Did you know that your body can tell the difference - and get more benefit - from food that comes with it's natural fiber vs food stripped of its fiber but replaced with a supplement?
How about the fact that ultra-processed foods -- like fake meat and cheese -- can't compete with their real counterparts when it comes to providing nutrients your body knows what to do with??
These are just a few take-aways from our new favorite book, What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery and Anne Bikle.
This week, we feature an in-depth interview with the authors shedding light on everything from how farming practices affect the health of the soil microbiome -- to the ultimate affect soil health has on the flavor and health of your food.
Be sure to get your copy of this great book - and get ready for a great conversation!
Brought to you by the Global Food and Farm Online Community
Click here to subscribe on your favorite platform or click here to listen on our website.
Support the show through Patreon -- Patreon.com/TastingTerroir
Did you know that your body can tell the difference - and get more benefit - from food that comes with it's natural fiber vs food stripped of its fiber but replaced with a supplement?
How about the fact that ultra-processed foods -- like fake meat and cheese -- can't compete with their real counterparts when it comes to providing nutrients your body knows what to do with??
These are just a few take-aways from our new favorite book, What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery and Anne Bikle.
This week, we feature an in-depth interview with the authors shedding light on everything from how farming practices affect the health of the soil microbiome -- to the ultimate affect soil health has on the flavor and health of your food.
Be sure to get your copy of this great book - and get ready for a great conversation!
Brought to you by the Global Food and Farm Online Community
Click here to subscribe on your favorite platform or click here to listen on our website.
Support the show through Patreon -- Patreon.com/TastingTerroir
We all love a tasty meal, but there's more going on than simple pleasure. It turns out our own bodies possess some pretty impressive biological tools for detecting what is in the things we eat and drink. And just as per ruminants flavors inform our body wisdom. Welcome back to our podcast Tasting Terroir, a journey that explores the link between healthy soil and the flavor of your food. I'm your host, Sarah Harper. That was an excerpt from my new favorite book, What Your Food? How to Heal our Land and Reclaim Our Health, by David R. Montgomery and Anne Bickley. And truthfully, I cannot say enough about this book. It's great, especially for the topics that we're interested in on this podcast the Flavor of food, the Length of soil health. We could do ten episodes just on this book. And I'm excited to bring to you an indepth interview with the authors of the book and my co host, Dr. Jill Clapperton in just a moment. But before we dive into that, I want to give you just a few excerpts from chapter 14 of the book, The Flavor of Health. Because of course, we are on the journey to find and talk about the link between soil health and the flavor of food. But it can often be difficult because the science is still emerging on flavor and that link and Dave and Anne have helpfully included some of that science and put some framing around this topic that I think is particularly interesting. So I'm going to read a few excerpts from again, chapter 14, Flavor of Health, and I'll give you some background on the authors and then we will dive into our interview with them. Flavor and taste have always been means to an end. On the surface, they were how we identified and remembered sources of nourishing food and avoided toxins. But on a deeper level, flavor and taste guide us to health, imbuing nutrients and compounds just like that of our herds and flocks. Our Body wisdom developed a nutritional dossier through repeated exposure to different flavors. The agents that collect and help interpret all this intelligence are special cells tucked deep inside the nose at the doorstep of the brain, along with taste receptors in the mouth. Another excerpt bland tasting fruits and vegetables, it appears, contain fewer health protective compounds than those suffused with flavor. At least that's according to a 2006 study published in Science that analyzed hundreds of volatiles and tomatoes. It turned out that the volatiles linked to the most satisfying flavors are rooted in compounds that directly benefit human health, like cartonoids phytochemicals, essential for sound, vision and eye health. The essential fatty acids L, A, and Ala contributed to the best tasting tomatoes. In addition, three amino acids also underpinned mouthwatering flavors, and these particular amino acids are among those that our bodies cannot make. The only naturally occurring source of them is in the foods in one's diet. Another excerpt it is challenging if not impossible, to recreate the full nutritional profile of the whole foods from which ingredients for ultraprocessed foods are sourced. But that is not the goal. Adding back the same phytochemicals and fats removed in processing would wreckful formulated textures, tastes, and flavors of ultraprocessed foods. And they mentioned earlier that this category includes many of the fake meats and fake cheeses that you see on the shelves. Much easier is to begin with a blank slate pile of protein or carbs and add vitamins and minerals back into the final version of the food product, along with various flavorings binders, additives, and preservatives. But whatever the final concoction, it is not a substitute for all that was lost along the way. Tastier foods are no longer a sure guide to healthier ones. Flooding ultraprocessed foods with flavors may delight the tongue and brain for a moment, but it leaves the body wisdom to spin aimlessly like a needle of a broken compass searching for north. That the health effects of diet are poorly understood through single components is borne out in research showing that combinations of various foods and spices can prove more important than the effects of any individual food or spice. For example, data from the Iowa Women's Health Study show that fiber left intact in whole grain foods reduced the risk of mortality more than an equivalent amount of fiber added back into refined grain foods. The benefit wasn't just from the fiber. Eating whole food sets up synergies between basic components like fats, fiber, and phytochemicals when they come naturally packaged together as a plant. And finally, drinking Polyphenolrich wine along with meat is another way to get some phytochemicals in your diet. This food and drink combination was also found to greatly reduce blood levels of key markers for oxidative stress and inflammation related to heart disease. These effects are likely due to polyphenols, inhibiting the oxidation of dietary fat and betacarotene. In simplifying our modern diet, we've stripped out things that formally interacted to our benefit. Honestly, I could read the whole book to you. It's that good. I really can't recommend it enough, but you'll get to hear a lot more about it here in just a minute. Just a little more background on the book. David R. Montgomery and Anne Bickley take us far beyond the wellborn adage of are you really what you Eat? To deliver a new truth, the roots of good health start on farms. Of course they do what Your Food Ate marshall's evidence from recent and forgotten science to illustrate how the health of the soil ripples through that of crops, livestock, and ultimately, us. What they really do a great job of is explaining the soil microbiome and how it affects the health of plants, the flavor, and how agricultural practices affect those things, too, in a way that is interesting and understandable. And you don't have to be a soil scientist to get it. So just a little background on the authors david r. Montgomery is a professor at the University of Washington and a MacArthur Fellow. His books have been translated into ten languages, and Bicklay is a biologist and environmental planner whose writing has appeared in Nautilus, Natural History, smithsonian Fine Gardening, and Best Health. The couple are married and live in Seattle. Their work includes a trilogy of books about soil health, microbiomes and farming, dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations, the Hidden Half of Nature, and Growing a Revolution. As I mentioned, I was lucky enough to be joined by my co host, Dr. Jill Clapperton, in this discussion with the authors. So without further ado here we go.
