Healthy eating <-> Healthy earth

A healthy gut is the basis to a happy life. That’s about the first thing that my mother taught me as a child.

It wasn’t always the easiest path, growing up with a bird as a mother – that’s what I used called her when she pulled out her thousand seeds, nuts and dried fruits and called it magic. It wasn’t always easy to justify why I was having a seeded German bread sandwich for break in primary school while my friends were gorging on crisps and Nutella-filled white bread. There were many thoughts of injustice, instances of ‘Wait what is that?’ when gazing down at some unknown vegetable sitting next to quinoa on our dinner plates. I only had to grow up to realise that it was the utmost just and honourable work that my mother had done for my brother and I. She has laid down the path for us to feed ourselves off the plurality of what our earth has to offer, to relish in the numerous colours and textures of plants and in the knowledge of how they can support our organism.

She has taught us to distinguish real food from the processed and genetically modified food – upon which she always used to add the prefix ‘junk’. These foods that have been chosen to feed the mass of our population, those that cause inflammation and illness in our bodies and dangerously impoverish our biodiversity. Eating healthy means steering away from these foods as much as possible and enjoying the beauty of wholefoods. Simply put, healthy eating means a life led happily and in health, both for us human beings as well as for our earth.

Our wellbeing goes hand-in-hand: To create a healthy gut, we must intake a wide variety of nutrients and often diversify the foods which we are consuming. The same goes for our soil, that cannot thrive by being exploited in a monoculture pattern. In a similar way as we are degrading much of our farmable soils across the world, we are also putting our health at risk by consuming a monoculture of processed foods. A wide variety of nutrients is necessary in boosting our organisms to function at an optimum level. The body is a complex and beautiful organism that must be fuelled by all kinds of wholefoods in order to thrive. The solution lies in the coming back into union with nature, listening to her as seasons change and we go from eating winter roots to summer fruits and the nutrients we lay in her soil vary. This way, the lifestyle choice of eating healthier foods and choosing wholefoods over produce grown in the chemically-imbued environment of monoculture contributes to both our own health as well as the health and sustainability of our planet, which is the biggest mission of our times. By choosing a variety of organic, ethically sourced foods that are good for your gut, rather than supporting the massive food industries, you are doing your part in contributing to combatting climate change. Isn’t that wonderful?

The correlation goes further still: In order to be fully capable of driving the change needed in our consummation behaviours, we will need strength, it’s a good thing that plants provide us with these superpowers. With superfoods from super clean sources we become superhuman... Or perhaps not superhuman but the very closest thing to it. When we eat from the variety of nutrients available on our planet, we become our most optimised selves. We reduce our risk of illness, boost our metabolism, our energy, and overall just feel so good that we are able to take on whatever lies in front of us, however daunting.

Plants are the very basis of healthy eating, they have all the protein and nutrients that we need in order to thrive. Not only that they are also incredibly powerful healers, there are remedies out there for all ails and illnesses. Too often do we seek solutions in pharmaceutical pills rather than looking to our natural environment to find medicine. The antioxidant, anti- inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, cardio protective and energy giving plants are readily available for our consumption, we simply need to be reminded of how to use them.

That’s why we need more mother’s like my own, who can teach us what we’ve forgotten over the last few generations: what constitutes real food, what foods to eat for what purposes and how to grow them. We need to be reminded that healthy eating means happy and healthy living, both for us and for our planet. It’s all interrelated, it's all cohesive and its all so beautiful.