The Real Food Campaign, The Return of Nutrition

Now a group of cutting-edge researchers, farm­ers and sci­en­tists have thrown aside “con­ven­tional wis­dom” and have iso­lated the truth behind our poor pro­duce. These dis­cov­er­ies have led to farm­ing meth­ods that are now turn­ing out grains, fruits and veg­eta­bles that are dense with nutri­ents, burst­ing with fla­vor, and even have longer shelf lives. This is pro­duce that tastes, feels and pro­vides nutri­tion like it did in your great-grandmother’s day.

The reader’s response upon learn­ing all this might be, “That’s fan­tas­tic! Where can I get it?” And therein lies the prob­lem. For while there are hun­dreds of farm­ers grow­ing such pro­duce, there are cur­rently no clear chan­nels for it to reach the aver­age consumer.

Enter the Real Food Campaign. Spearheaded by direc­tor Dan Kittredge, farmer and expert in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, the cam­paign has as its end prod­uct the com­mon avail­abil­ity of truly nutri­tious foods. It is a project of the non­profit orga­ni­za­tion Remineralize the Earth, of which Kittredge is the for­mer exec­u­tive director.

“What the Real Food Campaign is doing is doc­u­ment­ing, coor­di­nat­ing and orga­niz­ing the farm­ers who are pro­duc­ing nutri­ent­dense foods and mak­ing those resources avail­able to con­sumers,” Kittredge said. “Working through exist­ing con­sumer orga­ni­za­tions that under­stand the need for such foods, we’re basi­cally try­ing to kick-start a whole food-supply process so that there is a nutrient-dense food stan­dard. The organic stan­dard took a dozen to twenty years to evolve, but it was in a sort of hap­haz­ard way. We’re try­ing to coor­di­nate, in a more intel­li­gent fash­ion, the nutrient-dense food stan­dard, hav­ing learned the lessons of the organic movement.”

The Status Quo

Thanks to a long-established sta­tus quo of farm­ing, plum­met­ing nutri­tional stan­dards and lack of pub­lic edu­ca­tion, the cam­paign is an uphill bat­tle. For over 60 years, improper farm­ing prac­tices have resulted in crops that suf­fer hor­ri­bly from dis­eases, fungi and insects and that have vir­tu­ally lost their nutri­tional value to con­sumers and even ani­mals. Instead of cor­rect­ing the agri­cul­tural errors, mil­lions if not bil­lions of dol­lars have been spent to kill off fungi and insects, and meth­ods have been imple­mented to pro­duce high yields of crops with no atten­tion what­so­ever to nutri­tion. These “solu­tions” have not only pro­duced nutri­tion­ally void crops, they have intro­duced poi­sons from pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides into our food chain, tox­ins from fer­til­izer runoff into our rivers, lakes and oceans, and even harm­ful pro­duce in the form of genet­i­cally engi­neered foods.

The prob­lem goes back to man­age­ment of the soil in which crops are grown. “When we look back, we see that agri­cul­ture has really dropped the ball rel­a­tive to nutri­tion in the soil, and then obvi­ously get­ting that nutri­tion into the plant, which is into the food that we eat,” explained Dr. Arden Andersen, med­ical doc­tor and world-renowned con­sul­tant in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture. This long-term mal­nu­tri­tion of crops has also led to disease—just as mal­nu­tri­tion in a human would do—as well as inva­sion of pests.

In fact, an inva­sion of insects is a sci­en­tific index of unhealthy plants. “Insects are like nature’s garbage crew,” said Kittredge. “They come in and say, ‘This plant is not suf­fi­cient for repro­duc­tion. I’ll go ahead and fin­ish it off.’ It’s just sort of a bio­log­i­cal man­age­ment sys­tem. So you know you’ve got unhealthy crops when you have insects.”

In addi­tion to pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides, there are even more recent—and dam­ag­ing— “efforts” by defend­ers of the sta­tus quo to solve the con­tin­u­ous prob­lems of insects and inva­sive bac­te­ria. One of these is the advent of crops that have been genet­i­cally engi­neered to resist weeds and pests. “In my opin­ion, genetic engi­neer­ing of crops is the worst evil to have ever been vis­ited upon humankind,” Dr. Andersen said. “We don’t have a genetic prob­lem in our food; we have a nutri­tional problem.