Anne Bikle:Hello. Hey, Ter.
David Montgomery:Hello, Jill. Hello, Sarah.
Sara Harper:Hi.
Anne Bikle:By the way, I love the name tasting. Terroir yeah, I think that's really it.
Jill Clapperton:Took us a long time to get that trademark. We did it out.
Sara Harper:I am so happy to welcome David Montgomery and Anne Bickley to our podcast. And if you haven't got the book, What Your Food Ate, you really should. It's just a great book. It has so much research and so many really accessible ways to understand, even if you're not a soil scientist, why the health of the soil matters to both the flavor and the health of your food. And I'm thrilled also that we have my co host, Jill Clapperton. Dr. Jill Clapperton is joining in this discussion, and so we're excited to hear her discussion with them and just all around continuing to look at this topic. So to start out, I just wanted to ask David, Anne, the book is about, obviously, what your food ate, and for meat eaters, I think that would make a lot of sense. Oh, well, did the cow, the beef that you ate, did it eat grass or grain? But what's really striking and unknown to a lot of people is that your plants are eating food, too. Everything that you eat is eating something else. And so how did you maybe decide to go on this journey and look at this topic, and what were you hoping to find?
Anne Bikle:Great question. Yeah.
David Montgomery:It'S been kind of a long and interesting journey for us to get to the point where we're writing about what our food ate, and in particular, sort of how we raise our crops and livestock in terms of what that means, in terms of what gets into our food. And we really started sort of looking at the degradation of soil and what you lose when you degrade soil health and soil quality. Because I'm a geologist and as a biologist, and you put those two things together and soil is kind of right in the natural boundary between those so that these areas overlap with both of our interests. But, you know, we started looking at degradation and first and then Anne's also a gardener, and we noticed in writing Dirt Erosion of Civilizations, the first book we wrote on these topics, as I was writing that Anne was restoring degraded land in our yard, literally turning around the problems that I was writing about in that. And so we wrote a book called The Hidden Half of Nature about the role of microbial life in soil fertility and soil health and supporting the human microbiome's role in gut health as well. And then that led us to thinking about, oh, well, if you could restore our yard using composting and mulching and tending the microbial life in the soil, what about on farms? And that led to writing Growing a Revolution. That whole setup led us to basically realize that, wow, the way we treat our land is actually impacting what's getting into our food in ways that the medical sciences regard as things that could either cultivate human health or undermine human health. And it's that last point that really led us to writing What Your Food Ate. So it's sort of the end of a long journey that Ann and I have been on. And that's not the end. It's the latest step on a long term.
Jill Clapperton:We're not at the end yet.
Anne Bikle:Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that comment, Joe, right. Agriculture has been going on for 10,000 years and here we are all these years later and we still haven't really quite got our arms completely around how it is we ought to be farming. If we want to get the two basic things that we really want out of agriculture, which is a sufficient amount of food and food that contains the kinds of things that are the leverage points and the critical key factors in human health. And as we write in great detail about in the book, that goes way beyond just this simple notion of protein, fats, carbohydrates, I mean, fats are in there, but they're considerably more complicated than I think most people realize. And I think also maybe part of the journey for us, Sarah, is that it's just sort of like anything when you begin to look into it, you come to realizations and you start putting a story together. But maybe it's really only when you get considerably into something that you kind of reach this tipping point of realizing how much you don't know about things. Because at first it's pretty simple to learn the basics, to get yourself up on this foundation of basics about any given topic. But then the more you know, then the nuance starts to creep in and the gray and the vague and the murkiness, but also at the same time clarity around, oh, okay, there's this noise on the side, but overall, there's this central thing that is happening. And that's where that's kind of where I felt like with what your food ate. It really came into at least my thinking on this, that farming practices are just I realized this before with the other books, but in a whole new way. Farming practices are just so fundamental to human health, and we never talk about it other than in terms of sufficient number of calories.
Jill Clapperton:Interrupt you right there. That is a great talking point right there. What is with the calories? We need more than just calories. We make energy from real nutrition. So what's with us dealing with calories alone?
David Montgomery:Yeah, we put far too much emphasis on the last 80 years of really agronomy or agriculture as a whole, just focusing on the calorie question. And of course, we need adequate calories to provide the energy to keep our bodies going. But health does not depend on calories. Survival may depend on calories, but health depends on much more than calories. And it's that connection sort of how to grow not just enough food to feed the world, but enough nutritious food to nourish the world that we really took our eyes off of. I think as a collective, as humanity's collective agricultural endeavor. Over the last 80 years or so, we got very good at growing very large harvest of very few things and didn't realize that we were undercutting. The amount of minerals that were in and the amount of phytochemicals that were in them, the kinds of compounds that our bodies use to help maintain health. Such that the point that now we would have to eat many more calories to get the same level of health benefits from all those other compounds. And that means we'd be eating too many calories, which was not good for those of us who have access to plenty of calories.
