Eve Minson: Bringing Good Vibrations Back to Food

She set out to rec­tify the para­dox. “There was obvi­ously some­thing miss­ing in my life. I thought, ‘What could be the most impor­tant thing that I could con­tribute to? What could my life stand for?’ At that time I was a total health-food nut, so I decided I was going to con­tribute to the reduc­tion of pes­ti­cides in the food system—a pretty crazy thing to try to do. I don’t even know exactly where that idea came from, but that’s what I set out to do.”

The Resolution

It was a rad­i­cal change. Minson applied to and was accepted at Cornell University. She quit her job, sold her house, bought a tiny farm in Ithaca, New York, and began attend­ing Cornell, doing every­thing she could to learn about eco­log­i­cal hor­ti­cul­ture and agriculture.

It was while she was at Cornell that she started learn­ing about truly sus­tain­able grow­ing. “I worked in inno­v­a­tive pest man­age­ment [IPM] at the very advent of it,” Minson said. “I and a men­tor com­pletely cre­ated an IPM pro­gram for Cornell green­houses. At that time there was a call to min­i­mize pes­ti­cides. So it was a really amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity and period for change.”

During her stud­ies at Cornell, Minson also learned and devel­oped meth­ods for con­vert­ing green­houses that had been “toxic waste zones” of pes­ti­cides into grow­ing envi­ron­ments teem­ing with ben­e­fi­cial organ­isms. “It was an unbe­liev­ably com­pelling time that set the tone for the rest of my career,” she said.

Sustainable Professional

While focused on sus­tain­able grow­ing, that career has been quite broad. Minson became both a sus­tain­able farmer and a land­scape man­ager, uti­liz­ing bio­dy­namic and organic pest man­age­ment. She began explor­ing green land­scape design and returned to school. She obtained another master’s degree, in nat­ural resources, with an eye toward con­ser­va­tion design and planning.

As hap­pened with many, the events of 9/11 changed the course of Minson’s life. “I was ready to get my PhD in land­scape ecol­ogy, but 9/11 hap­pened and it really derailed me,” she said. “I real­ized I had been in school for nine years, and it was time to take a break and do some other things. I started teach­ing green land­scape design at Delaware Valley College in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I still live.”

Minson began spend­ing sum­mers off from teach­ing grow­ing food for her­self, her part­ner and her com­mu­nity. She cre­ated a pop­u­lar CSA and also set her­self up as a sus­tain­able land­scape designer. All of that wasn’t enough, how­ever; she has also been work­ing for four years on the cre­ation of a 400-acre com­mu­nity gar­den, in league with the Northeast Organic Farming Association.

Bionutrient Food

A year ago Minson had the oppor­tu­nity to add to her vast store­house of knowl­edge when she enrolled in a class being given by Dan Kittredge, founder of the Bionutrient Food Association. “I have been using a kind of per­ma­cul­ture approach, an eco­log­i­cal approach to bring­ing land­scapes back to life,” Minson explained. “I have used a lot of bio­dy­namic preps on the land­scapes that I man­aged and, of course, in my gar­dens. But Dan takes it many steps further.”

Kittredge has devel­oped sys­tems that treat soil as a liv­ing bio­log­i­cal sys­tem, and his meth­ods are aimed at vastly increas­ing the nutri­ent lev­els in our food supply.

Click any image to enlarge.

“Dan starts out by stat­ing that every­thing is ener­get­ics and every­thing has a vibra­tion,” Minson con­tin­ued. “In my view­point, unfor­tu­nately what we call mod­ern science—and what the typ­i­cal land-grant col­lege teaches as agron­omy and so on—is bereft of life. We have accepted it as being main­stream, so things have got­ten pretty sig­nif­i­cantly skewed.

“Connecting with Dan has reminded me of what I thought a very long time ago, and I really wanted to get back to bring­ing that kind of approach to my man­age­ment as both a farmer and a designer, and as a thinker: under­stand­ing that things live on many dif­fer­ent lev­els and dif­fer­ent lay­ers all at the same time.”

The Remarkable Results

“My farm was not par­tic­u­larly worn out or any­thing like that; I was grow­ing nice plants and doing okay,” said Minson. “But incor­po­rat­ing Dan’s meth­ods, I just saw a tremen­dous change in how robust and resilient my plants are, how pro­duc­tive my plants are, how my plants just grow to unusual heights and girth and that kind of stuff, which tells me they’re very happy. That, to me, pro­duces extra­or­di­nar­ily healthy food, which goes in our bod­ies and makes us extra­or­di­nar­ily healthy. That’s what we all want—a happy food system!”

The nutri­tional lev­els in the food cul­ti­vated with Dan’s meth­ods pro­duced a remark­able encounter at her farm, which she fre­quently uses as an exam­ple. “A friend of a friend, an older woman in her six­ties, came to visit the farm,” Minson related. “I ended up walk­ing her through the gar­den and giv­ing her some kale, gold toma­toes, a whole bunch of grains, and all kinds of stuff.

“She called me the next day and left a mes­sage that said, ‘I have to talk to you!’ I returned her call and she told me, ‘I started dri­ving home and I began pick­ing at some of the food that was there. Then I just started shov­ing it in my mouth and eat­ing and eat­ing and eat­ing! And I thought, “My God, what’s wrong with me? I’m not even hun­gry! What’s hap­pen­ing?” I real­ized there’s some­thing in your food that hasn’t been in my body for years. Whatever this is, Eve, you have to tell every­body! You have to do more!’

“I think that what she expe­ri­enced is exactly on the mark,” Minson con­cluded. “Much of the food that she’s been eat­ing for a long time is miss­ing these min­er­als, and there’s a vibra­tional thing: this food is ‘on fire.’ It is alive and it’s in your body and it’s very dif­fer­ent from stuff being shipped across the coun­try and sit­ting and wait­ing to be eaten for five days, and God knows what’s hap­pened to it.”

And that is the true begin­ning of a food sys­tem transformed.

For more infor­ma­tion on the Bionutrient Food Association, please visit www.bionutrient.org.