Conventional farm­ers will say that they need genet­i­cally engi­neered crops because they have weed, insect and dis­ease prob­lems they can­not con­trol with stan­dard chem­i­cal weapon appli­ca­tions. Additionally, they con­tend that they will feed the world and save impov­er­ished Africa from the rav­ages of mal­nu­tri­tion by genet­i­cally engi­neer­ing nutrient-enhanced crop vari­eties. Every one of these issues is already solved 100 per­cent by appro­pri­ate nutri­tional man­age­ment of the soil and crop.The prob­lems of dis­ease, weeds, insect pests and crop nutri­tional value are not genetic defi­cien­cies nor defi­cien­cies of chem­i­cal weapons genet­i­cally engi­neered into the crop; rather they are nutri­tional defi­cien­cies or imbalances.”

Why does Dr. Andersen claim genetic engi­neer­ing is so evil? “If we look at every human study and every ani­mal study that has been truly inde­pen­dent, they show that genet­i­cally engi­neered crops cause a sig­nif­i­cant inflam­ma­tory reac­tion in every organ­ism that con­sumes them, whether an insect, an ani­mal or a human being,” Dr. Andersen said. “There are no excep­tions to this inflam­ma­tory reac­tion. Anyone with a hint of under­stand­ing of immunol­ogy under­stands that genet­i­cally engi­neered crops are for­eign amino acid and pep­tide [a com­pound of two or more amino acids linked in a chain] mate­ri­als that the immune sys­tem sees as non­food and inva­sive, need­ing to be eliminated—thus the inflam­ma­tory response. Read Jeffrey Smith’s books Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette.”

Dr. Andersen has observed evi­dence of this prob­lem right in his own med­ical prac­tice. “In my prac­tice in south­ern Michigan/ north­ern Indiana, I see a tremen­dous num­ber of aller­gies, increas­ingly so every year, as well as a weak­en­ing of the immune sys­tems of the peo­ple and ani­mals, new viruses and mul­ti­ple chem­i­cal sen­si­tiv­i­ties,” he said. “Why? I believe it is because this area is the haven for genet­i­cally engi­neered corn and soy­beans. Elsewhere, the British found a 50 per­cent increase in soy aller­gies in their gen­eral pop­u­la­tion the year fol­low­ing the intro­duc­tion of genet­i­cally engi­neered soy­beans into the UK.”

What about Organic Food?

We have all been edu­cated into the belief that food labeled organic is bet­ter than run-of-the-mill super­mar­ket food. But accord­ing to the spe­cial­ists involved in the Real Food Campaign, this turns out to be only par­tially correct.

“There have been a lot of stud­ies around the world, and unfor­tu­nately they have been on both sides of the equa­tion,” Dr. Andersen told OC. “We had some out of Germany and Europe maybe three years ago that said, ‘Oh, there’s no dif­fer­ence between organic and con­ven­tional.’ And then there have been a few stud­ies out of this coun­try as well as out of Europe say­ing just the oppo­site of that. Why the dichotomy? What really has to be under­stood is, num­ber one, what sorts of crops did they eval­u­ate, and num­ber two, from which coun­try and from what kinds of soils did they take the food that they eval­u­ated? Because if they hap­pened to get organ­ics from bet­ter qual­ity soil and from farm­ers that were doing a bet­ter job of nutri­tion, then those are the stud­ies that find that organic is bet­ter than con­ven­tional. If, how­ever, they took the food out of soils that are mar­ginal, then they find no dif­fer­ence. It all has to do with the nutri­tional man­age­ment from which it came.”

“Organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sim­ply means that you have not used syn­thetic sub­stances,” explained Dan Kittredge. “There is no qual­ity stan­dard of what the food is as far as nutri­tional sub­stance. Organic agri­cul­tural prac­tices, just like con­ven­tional agri­cul­tural prac­tices, are not focused on max­i­miz­ing the bio­log­i­cal vital­ity of the soil life.” But accord­ing to Dr. Andersen there is a rea­son to pur­chase organic: “You should buy organic sim­ply to keep out the pes­ti­cides, her­bi­cides and, most impor­tantly, to avoid genet­i­cally engi­neered crops.”

