Book Review What Your Food Ate

How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, by Anne Biklé and David Montgomery

Book cover of What Your Food Ate in my vegetable garden, photo by Author

When I learned that fruit and vegetable contents in micronutrients had dropped dramatically since the 1940s and that we’d need way more than an apple a day to keep the doctor away from today’s apples, this depletion was attributed to the selection of fast-growing varieties producing big & shiny fruits, but nutritionally impoverished.

This explanation is insufficient. The other part of the story is about the degradation of soils, the massive destruction of microbiomes living in soil and plants by conventional agriculture practices. These microbes, the interwoven biology at play in the Hidden Half of Nature, a previous book by the same authors, are crucial to grasp nutrition, public health, and the challenges of sustainable food production and climate change.

Since I started reading What Your Food Ate, I found it so important for our lives and the meaning of our jobs that I’ve told over a dozen people about it — friends, colleagues, and fellows from the sector of nutrition and the microbiome. No one had heard of it (except Nicolas Durr). Yet, this is a pivotal work that interpenetrates their field with the whole food production system, our health, planetary health, One Health.

“That roughly 40% of the molecules circulating through our bodies arise directly or indirectly from our gut microbiota adds a new dimension linking diet to health” — Anne Biklé and David Montgomery.

The magnitude of symbiosis is true for plants as it is for humans, as greens offer up to 50% of the sugars they produce by photosynthesis to the companions lying at their roots, and are perfused in exchange with the elements mycorrhizae and bacteria retrieve from the soil. These microbial partners act as an externalized stomach, a root extension for the plants. They produce enzymes and organic acids that release minerals bound with rocks to make them available. They reach beyond and extend faster than plant roots to find nutrients in a much wider perimeter than the one accessible to plants alone.

Like animals evolved from a state of symbiosis, so did plants. When they came ashore about 400 million years ago, “their roots served mostly as an anchor, while fungi provided them with minerals from the soil”.

The problem

Biklé and Montgomery rely on a lot of scientific publications, but also on their real-life experience with their own gardens and meeting farmers all over the United States. Always, the observation is the same: conventional agriculture, with its large monocultures, tilling, fertilizer, and pesticides, has destroyed soil’s life and, as a consequence, its fertility.

Without the relationship with worms, insects, mycorrhizae, and bacterial symbionts that provide plants with their mineral nutrients, crops have become “anemic”. Depleted from crucial elements that act as building blocks of their immunity (secondary metabolites), they can’t resist disease or pests.

“Having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art” — Andy Warhol.

Worms boost yields by an average of 25%. And chemical fertilizers kill an average of 80% of them.

With the associated loss of biodiversity, pests’ predators have disappeared, and bad bugs or diseases can feast on the weakened vegetation. Indeed, the reality is that there are significantly more pests in fields treated with pesticides than in organic or regenerative ones. And these pests build resistance to the poisons, requiring a spiral of ever-more potent and polluting chemistry.

Implications for the nutrients profiles in fruits, vegetables, and grain

The secondary metabolites that the plants can’t build in this malnourished state happen to be the ones that present loads of health benefits for us: polyphenols, antioxidants, carotenoids, flavonoids, lycopene, anthocyanins, resveratrol, carotenoids, daidzein, phenolic compounds… These compounds defend us against cardiovascular disease, inflammatory bowel disease, neuro-degeneration including Parkinson’s disease, cancer, arthritis, cognitive decline… They also tend to promote satiety, reducing caloric intake.

But there is no dietary recommendation for these precious phytochemical compounds, so they are not labeled, not analyzed, and not selected for.

“People would take in 20 to 60% more phytochemicals if they ate organic rather than conventional foods.” — Anne Biklé and David Montgomery.

Crops’ contents in minerals, antioxidants, and polyphenols can vary widely — up to 200-fold in carrots and spinach for example. Different scientific reviews looking at micronutrient contents of different foods in time and in the different agriculture systems show that conventional agriculture has significantly reduced crops contents in iron, zinc, selenium, copper, magnesium, manganese, calcium, phosphorous, boron, vitamin C, vitamin B2, protein. Often, the reductions range between 5 and 50%.

Interestingly, in some studies, the difference in mineral contents could be explained only by the loss of symbiotic relationships. The change was so quick that it could not be linked to the soil contents in minerals.

“Restoring soil nutrition comes from restoring soil fertility.”