Jill Clapperton:Yeah, I guess I couldn't resist that point because we've been focusing, we've been talking about what is the dietary intake and how do we calculate that, and it's all based on calories. And I'm like, Wait, no calories, but we need a certain amount of them. But are we just talking about lipids? Where does this come from? And it's been really interesting, this whole idea between nutrition and science and farming. I mean, it's like the whole thing is completely disconnected.
Anne Bikle:Yeah.
David Montgomery:And there's even some really interesting and to me, odd definitions of nutrition in the nutritional sciences world that sort of leave out things that are known to be important for human health, but that you can live just fine without. Right. So you don't need them to survive, but that if you have more of them. And I'm thinking of things like that phytochemicals like betacarotene or lycopene and tomatoes, things that have antioxidant or anti inflammatory effects in our bodies once we consume the plants, make them for their own purposes, but that are good for us in our food. And we've known for a long time that how we farm affects those levels. But we haven't really paid all that much attention in terms of the nutritional sciences at looking at that as an element of nutrition and instead of focused on what does it take to maintain life rather than maintain quality of life.
Anne Bikle:Yeah. I think it's interesting that these motifs that run through agriculture, which you put your finger on, Jill, like, what's? With our sort of sheer focus on just calories, which is about quantity, which is about yield. That whole idea has flowed over and poured into the nutrition world, where we're either thinking in terms of total caloric content or we're thinking in terms of do we have adequate levels of, you know, vitamin C or calcium or this thing or that thing? And the whole sort of problem with that line of thinking is that it's easy to measure those individual things, but we still really don't have a great understanding of how does that all work together and how does that work together in the infant body, the male body, the female body, to whatever body through the life history of a human being? And that's dynamic that is ever changing from especially early in life, right? You ask anyone with kids, and it's like, well, I don't know, they weren't doing that last week, but they're doing that this week, and it's some new behavior or some new growth phase.
Jill Clapperton:I don't know what I should do.
Anne Bikle:And so we got this idea that the human diet was solely about sort of fuel and energy and nutritionists started talking about, well, yeah, that's what we need, because you need to grow from an infant into an adult. And that's energy, that's the fuel part. And somehow along the way, we lost sight and track of, especially in the Western world, about how important it is to support things at the cellular level in the human body, right? So, you know, you get on in your decades, in your thirty s, forty S, fifty s, and so on, and it's like, wow, we got some hardworking cells here. And they're building up a bunch of exhausts inside that cell. There's got to be cleanup crews, there's got to be ways of keeping that cell functioning. So your cells need to be a lot more tidy, so to speak, about what they do inside the body. And so this is why phytochemicals and probably other compounds and molecules yet to be discovered or that we know about, but we're not quite sure what they do. These antiinflammatory effects and their effects to just keep our cells functioning normally. That's a huge part of health that is completely different from, but as important as sort of these energy aspects. And we sort of got stuck. It's like we got stuck in this recording, like the days when you had vinyl and it's like, oh, the needle is stuck.
Jill Clapperton:And you just go round and round.
Anne Bikle:And round and round. So here we are. The needle is stuck in the agricultural vinyl of yield, yield, yield. And same with nutrition. Calories, calories, calories. And it's like, wait a minute. All that biomass that is the human body. We got to take care of that somehow, and it's not through a bunch of carbohydrates.
Jill Clapperton:I love that analogy with the exhaust building up. I love that.
Sara Harper:Yeah. One of the things that really struck me, too, you had a number of examples in the book about even when you try to make up for, like, what's been lost with supplementation or with fiber or whatever, it still doesn't have the same effect. Like, we've lost this idea of that we come from whole, and we need whole. That, yes, you can take a fiber supplement if you're eating nothing but white bread or lost fiber here. So we'll take it back there, and it's the same amount of fiber, so it should all be good. And it's that very kind of mathematical chemistry kind of thinking, like, we can control all the components and just select whichever way. But it's really fascinating that it doesn't work that way, that there is a wholeness that has to be taken in in order to get all the benefit that it matters that you eat the fiber with the thing that it was supposed to be in.
Anne Bikle:Yeah, definitely. And just an example of that, I was reading something the other day. There's a lot of discussion in the grain world about some people are like, don't ever eat wheat again, or any grain because it has phytic acids or phytates. So these are a phytochemical, and it's considered some people think, oh, they're toxic. You shouldn't eat those at all. And they bind up minerals, they call them anti nutrients. And it's like, Wait a minute. That's a pretty extreme way of looking at a crop that has fed humanity for thousands of years. And okay, some phytates might bind up some mineral to some extent, but it's not binding up 100% of the iron in a wheat grain or 100% of the selenium or the calcium or what have you. And so it's just these ways that we human beings are so interesting. It's like, either we just sort of get addicted to thinking in terms of black and white things, or we get stuck in the vague and the gray. And so then we say, well, we can't say anything. And it's like, no, wait a minute here. We can navigate our way through that situation. And some of these phytates, I think, are probably doing things in our bodies that we're completely unaware of, and they might be a mix of detrimental and beneficial, but, like, on the whole so back to your point, Sarah. On the whole, these things are an important food to have as a part of the human diet.
Sara Harper:Yes. And Jill, I'd love you to chime in, and I know you know this, too, from your work, and I was.
Jill Clapperton:Going to chime in on the whole.
Sara Harper:Yeah.
Jill Clapperton:I've been through the book a couple of times, and one thing that really struck me was historically speaking, and that was going through, like, Alfred Howard and Eve Balfour, andre Boise, anna Primavezi was another one that came to mind for me from Brazil. You know, people who were so far ahead of their time. One of the questions I'd ask if you really dove into this, Anna Dave, is that they tried to turn the tanker around. Why didn't they succeed? And how will we, given what you dove into.
