Grass-Fed Nation E-Book

Graham Harvey

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

For years we've been told that traditional foods are unhealthy because of their saturated fat content. In place of grass-fed meat, grass-fed dairy products, and eggs from hens running on pasture, we now mostly eat grain-fed meat and processed factory foods – and we've witnessed an epidemic of disease, from type-2 diabetes to heart disease and cancer. Modern agriculture has locked us into an unhealthy, vicious circle, with degraded foods pouring from an overstretched, impoverished landscape. There's a simple remedy: the grass-fed movement. We can make sure that the meat, dairy foods and eggs we buy come from animals grazing on or running in pasture, as they always used to. This will also put life back into our soils and wildlife back onto our farmland. Graham Harvey, agricultural advisor to BBC Radio 4's The Archers, lays out all the arguments for grass-fed food – why it's good for us, and why it's good for the planet.

Leseprobe

GRASS-FED NATION

Praise for Graham Harvey’s previous books

The Killing of the Countryside ‘He explodes the myth of cheap food with a few simple statistics’

John Humphrys, New Statesman

‘I fully support this book’s profound and Blake-like charge’

John Fowles, Sunday Times

‘A modern Grapes of Wrath’

Simon Jenkins, The Times

‘A brave, much-needed book’

John Vidal, The Guardian

‘A forceful, informed and authoritative account of the state of farming and the countryside’

Bryn Green, Spectator

We Want Real Food ‘Passionate, well-argued and thought-provoking’

Independent on Sunday

‘Explains clearly that we can all make a change in what we eat and radically improve our health’

The Ecologist

‘A book that deserves to be properly chewed over’

Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian

GRAHAM HARVEY

GRASS-FED NATION

GETTING BACK THE FOOD WE DESERVE

Published in the UK in 2016

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

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email: [email protected]

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ISBN: 978-1-78578-076-9

Text copyright © 2016 Graham Harvey

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graham Harvey has written on food and farming for Farmers Weekly, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, New Scientist and Country Life. For three years he wrote the ‘Old Muckspreader’ column in Private Eye. In the mid-1980s he joined the script-writing team of The Archers, since when he has written more than 600 episodes of the BBC drama; he is currently the programme’s agricultural advisor. Graham’s first book, The Killing of the Countryside, was winner of the BP Natural World Book Prize. He is also co-founder of the country’s leading conference on low-input, ecological agriculture – the Oxford Real Farming Conference.

Contents

Introduction (Paradise Wasted)

1.Darwin’s diet

2.How grass makes you healthy

3.Our occupied land

4.A landscape for life

5.The dodgy science that steals our food

6.The power of pasture

7.Grazing animals – our planet’s best friends

8.In search of real milk

9.Wild new farms

10. Our grass-fed future

Further Reading

Notes

Index

To the memory of Walter Yellowlees A Doctor in the Wilderness

Introduction (Paradise Wasted)

If you needed a way to assess the general state of modern Britain you probably wouldn’t choose to count its hedgehogs. You might take look at the FTSE share index, I suppose. Or perhaps the current level of spending on the health service. But the number of hedgehogs? Unlikely, I’d say.

Not so long ago these oddly endearing animals were the butt of many a stand-up comic’s jokes. In the face of danger they’re in the habit of rolling their spiny bodies into a tight ball, a defence mechanism that’s spectacularly unsuccessful against trucks. Which meant you often used to see them dead on the roads.

These days you rarely see a squashed hedgehog. This doesn’t mean we’re driving any better. It simply means there aren’t nearly so many around as there used to be. Some surveys show their numbers may have halved in a decade.1 But it’s not the traffic that’s killing them. It’s the countryside.

The hedgehog is just one of a long list of wild species that have fallen victim to what’s happening in rural Britain. Not long ago our countryside provided a home for huge numbers of wild animals, birds and plants. Today it has become a hostile place for many of them. This ought to come as a wake-up call because it’s rapidly becoming a hostile place for us as well.

Even though most of us live in towns and cities we retain a deep affection for, not to mention pride in, our countryside. We tune in to wildlife and countryside programmes in our droves. In the annual orgy of national flag-waving that is the Last Night of the Proms, we sing passionately about bringing Jerusalem to our ‘green and pleasant land’. But while it may still be green, much of it isn’t that pleasant any more.

