We live in a world where millions of people are suffering from multiple forms of degeneration, wide-spread ignorance about Mother Nature as well as the world we live in, and very few survival skills. The risk is that we may not survive should anything arise to threaten or disturb our modern and very fragile way of life. The tragedy in all of this is the loss of food traditions as well as natural tools and techniques for restoring health and a sense of well-being. These tools and traditions were based on an understanding of our connection to Mother Earth, knowing how to use real food, the willingness to engage in physical work or exercise, and regular fasting and detox to clean out the body. People went to great lengths to find and collect the foods they needed to produce healthy babies and maintain full function right up to death.

Before the Industrial Revolution, if people avoided infections and accidents, they often lived long, healthy lives and died peacefully in their sleep at advanced ages. What did our ancestors know about food and health that we don’t? Why is each generation suffering from degenerative diseases at earlier and earlier ages? What do we need to know to really heal ourselves? Getting Well From the Soil to the Stomach offers an illuminating look at these questions and outlines a path to sustainable medicine.

European missionaries carried the white man’s diet around the world with them, becoming a potent wedge between people and the feeding traditions they had evolved over thousands of years. Everywhere they went, disruption of indigenous lives followed. People who depended on the continuation of their food tradition for maintenance of their high level of immunity were forced out of their sustaining routines, into schools and churches, and onto barren, dead soils. They were fed Western foods right along with Western religions. The result was confusion, disease, psychological malaise, and death everywhere the missionaries went.

Today we do not have missionaries to contend with, we have marketing departments. A great deal of misinformation has been generating by marketing programs designed to get sales moving for a product. Once the misinformation gets out there, we build on it, creating a labyrinth of wrong turns in terms of our diet. If we do not correct these, we simply will not survive.