David Montgomery:The take I would have on that is that what people like Howard and Balford and others in their era, back in the McCarrison ahead, what they were all looking at and doing is there were any experiments. They're making observations. They're putting together a story about how the way we treated land or fed our crops influenced what got into the nutrition, whether they're feeding it to rats or cows or people. But they had a very different so they had observations and anecdotes and connections to point out. But what they really lacked was much in the way of a scientific underpinnings for a mechanism. And so it was really hard for them to sell their unlike minded, conventional peers that they were actually seeing very real things and seeing real effects. Because at the time, people are enamored with the higher yields you could get from adding a lot of fertilizer to degraded land and then kind of swept under the rug that oh, that meant that you then had to start using a lot of pesticides because something happened and there were now more pests in those fields. And progress can be very effective blinders when one defines progress in a particular way and just ignores any evidence that might challenge that wisdom. So what I think that they really lacked in that day was one of the things they lacked was the ability to point to specific mechanisms they could independently verify and other scientists could go, oh, yes, this is actually the way it works. And part of that was because your understanding of the microbial world in soil was truly embryonic. In those days, there was hardly any understanding that there were even beneficial organisms in the soil, let alone that it was teeming with them in healthy, fertile soil as a key part of the basis for fertility and nutrient cycling. So one of the things we tried to do in the book is to lay out what the last 80 years of science has really filled in, in terms of connecting the dots, going between the way that farmers treat the soil to the health of the soil from the health of the soil to the health of crops. The health of crops and plants and what livestock eats to livestock health and how that all rolls up into human health. And that's a lot of dots to connect, right? You're going from soil health all the way over to human health, but if you break it into bite sized pieces, you can kind of connect the path all the way there, even if it's going to be a long time before someone does. The definitive experiment at a population level, sort of showing with 99% certainty about how all the connections work, but there's studies that have done a lot of that for all the little pieces. So that's a big part of what we tried to do, is to basically go back to look at some of those insights from historical figures and investigate what have we learned since then? And they come out looking pretty good in hindsight as people who are kind of ahead of their time because their insights were really pointing in the direction that I think science has led in the subsequent century.
Jill Clapperton:Yeah, I mean, I love that. I love that title. Rocks become you. And that was just so you, Dave. I could see the geologist in that and how it just sort of, you know, started really flowing from, well, here's how we mineralize rocks. And that whole discussion of how we mineralize rocks is really powerful because that is, I mean, really the bedrock, the start of the whole situation, how we started to actually get trace elements into our food. Right.
David Montgomery:Yeah.
Jill Clapperton:And then how do we go on it? So one of the things I also wanted to ask you, given that you've talked about the whole you've really looked at these things in individual studies all along, is now, as a scientist, as scientists, where's the gaps and how do we as scientists start to approach those gaps in a meaningful way?
David Montgomery:I think one of the biggest gaps that we sort of saw in the literature that we reviewed for the book, and if anyone is interested in the science and the background that we're talking about here, we also actually published the source list from the book as a separate PDF document that you can download from our website, dig, to grow it's free. Norton basically published it as a free ebook. It's a PDF. People shouldn't have to go looking for all these sources again. We've swept them into a big pile and you can sort through them on your own if you'd like to. And now I forgot your question.
Anne Bikle:Well, yeah. So your question was about gaps. Where are the gaps, Jill? And I think you can think about that. But what comes to my mind in part is that we know some of the mechanisms and we know some of the connections between the way that, say, high levels of organic matter and minimal chemical and physical disturbance of the soil translate into nutrient density in crops. I think we need to explore that more because at least this is how my mind works. The more evidence that you can get behind something and then write and communicate about to the people that that information is going to impact. You're just sort of building your case over and over again, or you're at least adding to it so that it gets to the point that, look, this is pretty rock solid what we've got going here. And when you have that kind of an evidence base for anything in science, for that matter, that's what can, I think start to turn this ship around is just continually adding to the evidence base. Because then anywhere from farmers to policymakers, to consumers, to food companies. They're kind of like you want to get people to that point of I guess the writing is on the wall. I guess this is how it is.
Sara Harper:Yeah. There's a real frustration, though, because regenerative Agriculture as a title, as a term, has been trying to kind of move people in that direction. Not maybe all of but that's really what you're talking about in the book, and the farmers that you're interviewing and profiling and marketing has taken over, and there's so much confusion now about what it is. And since I was thinking about because I come from a policy world, and I know all the ins and outs of how hard that is to change policy because of all the things that are behind that. And so why you would like to see that change, I'm wondering if maybe part of the solution is that people really need to have a garden, even if it's just a salad pot in there, which I have three in my window, in my window sale. And start doing in a micro level the practices that you talk about in the book. Because then when you taste that green, when you sniff the little lettuce or the arugula or whatever it is you're growing and you taste the difference, you taste how much more peppery and just the real difference of what you've done versus what you buy in the store. Because I feel like there's got to be people to experience it and not just read about it.
Anne Bikle:Yeah. I mean, you're not going to get any argument from growing any kind of plant. I don't care if you want to eat it or look at it. You just got to marvel at it. Okay. And I think you can marvel at whatever your house plant all the way to your corn plant, to your whatever. But that is a really good point, sarah and it goes to tasting tawar, what you guys call this podcast, because the body knows when it's taking in what it needs. And one of the most fascinating areas that we researched for the book was this whole link between nutrient density and flavor, and that that flavor is coding. Embedded in that flavor are things like phytochemicals, in particular amino acids in a particular fat profile. I mean, that's what all this tomato research out of. I think it's Florida Summary. Yes, out of Florida. Harry Clay that's what it's telling us, is that flavor links to health. And if you're perturbing and you're sort of jamming monkey wrenches in at the level of the soil with all these practices, all you're doing is you're getting in the way of biology, and you don't want to do that. You want to let these plants function. And function biologically like they're supposed to be doing, so that all of this then eventually occurs to these nutrient dense foods in the human diet.
