What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health

Reducing food down to carbs, fats and protein misses out on a lot of the key nutritional value. There are many micronutrients that have value that we have yet to understand. Even isolating these misses out on the benefits of the interrelation between various compounds. People have had centuries to select food for nutritional value. 

We have spent a few decades tearing food apart and attempting to provide similar benefit. Alas, we have not done a good job. Taste has previously been a key way to identify food our bodies need. However, as scientists have been able to isolate key macronutrients, they were left with bland food. No problem, they added plenty of flavors to help fool us into liking the "fake" food. Even "natural" food suffers from the same problems. Agriculture has engineered crops for yield rather than taste or nutrition. Fields are covered with fertilizer that makes plants grow fast. They have little time for defenses, thus they are covered with pesticides. This kills off the pest predators also, requiring more pesticides. 

Meat has suffered from similar problems. Livestock are fed grains that are cheap rather than nutritious. This "food" needs to be flavored to get the animals to appropriate consume it. The animals quickly put on weight, but the nutritional value and taste of the meat is lacking. (Argentine grass-fed beef tasted so much better than the feed-lot American beef.) There are also the externalities. Animal waste is great fertilizer on farms, but hazardous waste on a feedlot.

The explores the decline in nutrition in modern food with a goal towards advocating no-till "natural" agricultural processes. Many of today's crops don't work as well in organic, no-till farming because they have been bred specifically for high-fertilizer, conventional farming. Breeding for taste and more natural conditions can produce more nutritious, better tasting produce with yields almost as high as bland conventional ones. We are only beginning to better understand the nutritional benefits. (Nutritional studies remain hard because there are so many different people and different interrelated nutrients.)