Our Next Step Toward Better Food

By now you've probably checked your fridge for that recalled lettuce. It got surreal enough that The New Yorker ran a real headline: "Grocery Shopping in the Age of Explosive Diarrhea."

And that recall is just the latest symptom. Our food system is a mess. The way I see it, eating healthy is really two separate jobs.

One: what we're trying to keep out of our food. The chemicals, the dyes, the junk, the bugs.

Two: what we're trying to make sure is in it. The real nourishment. The vitamins, the minerals, the good stuff that should be there in the first place.

And both can kill you.

When it comes to buying food, almost all of us have been trained to watch the first one. Is it clean? Is it safe? That's the question we've learned to ask, and it's a good one.

The second question, whether the food is actually nourishing us, we mostly try to fix after the fact. We spend close to seventy billion dollars a year on vitamins and supplements, trying to put back the nutrition our food should have carried in the first place.

There's a name for that second one - Nutrient Density. How much real nourishment, the vitamins, the minerals, is actually in a bite. And it varies way more than most people would ever guess.

Researchers tested hundreds of carrots. Some were so empty you'd have to eat forty of them to match a single good one. Forty carrots. To equal one.

Same shelf. Same organic sticker. Same price. And no label will ever tell you which one you're holding.

So how do you find the good one? It comes down to how the food was grown. The research keeps pointing to the same place. Living soil grows nourishing food. Feed the soil, and the soil feeds you.

That's the thread I want to pull.

Back in March, I told you we'd start measuring the nutrient density of our own meat. This week, we finally did it. I sent samples from three of our cows to a lab: a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and a ten-year-old.

The folks at the lab got curious about the ten-year-old cow. Does a decade on grass build nutrient density the younger animals haven't had time for? I honestly don't know. That's what I want to find out.

Maybe the results prove what we believe. Maybe they humble me. Either way, I'll show you the real numbers.

And I hope this is just the start. There's a lot more I want to test, different species, different breeds, different feeds, different ages, all to figure out what actually makes food more nourishing.

But I'll be honest, this isn't cheap. I think the information is worth it, but before we go all in, I want to know that you do too.

So if this is the kind of thing you'd want us to keep doing, hit reply and tell me.

Let's figure it out together.

Your farmer,
Cody