Healthy Food: Your Fundamental Right

As we have seen in the previous chapter, plant food is the right diet for our species. Plant foods in their natural form are therefore the healthiest foods for our body.
Although we are used to thinking about the few fruits and vegetables we can easily find in supermarkets and stores, plants are actually much more numerous and belong to a much richer and more complex family, which goes far beyond those we grow.

As we have seen in “Organization of the world of the living and the inert world”, plants, including those that are edible to us, are at the base of the food chain and enable life on earth. They are very diverse and include:

• Algae, all grasses and herbaceous plants, all trees and the microscopic organisms that make up the
  phytoplankton.
• Algae and microscopic organisms that form plankton.
• Mosses
• Ferns
• Gymnosperms (plants without flowers)
• Angiosperms (flowering plants)

The majority of plants that are edible for humans belong to the angiosperms and a small part to the algae. Mushrooms, which are part of the fungi, are not considered as plants, however, for reasons of simplicity we will associate them with plants in the context of healthy foods.

Loss of the variety of cultivated plant species (cont.)

Definition

Organic agriculture is a mode of agricultural production that is opposed to industrial agriculture. It does not use chemicals or GMOs and is part of a global vision of sustainable development in respect of the environment and biodiversity.

Why go organic?

Mankind has always eaten organic food, until the appearance and recent use of chemicals (pesticides, herbicides and fungicides) less than 70 years ago.
Thus, the question should be: why not organic?

Fertile soil (humus)

All of our agriculture is based on humus, what we commonly call “soil”. Without humus, there is no agriculture. Thus, having good “soil” actually means having good humus, i.e., a very fertile soil. This fertile humus, 30 cm to 100 cm thick in most cases, is the top layer of the soil. It is created by a complex synergy of the 7 living worlds that compose it and renew it continuously, as well as of inert matter.

That is why a fertile soil contains among others:

• decaying plants and animals
• fungi
• bacteria and viruses
• other micro-organisms
• full of by-products such as the excrements, excreta and exudates of these different living organisms
• minerals (from the lower layers of the soil)

Earthworms are a prime example of the complexity of this fertile soil. Without them, there is no fertile soil. They digest plant debris to make organic matter, aerate the soil and help water absorption. They concentrate nutrients for plants, bring up minerals from the subsoil, allow the growth of plant roots and promote the development of good bacteria and other micro-organisms.

The complexity of our gut and gut flora can be compared without a doubt with the complexity of humus.

Industrial agriculture and chemicals (cont.)

Healthy eating is eating healthy foods, which are cooked in a healthy way.

Simple, right? Well, yes and no. Because today, healthy food is often hard to come by, and the worldwide misinformation about food makes many people not know how to cook healthy anymore. The task seems so complicated for some people that they end up giving up and eating “a little bit of everything, but not too much!” a killer saying that nips in the bud any possibility of accessing healthy food.

How is it possible to make people believe that they are made to eat “a little of everything, but not too much”? As we have seen thanks to comparative anatomy, this is obviously not the case, even if it is true that our organism can survive by eating unsuitable food.

It is unfortunate that so many people on earth are currently surviving instead of living, in part because of unhealthy diet. Of course, the list of factors that prevent humans from living instead of surviving is long and cannot be fully resolved, but some of these factors can, and diet is clearly one of them.

Better yet, diet is a decisive factor that impacts us every day and all our lives.