“We got less from growing more”

“We’ve focused on making food bland, inadvertently undermining our bodily defenses.”

“The disease-prevention power of phytochemicals stems in part from synergistic effects that come from eating combinations of fresh, whole foods and gut microbiota that further enhance protective effects.”

Beyond the loss of precious nutrients in conventionally-grown foods, we also collect the excess nitrates linked to chemical fertilization, which bacteria convert to nitrites and nitrosamines, increasing the risks of stomach, bladder, prostate, and colorectal cancers as well as thyroid disease. Vitamin C and polyphenols could oppose this mechanism… if they were still there.

Besides nitrites, conventional foods have more heavy metals, pesticide residues, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria than organically-grown and regenerative agriculture. Pesticides increase infertility and birth defects, and higher-than-average exposure doubles the risks of ADHD.

“Spinach became progressively inferior in nutritional value with each additional increment of nitrogen” — Anne Biklé and David Montgomery.

The impacts of pesticide use are dramatic for worms and pollinators, and their use increases pests' abundance because “pests rebound faster than what eats them”. On the other hand, accepting to live with a little insect damage increases resilience, and increases the phytochemical levels in crops — makes sense: plants produce their immunity phytochemicals when they need to defend themselves.

Implications for nutrients profiles in meat and dairy

Ruminants evolved to eat grass and roam in pastures. Allowing cows to eat grass improves the nutritional quality of milk and meat, reduces the environmental footprint of breeding (they fertilize the land instead of creating pollution with manure, and feed on fresh kilometer-zero food instead of having soy grown from deforestation that traveled half the world), and improves the health of the animals and their eaters. Indeed, the absurdity of moving cows indoors could only happen in an economy of cheap fossil fuels and cheap grain (anachronically subsidized).

Total Mixed Rations (TMR), on the other hand, are ultra-processed and standardized, and derived from grain and soy, increasing dramatically the omega-3/omega-6 balance. Grassmilk omega-3/omega-6 ratio is 1:1, while organic is 1:2 and conventional is 1:6.

“The typical American diet today contains 10 to 20 times more omega-6 than omega-3. This is roughly 3 to 5 times higher than what is considered beneficial for human health”.

This dietary omega-6 excess comes with a plethora of inflammatory civilization diseases.

Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) dropped too since cows moved indoors, by half in 4 decades, and CLA is important for different aspects of health, including balancing lean mass and fat mass.

Of course, as milk has changed, so have butter, cheese, and yogurts: they are now characterized by a near-absence of omega-3, less vitamin A and E, and much fewer phytochemicals (10 times fewer flavonoids for example).

Under these conditions and diets, cows live shorter and sicker lives (3 years in TMR-fed UK compared to over 5 years in pastured New Zealand for dairy cows), more often suffering from acidosis and mastitis, bovine respiratory disease, inflammation, and infertility — similar banes as humans.

Critically, the USDA doesn’t address what composes a cow’s diet in organic certification — the requirement is that 30% of the dry matter must come from organic-certified pasture, but it could be grain, or dried grass, which loses most of its omega-3.

Beyond cattle, the same destitution was found for salmon (traditionally a good source of omega-3, but even organic-bred salmon saw its omega-3 contents divided by 5), chickens, and eggs (omega-3 divided by 10 and omega-6 doubled between American farms and Greek free-roamers). Antioxidant levels also were divided by 5 in indoor birds compared to outdoor breeding, and vitamin D by 3 to 4.

The omega-6/omega-3 ratio even doubled in mothers’ breast milk!

These are not new theories and new findings, Voisins’ book Soil, Grass, and Cancer stated in 1959:

“Preventive medicine was the best solution for livestock health. And the key to that? Soil health.” — Voisin

The cows and other herbivores (although they are actually microvores) exert body wisdom in their eating behavior. When they roam pastures that present shrubs and some biodiversity, they are able to use botanicals as an integration, they can de-worm with the right plants, and dose them right. They meet their needs, no less, no more, while with TMR, some individuals need more of certain nutrients than others, leading to overeating, overcharging their body, and extra costs.

“Love and respect for animals translate into healthier foods.” — Anne Biklé and David Montgomery.

Implications for public health

The importance of vitamin B was discovered when rats were fed chemically-fertilized grains and became badly sick — to recover immediately when fed with whole grains. The same happened to livestock on chemically-fertilized farms that came back to health within a few years with compost-based farming. And to people when we shifted to white bread and white rice.