Jill Clapperton:And you know what? You can do that. If you put your plant hat on and become a plant, if you're feeling good and you have enough nutrition and you don't have a lot of pests actually nibbling at you or poking you all the time, you can actually put a lot of nutrition into your body, and you can use the energy at that point. You're not expending it to build up lignin to keep something off. You were using in the chemo acid pathway to make all these really toxic chemicals. You can actually use it to actually add in all these trace elements, add in all these other things. And I don't think that's any different than us. If we're really healthy and our gut is really healthy, we can take in a lot more nutrients.
Anne Bikle:That is a great analogy, Jill. I love it. I'm going to be thinking about my plant hat, all these things coming out of it and going into it. I love it.
Jill Clapperton:I'm going to have to create one like Harry Potter, only it's going to be the plant hat. Right. You put it on and you'll be able to think about how you store plants. I don't know.
Anne Bikle:Yeah, totally.
Sara Harper:Well, I love that you did spend so much time on that link between flavor and health, because that is what we're trying to get out. But so often when we talk to people, they'll be like, well, I think so, but I don't know. We don't know. And I'm like they found a lot of science behind which intuitively makes sense. It makes sense that when you taste a really good tomato, that it's because it has more nutrients in it.
David Montgomery:I think Anne was the one who first sort of between us, started digging up papers that looked at how there's taste receptors throughout the organs of the human body that tie into when we taste them in our mouse we call flavors, but that they're really sort of sensory receptors to what's in our food. And when you think evolutionarily about well, think in the days of before food processing, say, when we're mostly Huntering and gathering, it would make sense that the foods that our bodies needed would be foods that tasted good, that there would be a positive feedback that people that ate healthy food were healthier and had more progeny and they were better represented in future generations. It just makes very simple evolutionary sense all the way through to the point when we really started to do like, massive food processing and changing things, taking whole foods, breaking them into their components and then remixing them in ways that broke the link between flavor and what's actually in food. And that makes it, I think, very challenging for us today to really kind of appreciate that and understand it. But we've all had the experience of eating those flavorless tomatoes that you can occasionally buy at the grocery store or having that absolutely delicious heirloom tomato that somebody you knew grew in their yard, that kind of melts in your mouth, and you go, oh, my God. This is what tomato is supposed to taste like. And that applies to all kinds of foods in terms of threshold foods. So there hasn't been a huge evidentiary basis. And one of the things I think we are a bit surprised by is that there's not a lot of studies that make that connection. The ones that do are pretty clear, but there's a lot. Back to your question of sort of what are the gaps and what's needed. There's more interest, I think, in the terroir beyond wine, is how I like to think about it. Food has a terwois and that it relates to flavor. Terrorism is a big, complicated concept that integrates everything from the atmosphere to the soils to the weather to the microbes and the life in the soil. But it may be that all of that actually really does impact what gets in our food and how we farm impacts all that in one scale or another.
Jill Clapperton:Absolutely. I think back to the Zan. That's how you and I met.
Anne Bikle:In.
Jill Clapperton:Person with that panel that was mediated by Dan Barber.
Anne Bikle:Oh, right. Absolutely.
Jill Clapperton:And we were talking about taste, and can you measure taste, and can you, you know, and if something tastes good, is it really good for you? Because intuitively, we believe that, to your point, that gap, that is a serious gap in the literature, because linking that idea of taste, because taste and aroma and these things are all more like a social science because they're so subjective. Like, whether you have those sense inadequate sensory organs or whether they you don't how you taste, flavor. And then not all of us need the same things, as you pointed out earlier. Right. And at certain stages in our life or certain stages of the day or whatever our stages of health are, we need different things. And so we might, you know, just as a pregnant woman might want fermented foods because of them, you know, maybe it's because of the microbiology. We don't know right now. I mean, that's the whole point, is that we don't really understand that. I know in the lab right now, I've been playing with volatiles and using headspace analysis to actually look at, well, why do we smell? But, you know, the thing that is most interesting to me is that all of those things, I can buy them separately. When I started to look at, oh, that's amazing. Look at that elderly, look at this, look at this, and then I realized that they were all for sale.
Anne Bikle:And.
Jill Clapperton:You found them all in wow. I was flabbergasted. I really was. I was like, there's nothing new here, Jill.
Anne Bikle:Well, is what you're saying, Jill. So then if you can buy all of these volatiles, like somewhere in the food industry, is that what you mean? Then why grow them? Well, here's why, girl. Because there's no as good as any food industry chemist might be, I don't believe that they truly understand the proportions and the particular variant of a phytochemical that goes into the flavor profile that the human body goes, oh yeah, that I'm hankering for more of that food industry great. They'll just shove sugar and salt into something and the human being will eat it. And that's tapping totally different kinds of levers. And I thought that's what you meant. It reminded me of something that is kind of happening right now around so the millennials and the gen zers are sort of down on alcohol these days. And so there's dry October. Dry January. Here we are in the modern era, though, and you need to drink something, right? So instead of just drinking water, the food industry, are they ever onto this mocktails beer and wine with no alcohol?
Jill Clapperton:OK, fine.