Reversing the Trend

So how exactly can such a severe sit­u­a­tion be turned around?

“Ultimately, in order to change crop health, we have to go back and change the soil, because that’s where it comes from,” Dr. Andersen stated. “And that’s really where pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine begins— right in the soil.”

Dr. Andersen’s method—called Biological Farm Management—is not an overnight process, and it must be done farm by farm to be truly suc­cess­ful. Dr. Andersen explained that it is a three- to five-year pro­gram as a rule, and it begins as a doc­tor would han­dle an ill patient. “We go back to some basic things of learn­ing how to do a his­tory and phys­i­cal exam, because 90 per­cent of every­thing that really is going to go on has to do with his­tory and phys­i­cal exam. We have to learn to read the defi­cien­cies in that soil. If we under­stand really how to read them—we go out and walk the field, doing var­i­ous pre­ci­sion instru­ment readings—all of those things tell us what’s actu­ally going on with that plant, with that soil, and so on. When we accu­mu­late those read­ings, they tell us what needs to be done nutri­en­t­wise in order to change that environment.”

“The tech­nol­ogy to pro­duce such crops is basi­cally an intel­li­gent use of soil sci­ence knowl­edge,” agreed Dan Kittredge. “The root of the whole process is get­ting the soil to be a bio­log­i­cally vital, syn­er­gis­tic organ­ism. People take aci­dophilus cultures—biological cul­tures for the intesti­nal tract to pro­mote health—because they under­stand that they need to have healthy biol­ogy in their gut. In that same fash­ion the soil needs to have healthy biology.”

Not only are the resul­tant crops far more nutri­tious and taste­ful, they are also far more resis­tive to pests and disease—in the same way a human body would be if it were receiv­ing proper nutrition.

Real Food!

What exactly is real food? Some years ago Dr. Arden Andersen intro­duced the term nutrient-dense to describe it. “Nutrient den­sity means the quan­tity of nutri­ent per quan­tity of food,” he said. “Typically the USDA ana­lyzes how many mil­ligrams or how many micro­grams of nutri­ent there are per 100 grams of food. If you take an apple and you weigh it, then take 100 grams of that apple, how many mil­ligrams and how many micro­grams of var­i­ous dif­fer­ent nutri­ents do you find in those 100 grams of apple? With nutri­ent den­sity, we want to increase the amount of nutrients—calcium, mag­ne­sium, sele­nium, chromium, iodine, what­ever there might be—per 100 grams of that apple. If you eat an apple and it is highly nutri­tious, highly nutrient-dense, you get a lot more nutri­ents out of that sin­gle apple than if you pick up another apple which has half that nutri­ent density.”

“You’re aim­ing for a higher per­cent of dis­solved solids in the plant,” added Kittredge, “a higher per­cent­age of com­plex car­bo­hy­drates, sug­ars and pro­teins. These are the ele­ments that cor­re­late directly with increased fla­vor, increased nutri­tion, increased shelf life, and increased pest and dis­ease resistance.”

Mark Nakata man­ages sev­eral farms in north­ern California, includ­ing Nakata Farms and California Tree Life Limited. Their crops include grapes for raisins, sev­eral vari­eties of stone fruit, cit­rus, berries, toma­toes, mel­ons and avocados.

Nakata adheres strictly to Dr. Arden Andersen’s meth­ods and swears by them. “The dif­fer­ence between our crops and stan­dard farm pro­duce is very evi­dent,” he said. “They’re really not on the same planet, hon­estly. What we’ve found is that the bet­ter we get at doing our farm­ing, the higher the nutri­ent den­sity level goes and the bet­ter the fruit tastes. When you bring the soil in bal­ance and really work on pro­vid­ing great nutri­tion for the plants and what they need, you find the fruit is firmer, it’s usu­ally larger, and you have a higher per­cent­age of num­ber one qual­ity and a lot bet­ter fla­vor. Ultimately you have a much hap­pier customer.”