The impoverishment of our foods with micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, protective phytochemicals, and antioxidants such as omega-3 and CLA, in association with the rise in toxic compounds like pesticides residues, nitrites, heavy metals, and pro-inflammatory substances push us towards a chronic low-grade inflammation and cancer-prone body status. Again, these dietary changes have been associated with birth defects and infertility, metabolic syndrome, obesity and cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, ADHD, and more.

It’s of particular interest to look at obesity as the links are quite direct: fruits and vegetables have lost a good part of their micronutrients and taste, so we eat less of them, and they are not as satiating as they used to be. I can tell by a simple meal from my vegetable garden. We turn to ultra-processed foods much denser in calories, but formulated with flavors and taste enhancers that make us eat more, and of empty calories. This leads to this pro-inflammatory setup, micronutrient deficiency, and food addictions. The food industry knows exactly which balance of fat, sugar, and salt makes people addicted (Big Food and Cie, Salt, Sugar, and Fat), and they play on this sweet spot to sell more. At the end of the day, we pay for this economic liberalism with our health and health bills.

An elegant study showed that when we eat processed foods, we eat an extra 500 calories per day, leading to a weight gain of 1 pound per week, whereas going unprocessed makes us lose 1 pound a week.

“Vegetables don’t taste like they used to. If they did, we’d probably eat more of them.”

In the USA, food is cheap but the healthcare bill rose in proportion and doubles the cost of food, “making cheap food not so cheap” and degrading the lifespan and quality of life for millions of people. As of 2016, treating chronic diseases consumed three-quarters of the approximately 3.3 trillion USD spent annually on healthcare in the US, about 5000 USD per American. Only 1 in 10 Americans actually eat the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables.

“Any public health system of the future would have to be based on soil fertility” — Eve Balfour.

Implications for food security

“About a third of the world’s agricultural land suffers from serious topsoil erosion or reduced fertility that compromises the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people”

The UN, in 2015, said we’re on track to degrade another third in this century. Other serious sources reckon that 90% of agricultural soils will be degraded by 2050.

Degraded soils mean less capacity of retention for water, more landslides, and an acceleration of topsoil erosion in heavy rainfall. In the context of climate change, conventional agriculture accumulates weaknesses: big surfaces of monoculture (all eggs in the same basket and prone to infestation, loss of biodiversity including pollinators), low water retention (sensitivity to drought), high topsoil erosion (sensitivity to flood)…

This system compromises our ability to produce food in the long term (some speak of 60 harvests left) and lacks resilience to face short-term challenges. Rich soils on the other hand improve the resilience of plants and water retention capabilities by 50% — not a luxury in the context of changing precipitation patterns.

Implications for the climate

“A study in the late 70s found that a third of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution came from degrading organic matter in agricultural soils.”

Some official reports (World Watch Institute report Livestock and climate change) reckon that over half of the greenhouse gas emissions are linked to animal farming (when taking into account animal feed coming from deforestation). This sector is probably the one with the biggest responsibility regarding the current status of the crisis, and the one with the biggest potential to bring at-scale solutions.

Increasing carbon sequestration in soils by 0,4% per year (international proposition discussed here) could be a major factor to offset global fossil fuels emissions and meet the cutoff of 2°C warming, or even 1,5°C, according to experts. What Your Food Ate relates experiences from the authors, going from 1% of carbon content in their soil to 10%, from Tobacco Road Farm, from 3 to 11%, and from Singing Frogs Farm, from 1–3% to 10–12% — well exceeding the target, albeit on small surfaces.

Investing in regenerative agriculture — and a consumption model transition — is probably the most impactful action that governments can take.

Consequences of glyphosate widespread use

Glyphosate was first developed as a chelator to make minerals in the soil unavailable to the plant — especially manganese, which feeds essential metabolic pathways of plants and microbes. Then it was patented as an antibiotic — making it possible to anticipate its impact on the gut microbiome (including for honeybees).

Glyphosate was deemed safe for mammalian cells, but it damages mitochondria. It tarps earthworms’ reproduction, impacts bees, affects mycorrhizal colonization enough to adversely affect plant growth, and impedes microbial deliveries of phosphate, reducing mineral and flavonoid contents. It also increases the presence of pathogenic fungi.

