5 Reasons I’d Rather Talk About Soil Health Than Your Vegan/Vegetarian/Paleo Diet

Earlier this month, I went to Futurewell, a sustainability and wellness summit, and heard Alice Waters speak for the first time. I sat there in the large audience feeling as star struck as I’ve ever felt. Here was Alice Waters, the woman who represents good food and the farmer. This inspiring matriarch of flavor, maven of slow food, and eloquent, well-spoken woman was up there talking about the thing we both love so much: the experience of food.

Of her entry into the world of food and regenerative agriculture, she said,

For me, it all started with taste. I remember tasting a wild strawberry in France and thinking, this, this is it. This is the life I want to pursue. A life filled with this taste.

Her love of delicious local food translated into the infamous farm-to-table restaurant Chez Panisse and a life-long pursuit to bring the pleasure of taste to those who ate at her restaurant, to kids in schools through The Edible Schoolyard Project and to those who cooked everything in her cookbooks (like me).

Alice Waters quickly discovered that the best tasting food, the foods that delight all of our senses and hold some sort of expansive magic, come from farmers who cultivate rich, diverse, thriving soil.

Because I love food so much—it’s flavor, story, cultural significance, the way it is cultivated, and the never ending imaginative and creative energy it gives me—I get turned off fast when conversations about food focus on “right” ways of eating versus “wrong” ways of eating. When people talk about their diets like they discovered the way, I feel like the air around me is stripped of oxygen. It’s like I’m sitting quietly, by myself, enjoying the taste of something delightful—say a perfectly ripe avocado with sea salt (something we can all agree on)—and someone knocks it out of my hand and starts yelling about a better way to do the thing I was already enjoying. I want to talk about the delight of food, despite your chosen dietary leanings.

Another event I attended recently was a climate strike. Inevitably, veganism and vegetarianism came up as a solution to the climate-damaging problem of industrial meat production and consumption. But, even if you’re the most vegan-vegan or the most fervent paleo diet believer (we all hear both of you!) if the fields that grew your tempeh or filet were depleting the soil instead of regenerating and replenishing it, both parties, despite their certainty in the rightness of their diet, is missing the most essential question that should guide our choices: is this food building soil or destroying soil?

So, because I love food for its taste and the pleasure it brings to my life (while also keeping me alive), here is a list of 5 reasons I’d rather talk about healthy soil than your dietary convictions.

Healthy soil, healthy plants and animals, healthy mama, healthy baby, healthy world.

1. Soil health Equals human health.

As chef and writer Dan Barber wrote in his book Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food,

Healthy soil brings vigorous plants, stronger and smarter people, cultural empowerment, and the wealth of a nation. Bad soil, in short, threatens civilization. We cannot have good food—healthy, sustainable, delicious—without soil filled with life.

2. Soil is exuberantly alive and has an endless capacity for self-renewal.

Organic cover crop growing in my garden.

Soil is a living ecosystem with billions of microorganisms in each teaspoon. It operates as an endlessly regenerative system that works cooperatively with plants, animals, microorganisms and the climate. Plants grow up out of soil while sending their roots deep into the earth. Dead plant and animal tissue are broken down by fungi and bacteria and turned into nutrients for plants. The enzymes secreted by these tiny creatures acts like glue that binds soil particles together. Symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi bring nutrients to plant roots while plants give the fungi carbohydrates. Insects and earthworm’s break down plant and animal material so that bacteria and fungus can access it easier, and the pathways created by earthworms bring air and water into the soil.

Over time, soil not only sustains, it improves. When we start farming on soil, we harvest its fertility. When fertility isn’t restored soil suffers and loses its superhero capability for self-renewal. When fertility isn’t restored, flavor is sacrificed. Restoring fertility requires adding things like organic matter, manures and humus. It takes cover crops instead of pesticides and cultivation over degradation.

3. Healthy soil sequesters carbon.

Farming can either emit or sequester carbon. Sequestration of carbon means, “maximizing the carbon dioxide pulled from the atmosphere by plant growth and minimizing the loss of that carbon once it is stored in soil.” Farms that emit carbon tend to employ certain practices such as the use of large machinery, soil tilling, over-grazing, use of fossil-fuel based fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Farms that sequester carbon increase the soils’ ability to store excess carbon. The practices that encourage carbon storage include: use of organic compost and mulch, no synthetic inputs and no tilling, planting perennial crops, livestock rotation and animal welfare, biodiversity promotion, cover crops and crop rotation. According to the Rodale Institute’s paper “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” this type of farming that rebuilds soil health “can sequester carbon from the atmosphere and reverse climate change.” This is incredible. This is why I want to talk about soil all the time. It is boundless. By taking care of the dirt beneath our feet we have the potential to move agriculture away from a massive emitter of CO2 and contributor to climate change, into a direct CO2 sink that improves the health of our food, land and waterways.

One of my perennials patches full of mint, comfrey, rosemary, lemonbalm, cat mint and others.

4. Healthy soil retains more water and cleans it up too.

Healthy soil holds more water than depleted soil, which reduces the amount of water needed to grow crops, run-off and erosion. In his article “How Can Soil Clean Water?” Paul Mankiewicz wrote, “Soil is the key to pure water. Soil works as a physical strainer, a biochemical renovator, and biological recycler of all wastewater passing through it.”

5.The best tasting and most nutritious foods grow in healthy soil.

Silvopasture, one of the principles of regenerative ag, is the “intentional combination of trees, forage plants and livestock together as an integrated, intesively-managed system.” This pigs and its mates pasture in the forest on a farm in Maine.

In his book, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm, David Mas Masumoto, a celebrated writer and farmer, wrote, “All good farmers become connoisseurs of dirt and dust.” The word connoisseur brings to mind another word we think of when we think of wine and flavor, terroir. Terroir is a French word that translates into earth, or soil, and is how a particular region—it’s climate, soils, and terrain—impact the taste and aroma of wine or food. Some places have more terroir, and therefore more delicious wine. Healthy, vibrant soil, which is marked by its thriving microbial communities, ability to grow nutrient-dense food and ability to improve the land, grows more flavorful, nourishing and delicious plants and animals.

Taste comes from the complex interaction between molecules and microorganisms in the soil that are repurposed and rearranged into phytonutrients. These phytonutrients build up the immune system of plants and they come to us in the form of complex, delicious flavors that also support our health. Of the essential link between soil organisms and taste, Barber wrote,

If a great tasting carrot is tied to the abundance of soil organisms, a bad tasting carrot comes from the absence of soil life.

All of us can be soil advocates, and therefore ecosystem, human health and taste advocates, by choosing food that is grown using regenerative practices and principles. If we start with pleasure, with taste, like Alice Waters, we inevitably find our hands and our care back in the soil.