Anne Bikle:Or if you want to drink soda pop, you can drink that. And then so I was thinking about this and over the summer I was sitting having dinner somewhere. This happened to be in Maine and the only place they had a seat was at the bar. And I'm like, okay, yeah, I'll sit at the bar. So of course, what do I start doing? Oh, here, can I say, let me take a look at that label on your bitters thing and oh, what's in that gin? And it's all sitting there and it's like, I'm kind of bored. I'm like, oh, just reading the labels on all this stuff. And what was really interesting to me on the orange little container called orange bitters, I'm expecting to see orange. Exactly. There was not one genuine citrus derived ingredient in that stuff. It was phenyl, oxylvis, Benzal. The whole thing was a big chemical cocktail which, okay, maybe some of those volatiles truly came out of a citrus, but not in the proportion and combination and so forth that you'd actually find it. So in other words, this is all they're just kind of hijacking and jerking around our body wisdom with all of these flavorings that are going into all of these non alcoholic things, which I would like the gen zers and millennials to know. I mean, why can't we make wine instead of 15% alcohol content?
Jill Clapperton:Great.
Anne Bikle:Let's get it down to 11% and 12%. Why do you think the French for so long have been able to, you know, drink a bottle of wine at lunch? Well, because it's not 15% alcohol that leaves you on your face.
Jill Clapperton:But there's that abundance, isn't it? More. If I can have this little bit, why not have more? I can create something that's more yeah, you talk about that in your book about more, more and and I certainly see it. But I think the point that we talked about earlier about the whole is really important because we don't understand and you made this point too we don't understand what all these phytochemicals do. Do they help us take up other nutrients? What are the helper molecules like when we eat Whole Foods? Where are the helpers? Well, we don't even know what the helpers are. But I think back to mycorrhizal fungi and there are helper bacteria that you can't actually have colonization unless I have this microbial community around the root in order to help stimulate that change. And I think that our guts and a lot of other things work that way. We need whole foods, we need whole plant extracts. We need this wholeness in order to get all the nutrients we need. Because otherwise if we're just cobbling them all together and what we think.
Anne Bikle:Is.
Jill Clapperton:Good for us is it?
David Montgomery:Yeah, we're sort of missing the potential ubiquity of synergistic effects where it's not so much the individual elements but the combinations that we take them up in that matter. And that's where there's another gap on the agronomic end of things in that if you look at most of the studies that have looked at the kind of things that we wrote about or tried to connect in the book, most of them will try and look at singular practices. They'll study, like, no tail farming or they'll study cover cropping. From everything that I can triangulate from this whole series of books that we've worked on, is it's the system of farming that matters? Not so much individual practices, but the net effect of a combined system of practices. And so that if you want to look at regenerative agriculture in particular, you wouldn't just go compile studies on no till, for example, because that's not the same story as if you're doing some kind of minimal chemical and physical disturbance with maximum diversity and continual cover, either between crops, between rows or between crops in a sequence of crops. And you really can't find very many published systems level studies that involve all those practices compared against the full suite of conventional practices. Everybody breaks it down into comparing one practice at a time. Why? Well, it's easier to fund. You can get one student to do it. You can actually get a clear result. It gives you a nice testable hypothesis, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're asking the right question. And I think that that's something that the agronomic world has fallen down very much in the last few decades is trying to wrestle with the issues in terms of what questions to ask and what studies to do to address systems level differences. Because that's where we actually the parsing of the literature that we've done now and a few books looking at that, that's where we tend to see really big effects or when people completely shift the nature of the system. And adopt a suite of practices that are different than conventional, then you get these synergistic synergistic effects that are quite remarkable in relatively short periods of time.
Sara Harper:That's why the mindset that's how the regenerative farmers we talk to, they all talk about it as a mindset rather than practices, and that practices change and they'll swap out things as new problems emerge or as weather changes. But it's the mindset that is the most important thing. And so what's been really hard is to try to convey that to consumers. Of course, you need to then know the farmer to understand what their mindset was. And our system isn't built for that. So do you think part of what is involved in people eating better is to actually find and support those people that are actually growing it and selling it directly to you?
David Montgomery:In terms of avenues within the marketplace today, that's probably a consumer's best avenue towards trying to get to the best food because you can sort of then peer through the labels, whatever they are, that those farmers are adopting. And if you can know what they're actually doing, it gives you greater insight.
Sara Harper:They've read your book and then they.
David Montgomery:Can ask, all right, there's that first step.
Jill Clapperton:Yeah, exactly.
Sara Harper:Well, there is an educational piece that's a big we aren't taught this. This should be part of what we learned in high school, health and what makes up health.
Jill Clapperton:Yeah.
Anne Bikle:When I was in high school, you had these lousy. Of course the girls had to go to home economics and the boys got to go off to wood shop. And I always wanted to go to wood shop, partly because you're kidding me. In home economics, I'm going to open up this box of stuff, mix in some water and put this thing in the oven. That is not creative, that is really boring, and it tastes like ****. So get me out of here. Right. So this is what home economics we could call it. Maybe it's just lifestyle school, but you're absolutely right, Sarah. What that kind of a course and content ought to be about in high school is your food, how your body works, how we're growing that food and how that all comes together over a lifetime. I mean, if you told a kindergartener could get that at a very kind of basic, simplistic level. And if we started, I feel like younger, if we started earlier in our education system with making links between how we farm today's point the whole farming system, not anyone practice, and how that ripples through to the plants and the animals. And we could call them plants and animals. I'm kind of about full disclosure, we're eating living beings, whether they are green or brown and furry. Right. That's the deal. Plant and animal foods. And we would just have a lot more honesty in our food system. And I think we'd have a lot more honesty about what it is we need to change and what it is we need to keep about the way we approach agriculture and farming in the US. Which is about your mindset. I'd love to see these kinds of things come out in the mindset of a farmer or have them thinking about it.