According to the authors, it takes 5 years for resistant weeds to appear and spread when one uses glyphosate, and half of the farmers using it report resistant weeds on their farms. Glyphosate is one of these inventions that creates a vicious loop — once used, it’s almost impossible to unuse it, because it will have destroyed the system that made it unnecessary in the first place. Glyphosate and other pesticides are needed in a system of huge monocultures — the very system that needs to be questioned and replaced.

The solution: Regenerative agriculture

It is possible to reestablish soil health and fertility, and regenerative agriculture has yielded remarkable results to bring back organic matter in the soil. To bring back life, yield, resilience, and health for the land, plants, and plant-eaters.

“Plants invest in building up carbon below ground if they grow in soil poor in organic matter, but favor their own growth in soil with higher amounts of organic matter” — Anne Biklé and David Montgomery.

Biklé and Montgomery say plant growth starts once soil carbon goes over 3%. Regenerative agriculture is a great way to produce in quantity while restoring soil carbon beyond 3%.

Regenerative agriculture is built on three pillars:

1. no-till;
2. constant coverage with cover crops;
3. diverse culture rotation.

Tests on nitrogen quantity on different types of soils showed that “the optimal nitrogen fertilizer application rate was zero for farms with the highest levels of soil organic matter and biological activity”. Why? Because nitrogen fertilizer makes the soil more acidic, reducing the solubility of minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium, and increasing the availability of toxic elements like aluminum, harming in the process nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizae.

My understanding is that there is no official, consensus definition or criteria for regenerative agriculture. Indeed, I recently heard a French regenerative farmer in a conference on Food production in planetary limits explain that her farm is dependent on glyphosate — because the cover crops are destroyed with glyphosate before planting new ones. However, other regenerative farmers testify in What Your Food Ate on the use of other chemical-free methods, for example covering the crops with a plastic foil under the sun for a few days to burn them before planting new seedlings.

Importantly, regenerative agriculture’s yields compare to conventional, but the costs for pesticides and fertilizers are much lower (they usually only buy compost and animal manure to complement the composting on their farm), making the system more profitable, even for the same price of produce, once the soil fertility is back.

David Johnson and his wife Hui-Chum invented a way to bring air into compost to create the perfect mix of fungi and bacteria for soil regeneration — “a form of soil FMT” they say (for Fecal Microbial Transplant). They found the mix boosted yields by 10% in wheat, doubled protein content, iron and copper levels, and increased manganese and other micronutrients, with similar findings with other crops. To work as well, the mix needed associations with several bacteria and fungi.

Challenges to implementing the solution

All the stars are aligned in the same direction, so why is it so hard to implement regenerative agriculture on a broad scale? Here are some of the challenges our societies face.

• Mentality and belief system: agronomists and farmers have formed and crystallized the belief that only the conventional system can “feed the world”. They think that organic and regenerative farming means lower yields and lower profits. It is not the case. The standard wisdom is that organic yields 10% lower than conventional — but actually when the soil is restored, organic yield can equal or exceed conventional yields — while the soil fertility goes down in conventional practices, compromising long-term capacity to “feed the world”. A global analysis showed that organic farms are a quarter to a third more profitable than corresponding conventional. And even if the yield stayed lower, a small over cost of the products would match or exceed the economic performance of conventional farming. The problem lies in the name itself: conventional, by any standard, should not be the norm.

“It’s going to take more than data to change things. You have to change minds.” — Lundgren.

• Farmers’ remuneration: as Jean-Marc Jancovici pointed out in this conference, 2 centuries ago, food represented one-half to two-thirds of families’ expenses. Today, it is only 2% of the GDP, it is a poor sector, and we’re asking it to invest massively in changing practices. There’s a financial incongruity here.
• Policies, subsidies, and certifications: they are currently not adapted to small regenerative farms: in Singing Frogs Farm near San Francisco, the diversity of crops grown and fast turnover between crops make it impossible to fill the over 1000 entries that would be required (input and output of every bed and every crop) to apply for an organic certificate. Another roadblock is that “small farms don’t get tax breaks like many larger farms. They’re too small”. Subsidies, in Europe included, go largely to the exact types of farms that are creating the problem: big monocultures of corn or soy that feed our sick glycemia, or cattle that were born to eat grass. They should instead make fresh fruits and vegetables more accessible, they are staples and can’t cost like luxuries.