It’s been taken over by what could almost be described as an alien culture. It furthers the interests of a few, while rapidly ruining things for the rest of us. Our elected politicians seem unwilling to step in. In fact most of them welcome the changes as ‘progress’. The media, meanwhile, rarely subject this rural occupation to any degree of rigorous examination.

This book is about the Britain we all seem to have turned our backs on – the 70 or so per cent of our land that our food comes from. It’s the part of our environment that we engage with most deeply through the purchasing decisions we make at the checkout, and that also has the biggest effect on our own health. If wild species are being destroyed it’s we who are doing it. And in our failure to consider the consequences of those decisions, we’re almost certainly harming ourselves too. The two problems are deeply interlinked.

Managed in all our interests, the countryside could help solve many of the nation’s greatest challenges, from public health to climate change. Instead it’s making all our problems a great deal worse.

For people of my generation growing up in the years following World War Two, good food was generally affordable by everyone. Imports were higher then, but food produced at home was from a countryside rich in wildlife. No one saw biodiversity as the enemy of productivity. They were simply the two sides of a sustainable food system.

Today that system has been largely demolished. In its place we have poorer food laden with toxic residues. Our wildlife is vanishing. And where once we had a secure food supply, our ability to feed ourselves in the future looks ever more uncertain.

What it adds up to is the theft of our food heritage. Much of our farmland no longer produces the foods evolution prepared us for. The consequences for the nation are potentially more serious even than the damage caused by the banking crisis. It’s happened as a result of poor science and corporate ruthlessness. But mostly because of our own lack of interest.

In the old days of coal-mining, the miner’s caged canary provided an early warning that the build-up of toxic gases had reached dangerous levels. In the fields of modern Britain it’s bird populations that have taken some of the biggest hits from modern farming methods.

Among the endangered species is the turtle dove, whose gentle purr was once evocative of summer. In Chaucer’s time it was known as the bird of love. Its most important food plant is a delicate, smoky-leaved wildflower known as fumitory, a plant that used to be common in arable fields. In today’s fields the plant has all but disappeared. It seems the turtle dove may soon follow.

Maybe we should make this bird our new canary? Let its decline be a warning that we’re in grave danger from an enemy within. A revival in the bird’s numbers will signal an improvement in the health and well-being of all of us. This book is about a national – and international – tragedy and how, if we all get stuck in, we can fix it.

CHAPTER 1

Darwin’s diet

It’s late autumn and the river running through my local town has turned the colour of a cappuccino. This doesn’t come as any great surprise. It’s happening with monotonous regularity these days. Most of the time the river runs a sort of dark, grey-green colour. But get a few hours of rain and it’s reborn as a coffee-coloured torrent.

Around the same time there’s a report in the media about the diabetes epidemic currently sweeping through Britain. According to one online medical journal, the number of people with ‘pre-diabetes’ – many of whom will go on to develop the full-blown disease – has tripled in eight years. Apparently one in three of us are now affected.1

There’s also a lot in the news about cancer. The number of new diagnoses has gone up by nearly 40 per cent over the past couple of decades. According to researchers, half of us will develop the disease at some point in our lives.2

These may seem like random events – the coffee-coloured river and the rising tide of disease in Britain. But to an old farming journo like me there’s a clear link. What happens to our rivers – and more precisely, what happens to the land they flow through – is connected with the level of disease in society. Unfortunately the experts who deal in public health don’t get to talk to the ones who worry about polluted waterways, so no one’s joined up the dots. If they did they’d realise that, just as there’s a common cause, there’s a remedy out there, too.

Over the years I’ve spent a fair bit of time checking out the colour of our local river. Even though the changes are happening a lot more often than they used to, it still comes as a shock to see the brown stain. I imagine this is how the River Euphrates looked when the Fertile Crescent – cradle of agriculture and western civilisation – was turning into desert. Or the River Tiber in Rome. The citizens must have been watching this colour switching at around the time the empire was falling apart. But who would believe it could happen in modern, enlightened, scientifically-literate Britain?

