen transported in the human and what does it need to transport oxygen? Iron. But parasites love stored iron. Is this a rabbit hole or what?
Let’s get to the nitty gritty of true health! That means a paradigm shift. It is a 360 on our beliefs about health and microbes. Well, remember, Douglas Adams wrote : “The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.” We probably only know 5% or less of how Nature works..but we do have some good information to change our ways NOW. And, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT!!!
Will you be apart of this soil revolution?