“A roadblock is to scale up to bigger farms, but it’s easier to scale up to lots of small farms”

• Agricultural science structure: “The funding and infrastructure in agricultural science mostly support conventional interests” — Lundgren’s story is an impressive testimony of this fact, as his warnings and scientific data were violently muffled by the power of lobbyists. He ended up exiting his academic career and making his farm a hot spot of diversity.
• Short-term cash availability: the cost of land can be prohibitive, and there is a cost of conversion of conventional to regenerative. Indeed, when the soil fertility goes back up, regenerative farming appears more profitable than conventional, because the yield compares, but the cost for intrants is minimal. However, while the soil fertility builds up and the farmers need to take risks in changing their practices, the system should share the risk and support them by offering a safety net, training, and a community to share best practices.
• Consumer demand: citizens are not aware of the differences in nutrition from the foods coming from different types of agriculture. In the absence of a regenerative agriculture seal, they think the best out there is organic, while the organic seals don’t look at what plants and animals eat — it’s not even compulsory for fruits and vegetables to grow in real soil — nonsense! Spread the word, consumer demand is driven by consumer education.
• Consumer habits — whole wheat bread has 3 times the iron, 2 times the phosphorous and 7 times the levels of vitamin A and B, yet, after the industrial revolution, people turned to white bread. The same was true in Asia as people stopped eating whole rice, but turned to white rice, leading to a large-scale beriberi epidemic — and feeding the type 2 diabetes (T2D) epidemic. Indeed, having white rice 5 times a week increases the risk of developing T2D by 20%, while having whole rice 5 times/week reduces it by 10%, compared to having it once a month. We need a shift toward wholeness, time to cook from fresh, real foods, and transition to include more plant-based foods and less animal-based. This would be facilitated by better subsidies policies.

“Eat food” (meaning real food). “Not too much. Mostly plants.” — Michael Pollan.

Here are more incentives to eat more plants.

• Consumer intention-action gap: a global survey by the Institute for Business Value found that 44% of consumers are purpose-driven: they want products that align with their values. But only 31% say sustainable products made up more than half of their last purchase. And what even qualified as sustainable? Education is crucial as we need to change eating models from childhood, yet at the same time, we can’t wait for the next generation to make the changes in consumption that we need now. To help bridge the gap, policymakers and distributors have big responsibilities.
• Lack of systems thinking: professions are now separate and it’s hard for people in nutrition, public health, and policy-making to know the diverse aspects that farming plays in their field. For example, I just read a French book called La vérité sur l’obésité (The truth on obesity) and as it investigates the facets of obesity from its causes (psychological, genetic, addictive…) to its treatments, the author never takes two steps back to question the system that has led to the pandemic. Yes, we started eating more ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods and moving less, but what is at the root of these changes? At the end of the day, What Your Food Ate sheds more light on the causes of obesity than this medical, downstream approach.
• Downstream industrial processes: they can nullify the benefits of growing nutritious foods. For example, in wheat, it’s the wheat germ that contains most of the interesting nutritional properties. However, the good fat in the grain is not very stable, so to make products with longer shelf-life, wheat is processed and the germ is removed. We need industries and distribution models that can handle shorter shelf life and better-quality products.

What can you do?

• Read the book to convince yourself of the importance of farming for the future of our civilization.
• As a consumer, promote regenerative agriculture by voting with your money. In France, Omie & Cie created an e-shop to offer products from regenerative agriculture. Or subscribe to local AMAPs (associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture). Look up your options locally.
• Shift towards seasonal foods, and limit animal products intake.
• As a farmer, start with a corner of your farm and expand once you figure out how to make regenerative agriculture work on your land — (Lundgren’s advice)
• As policy-makers and voters, push for the adaptation of the infrastructure — subsidies and tax returns should promote conversions to smaller, more virtuous farms. You are here to protect the population, not lobbyists’ interests.
• In the nutrition sector, educate about these differences and change the labeling regulation to indicate the contents of polyphenols and omega 3/omega 6 ratios in foods.
• In academics, ensure the funding does not go only where there are products to sell, but where the common interest lies.
• As a business, there are many needs: financing the transition can be done for example by offering companies to buy carbon credits from the farms that trap carbon in the soil. In the long term, we don’t want compensation, but in the short term, we need to enable a fast transition. Insurance companies can offer specific services to cover risks. Certifying companies can create a quality seal for consumers to navigate the offer. And all food companies have a responsibility regarding what they put on the shelves, regarding the healthfulness and life cycle of their products.

Truly, there can be no health without One Health.

“The health of soil, plant, animal, and man is one indivisible whole” — Eve Balfour.