Sara Harper:Yeah, well, it would also make people less susceptible to some of these claims. That another area that you talked about a lot in the book that I just love was like, the fake meat, the ultra processing that goes. I mean, if people saw, you know, instead of instead of fake beef for whatever impossible beef or whatever, if they saw it as ultraprocessed food that's what it is. That's what it is. But it really changes the whole mindset of what you're doing because they think many people think they're eating healthier because they're avoiding meat and share with the people.
David Montgomery:Yeah. And really the first question that ought to be asked if one wants to eat healthier, I think prior to the question of do I eat meat or do I eat plants, the way it's usually framed would be, how is whatever I'm eating raised? What did your food eat? How was it grown? Because we can point to examples of livestock being very integral tools in landscape rejuvenation and increased carbon sequestration on degraded grazing land in ways that also provide more Omega three rich foods for human consumption. Foods that are better at quelling inflammation than the Omega six rich meat and dairy that comes off of feed lots where they're primarily fed seed derived feeds which are going to be very rich in Omega sixes, which tend to promote inflammation when they carry through into the human body. And similarly with plantbased foods, if they're grown regeneratively a vegan diet, that's great. To be completely healthy, you got to watch out a little bit for certain nutrients that you might want to pay special attention to getting if you're very strict about it. But if you're eating plant based foods that were derived with farming practices that degrade the land to the point that the mycorrhizal connections with crops aren't there, you'll be getting fewer minerals, you'll be getting fewer phytochemicals. Sure, you'll be eating plants, but you may not be eating as healthy as you could on a different plant based diet.
Anne Bikle:Here's where we depart.
David Montgomery:Do we not agree on everything?
Anne Bikle:Apparently not. This is what I find kind of irritating and intriguing all at the same time. And it's the cleverness of the term plant based me because last time I checked, animals that are herbivores, that's all they eat. That's why they're an herbivore. Exactly. So all of our ruminants are plant based meat. That's what they eat. And especially with the exception of feedlot practices. And we're not in that we're not in that realm on this podcast, and it's not worth talking about that. But all of these pasture raised herbivores, that is what they're eating. They're eating plants, and that is plantbased meat. Somehow the food industry got a hold of plantbased meat and turned it into this. They missed the label, Sarah. I already have plant based meat. That's dairy and beef, and they don't.
Jill Clapperton:Fully disclose the amount of sodium chloride that's in it.
Anne Bikle:Right. And that other stuff is ups. These are ultra processed foods. It's kind of stunning in the way in which it's interpreted and presented to the consumer. Quite stunning, actually.
Sara Harper:No, it has been, especially because there's almost like a virtuous glow that people seem to feel about it when it's exact opposite.
David Montgomery:It's more nuanced and complicated than either or. And that's why I go back to my point. If it's important whether you're going to be interested in eating meat as part of your diet or dairy or not, it's a very personal choice for people, sure. But if people are making it from the perspective of trying to have a smaller environmental footprint for their diet and have a stronger health footprint personally for them or the loved ones that they're feeding, then whichever kind of diet they're on, they need to ask the question of, well, how was it raised? And that's the virtuous glow that often surrounds the perhaps incorrectly named plant based meat proponents. It really goes back to there's lots of the first book that we wrote on this dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations. I mean, almost every civilization I wrote about in that book as having destroyed their land and impoverished their descendants for centuries after the fact did it with organic agriculture, and they did it by degrading the land, and they did it mostly with plantbased foods. And so it's really how you treat the land that I think is the common denominator for how we ought to be thinking about the way that our environmental footprint of our diet, our global footprint of our diets and the human health impact of our diets. And the framing that I think we could take across the board, whether we're talking about crops or livestock, is to think about farming, to reevaluate farming practices in terms of their net effect on soil health. And soil health. It's a bit of a squishy concept, but so is human health. We don't have a crisp definition of human health that you can go out and get a number and measure and go, my health score is this. Yours? Is that I mean, we have lots of specialties in terms of different maladies, and I think soil health is kind of similar. It's a very useful overarching concept that we tend to recognize most by its absence, just the way that we recognize human health most by its absence. We know when we're sick, when we feel good, we just feel good. We tend not to pay attention to feeling good. We just feel good. And I think if we started looking at the land similarly, the first thing we come away with is like, good Lord, most of the world's farmland is sick and not healthy. How do we turn that around? And that's, to me, the common denominator that underpins regenerative agriculture and all it sort of stands for and the promise of it is a way to think about farming that leaves the land better off as a consequence of how we farm. And that's certainly not conventional farming today.
Anne Bikle:Right.
Jill Clapperton:I couldn't agree more. But before you go, I want to read one part from your book. When desperate people pass their suffering onto the land, degraded soil hands impoverishment. Degraded soil hands impoverishment. Right back. There is a compelling need for a global shift in how we see soil to accept the health of the land as central to our own. I thought that was one of the most powerful statements I've ever heard. I have to tell you that it almost brought me to tears when I read it, because and so when I think about that, once again, I come back to, you know, what is regenerative egg and how do we turn this around? Because I personally feel a desperate need to do that.
Anne Bikle:Yeah, I think a lot of us are desperate like that. We're getting it right, and we've been seeing what has been happening to land and to human health for a while, and it's clear that we do need to change things. And you'd ask a little earlier about, like, yes, so what can we do to turn this ship around? And why weren't historically the Balfours and Howards and others and other cultures able to do this? And I think these days, what we really one way to consider going about this is it's a concerted, coordinated, long term effort. And I think it begins with raising awareness and knowledge, which is where, you know, writers like us come in providing information in a way that, as you put it, it's assimilateable picture plants, plants sucking up information. Well, that's our farmers, our eaters, our chefs, everybody. So that's where we come in. You raise awareness and knowledge, and then you find out you actually talk to farmers, and you say, hey, what are your challenges and barriers? Because nobody thinks life is too hard. Farming is too hard for anybody to take on something with insurmountable or even medium sized barriers that might be technical knowledge, that might be money, that might be incentives, say, okay, now we've got a handle on your barriers and challenges. Then what do you do? You work to remove them. Right. You want somebody to take 100 steps a day, then give them a decent pair of shoes, give them some time, give them a walking route. Right? We need that kind of an idea applied to farmers if we want them to go regen. And then once the education and information there, we understand the challenges. The challenges are on their way out. We need to nest that in a cocoon of support and that's how you keep people doing things. You get the pivot happening and then you support it. And that support piece is private sector. It's government, it's how we spend our food dollars, all of that. Nothing needs to be invented, Jill, to make this change. Right? We don't need to make some carbon sucking machine. It's going to send this stuff off to Mars. We already have all of the infrastructure. We have the human knowhow, we have a civil society that can interact productively around these things. That's how we do it.
