Wizard Recipes

Price was heading towards an organic vision of food and health, being much ahead of its time. He understood that by eating we are bounding with the earth and its elements, as well as solar energy. “Dinner that I took tonight,” as he was saying in a lecture that he held in 1928, “was part of the sun with a few months ago. The food industry hides and diminishes these links. By stretching the Tropic chain, so that the population from the big cities can be nourished using far away soil, we violate the “laws of nature” at least twice: stealing nutrients from the soil in which plants were grown and then wasting them trough food processing. Unlike the indigenous populations studied by Price, which endeavored to return nutrients back to the local soils on which their entire existence depended, “our modern civilization returns extremely few nutrients compared to the quantities consumed”. Renner shows us how Price came to the conclusion that the food and health problem is actually an organic dysfunction. Destroying links between local soils, local food and local populations, the industrial system, it can not fulfill the biochemical requirements of the body, which, by not having time to adapt, will collapse.

Regardless whether or not you are willing to follow Dr. Price in his long journey, he and all other researchers of western diets from the twentieth century that have returned to the civilized world with the same simple conclusion, devastating and hard to resist: the human animal is adapted and apparently can prosper on the basis of extremely varied diets, but the Western diet, however you define it does not seem to be a part of them.

But the ecological critic of the industrial civilization that was promoted by Weston Price in 1930 hasn’t survived the Second World War.  The niche of this type of writings-in which Sir Howard and Lord Northbourne from England and the American agrarians took part- closed shortly after Price published “Nutrition and Physical degeneration” in 1939. Soon, people had to turn the back to the attacks on “industrial civilization”, on which their salvation depended in time of war. At the end of the war, the industrial civilization strengthens his position, becoming more confident.

The next consolidation was the agriculture industry (that had a benefit from the transformation of the mountains in soil fertilizers and toxic gas in pesticides) shortly the other types of agriculture disappeared. Weston Price and his colleagues who had studied the western diseases had been forgotten by now. No one was willing to look back or to recognize the wisdom of the primitive groups, moreover, they disappeared or were quickly assimilate, even Aborigines were moving to the city.

In terms of the Western diseases, these didn’t disappeared- immediately after the war the rates of heart disease have exploded-but now they remained to the responsibility of modern medicine and to the reductionist science.          The nourishment became a widely language accepted in discussion about nutrition and health. The industrial food chain would be brought up again late in the 60s along with the rise of organic agriculture.

Eat products grown and cultivated on healthy soils.

It would be easier to say “eat organic products“, it is true that certified organic nourishment is usually properly cultivated or grown on healthier soils- soils fed with organic matters. Yet, there are some farmers in America that don’t have attested organic food,  but whose products must not be overlooked. The “organic” mark is important, but it is not the only key for the production of quality food.  In fact supermarkets are full of processed organic food products that are just a little bit better, at least in terms of health, than their conventional equivalents.

Organic cream cookies aren’t a healthy food product. When an organic Coca-Cola will be launch, what will happen for sure, then it will be probably a big strike in ecological terms, but not for our health. Most of the consumers expect automatically that the mark “organic” is a synonym with “healthy“, but the fact that the corn syrup with high fructose from your soft drinks, is organic, is not at all an advantage for the metabolism of insulin.

Yet, the superiority of real food grown on healthy soils seems to be obvious. More and more studies support the hypothesis which was first launched by Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale; soils that are rich in organic matters produce nutritious food. Recent some comparisons made between organic and conventional crops have shown that several plants from organic crops had much higher levels of antioxidants, flavones, vitamins and other nutrients. But of course after been carried for several days by truck, any fresh product loses its nutritional quality, therefore it would be good to search not just for organic food but also local organic food.