Kittredge finds the same with his veg­eta­bles. “My crops have this incred­i­ble sheen,” he remarked. “The fla­vor is far, far bet­ter, and they last longer. For a cou­ple of years we were har­vest­ing broc­coli all the way into December, which is pretty amaz­ing, espe­cially for Massachusetts.”

How do Nakata and Kittredge find such plants resist pests? Nakata tells the story of a par­tic­u­lar breed of peach he has been grow­ing for some years. “We have this vari­ety of peaches that is called White Lady, an older vari­ety now. We’ve been farm­ing those for 20 years. When we were farm­ing chem­i­cally, we were spray­ing for glucose-consuming insects, such as aphides, 12 times a year. Applying nutri­tious farm­ing meth­ods increases the amount of sugar in the leaf, and by doing so, we found that the insects can no longer process that glu­cose and they either die or go away.”

“Insects can basi­cally sense the elec­tro­mag­netic fre­quency of each plant,” Dan Kittredge fur­ther explained. “They know what is digestible and what is not digestible. Insects have a sim­ple diges­tive sys­tem so they can digest sim­ple sug­ars, but they can’t digest the com­plex sug­ars of healthy crops. Our crops are now grow­ing vir­tu­ally insect free.”

The Real Food Campaign

Now it falls upon some­one to begin the sub­stan­tial amount of coor­di­na­tion needed to get the news out and find ways of mov­ing this spec­tac­u­lar pro­duce into the gen­eral mar­ket­place. Dan Kittredge has elected to be the cat­a­lyst, and as Lao-tzu said, “A jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step.”

“The first thing is to iden­tify the farm­ers that are pro­duc­ing the crops and put them up online,” said Kittredge. “Who are the farm­ers? What crops are they pro­duc­ing? The sec­ond step is to coor­di­nate more closely with the con­sumer orga­ni­za­tions that already have active con­stituen­cies look­ing for high-quality pro­duce, and we start writ­ing arti­cles for the jour­nals of those con­sumer organizations.”

Of course a web­site is going to be key to the entire activ­ity, and a new web­site— www.realfoodcampaign.org—is now up and run­ning. As active farm­ers are iden­ti­fied, they are added to the web­site. “Then it’s just basi­cally a push and pull, back and forth,” con­tin­ued Kittredge. “First you need to get the food avail­able; then you get the con­sumers ask­ing for the food; and by then you’ve iden­ti­fied all the con­sul­tants who can work with the farm­ers so that the farm­ers are hear­ing about it and inquir­ing about it. Then, in addi­tion, we begin reach­ing out to retail­ers. I’ve been work­ing with some Whole Foods Market stores here in Massachusetts who are very inter­ested, and Mark Nakata has been work­ing with Trader Joe’s and a cou­ple other stores out on the West Coast and in the Midwest.

“Basically the model is sym­bi­otic,” Kittredge con­cluded. “We’re try­ing to work on mutual empow­er­ment prin­ci­ples, so that it’s in the inter­est of the farm­ers to be pro­duc­ing bet­ter yields and higher-quality crops that they can receive a higher price for, it’s in the inter­est of the con­sumers to be eat­ing a tastier food that will actu­ally help their bod­ies fight dis­eases, if not just make them feel bet­ter, and it’s in the inter­est of retail­ers to have a premium-quality prod­uct that they can draw con­sumers in with. So, we’re just try­ing to find how it is in the inter­est of var­i­ous con­stituen­cies and to kick-start a com­plete ver­ti­cal inte­grated food sup­ply chain. You need the farm­ers; you need the con­sumers; you need the con­sul­tants who can edu­cate the farm­ers; you need the labs with the soil test to ana­lyze the soil; you need the whole­salers and the retail­ers to be mov­ing the food into the sup­ply chain. And so we’re basi­cally try­ing to coor­di­nate these dif­fer­ent groups.”

Find Out More

Of course, con­sumers are going to be the final ben­e­fi­cia­ries and the end-users for the entire sys­tem, and there is much you can do as an end-user to cre­ate the demand that will even­tu­ally pull real food down through the sup­ply chain to your local outlet.

To find out what you can do, includ­ing how you can con­tribute to the Real Food Campaign, please visit www.realfoodcampaign.org

For a link to buy Dr. Andersen’s book Real Medicine, Real Health, visit our book­store.