Sara Harper:And we have a lot of farmers.
Anne Bikle:Who already do this, and we can lean on them.
Jill Clapperton:So many people think that there's nobody out there doing this and there are a lot of farmers that got this.
Sara Harper:It's the processing industry. But you talked about that on other episodes. Yes. Well, gosh, we could talk to you for another whole hour. So as we wrap up do, please answer the question that Jill mentioned. We do ask everybody. So we just say, what is regenerative agriculture? Fill in the blank.
Anne Bikle:Regenerative agriculture is regenerative agriculture is when you farm in ways that bring life back to the soil. If it's kind of short on life in the first place, or if you got pretty decent soil, your practices are just continually improving and replenishing that so that biology is functioning normally, which is to say exactly how it's supposed to be functioning between the fungi, the bacteria, the metabolites and everything. Yeah.
David Montgomery:And I would say what she said, regenerative agriculture is a style of intensive farming that can leave the soil healthier and better off than without. So farming that can improve soil health.
Sara Harper:Great.
David Montgomery:Yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Jill Clapperton:What you said, what you both said was just combining together what Anne and Dave said.
Sara Harper:I just want to say, though, to your point about the solution, the pathway, I think that's an excellent one. That is what Jill does in her work with farmers all the time. She just helps farmers understand the different practices specific to their land because all their situations are different. And there are other advisors like Jill working with farmers. And so that knowledge, getting that knowledge out, getting the awareness that there are people like that that can help farmers solve those problems is a big piece, too.
Jill Clapperton:It's actionable. We talked about that today with Francis Jetman. It was like it's about actionable. Results. Don't just hand somebody a bunch of numbers and go, Here you go.
Anne Bikle:Right.
Jill Clapperton:And then they look at you and they go, and what am I supposed.
Anne Bikle:To do with this? Exactly?
Jill Clapperton:Does this mean anything? Does this tell me where I am in the scheme of things? And back to your point, Anne, is about grabbing somebody by the hand. You have to succeed to turn things around. You have to succeed at the very first step. You have to. And everyone can everybody can take a first step, and then it's working through all the other steps. And just me handing a bunch of numbers is not going to solve the problem. There's a whole lot of other things and all those synergistic effects and all those other things that come into play that are going to solve this. But I want to thank you for your book. Thank you so much for putting all this together and all your books. I know the enormous amount of research that you both did on this, and I can't thank you enough for putting it together in a very digestible form where my microbiome doesn't have to work very hard to understand it.
David Montgomery:Yeah, thank you.
Anne Bikle:Yeah, we appreciate that coming from you, Jill, is just really special because you do understand the amount of work that goes into researching this topic. So that, personally, that means a lot to me.
Jill Clapperton:Thank you. I want you to keep going. So I will do what I can to, you know, keep those books coming because, you know, it's such a breath of fresh air to have people who do a really thorough job, who really weave the science into this incredible language that's so easy, and the analogies and the metaphors and everything. It's really nice. So congratulations on this book. I mean it because I know how much hard work went in and please keep it up.
David Montgomery:Well, thank you.
Anne Bikle:Yeah, that's worth a lot. Yeah, maybe we'll give you a call every six months. Joe, we need a little pat on the shoulder here.
Jill Clapperton:I love to do it, and I would love to take you to the lab and show you what we're doing and talk about it.
Anne Bikle:And we can wear our green hats and we can think like a plant.
Jill Clapperton:Yeah, we'll wear our plant hats.
Anne Bikle:Okay. Good.
Jill Clapperton:I promise.
Anne Bikle:Good.
Sara Harper:All right. Thanks again.
Anne Bikle:Okay. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Jill. Yeah.
David Montgomery:Thank you both.
Jill Clapperton:Thank you for being here.
Sara Harper:You've been listening to Tasting Terroir, a podcast made possible by a magical collaboration between the following companies and supporters, all working together to help farmers, chefs, food companies, and consumers to build healthier soil for a healthier world. Risottra, owned by Dr. Joe Clapperton, rhizotra is an international food security consulting company providing expert guidance for creating healthy soils that yield tasty, nutrientdense foods. Check us out@risotterra.com. That's RH Izoterra.com and the Global Food and Farm online Community, an ad free global social network and soil health streaming service that provides information and connections that help you apply the science and practice of improving soil health. Join us at Global Foodandfarm.com and from listeners like you who support us through our Patreon account@patreon.com, Tastingtawar. Patrons receive access to our fulllength interviews and selected additional materials. Patrons will also have the opportunity to submit questions that we will answer on the podcast. Tune in next week to hear more interviews and insights with myself, Sarah Harper, and Dr. Joe Clapperton, as well as. The regenerative farmers, chefs and emerging food companies in the Global Food and Farm online community and beyond. If you like our work, please give us a five star rating and share the podcast with your friends. Thanks so much for listening and for helping us get the word out about this new resource to taste the health of your food. Until next week, stay curious, keep improving, and don't stop believing that better is possible when knowledge is available.