Though it’s scarcely believable, we humans are fast destroying our most precious natural resource: the soil that feeds us. Across the world we get 99 per cent of our food from the land. Yet each year we allow 10 million hectares of farmland to be destroyed by soil erosion.3

According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the people on our planet are malnourished, which means either they’re not getting the nutrients they need or their dietary nutrients are unbalanced.4 Despite this, soil is being lost from farmland up to 40 times faster than it can be formed by natural processes. While it’s true that erosion rates are highest in Asia, Africa and South America, British and American farmers are still destroying soils far faster than they can be replaced by natural processes.5

Long before soils collapse they become dysfunctional. Their ability to supply nutrients to crop plants is impaired. This is why the milky-brown waters are a warning we ignore at our peril. Roughly interpreted they mean there’s going to be more sickness around; more of what health experts call ‘non-communicable’ diseases. Weird though it may seem, the stained waters tumbling under a Somerset river bridge are a fair indication that things are going to get a whole lot worse.

Whenever we hear of someone being struck down with cancer or heart disease, most of us think of it as bad luck and nothing more. We try to cut down the risks by giving up smoking or eating more sensibly or reducing our alcohol intake. Apart from that we hope for the best and get on with our lives. Doctors reassure us that we’re all living longer. Diseases like cancer in our later years are the price we have to pay.

However, this isn’t what they used to think. A century ago there was a broad medical consensus that the ‘diseases of civilisation’, as they were called, were caused by processed foods, particularly those rich in sugar and refined white flour. The evidence came mostly from doctors who’d had experience working overseas.6

Wherever the Europeans settled they took their western foods with them – white bread, cakes, biscuits and sugar. Where local people steered clear of the stuff and stuck with their traditional diets, diseases like cancer and heart disease were rarely seen. But when the locals took to western foods, the new diseases started to appear. They included obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, tooth decay, gallstones, varicose veins and many more.7

Typical were reports coming out of Africa and published in the medical journals of the early 20th century. Doctors started seeing the first cancer cases in places where the local people mixed with Europeans and copied their diets. But they rarely saw the disease in people who had stayed true to their ancestral diets. Reports from doctors working with native Americans told a similar story. Cancer cases were rare or non-existent in most tribes. Among Inuit peoples, whose diets were made up mainly of seal meat, high in saturated fat, cancer cases were hardly ever seen. Nor was heart disease.

The consensus that modern diseases were the result of eating refined carbohydrates lasted until the early 1970s. It was then discounted because it didn’t fit easily with the new theory that saturated fat was a major risk factor. Today that fat – disease connection has been largely discredited. Researchers now say the earlier health advice that we should reduce saturated fat in the diet was never supported by the evidence. There was no chance that it would reduce heart disease rates.8

Yet across the western world dieticians and the manufacturers of low-fat foods continue to spread the fable that saturated fat is bad. And the medical world has so far failed to reinstate and investigate the old theory linking modern disease to processed foods.

In the absence of a clear lead from the medical world, evolutionary biologists have stepped into the healthy diet debate. Like doctors of the early 20th century they’re convinced it’s sugar and starchy grains such as wheat and rice that are to blame for the dire state of our health. And we have agriculture to thank for it!

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, described farming as the worst-ever mistake made in human history.9 We choose to think of the human story as one of unbroken progress from primitive tribal societies to our modern world. We view the switch from hunter-gathering to farming as a crucial step along the way. Who wouldn’t swap the hard work and insecurity of hunting and foraging for the ease and plenty of farming communities?

But in reality, says Diamond, this momentous change didn’t make life any better. Instead it made things a good deal worse. As hunter-gatherers we had enjoyed diets rich in protein and well-balanced for other nutrients. But as farmers we started eating starchy foods, particularly cereal crops like wheat. We probably didn’t have much choice in the matter. There were too many mouths to feed. But in making the switch to agriculture we gave up a healthy diet for a far poorer one.

Hunter-gatherers ate almost everything that was edible in the natural world around them. This meant they enjoyed a very diverse diet, which included dozens of plant species in season. By contrast, farmers concentrate on growing a few staple crops with high yields.

Today we rely on wheat, rice and potatoes for a large part of our energy intake. In other parts of the world, farmers have relied on grains such as millet, barley and rye as food staples, along with starchy crops like cassava and taro. While these are rich in calories and can be grown in large quantities, they often contain far fewer vitamins and minerals than the wild plants harvested by hunter-gatherers.10

Archaeological evidence shows that in the period when human beings were changing from hunting to farming – around 12,000 years ago – there was a rapid decline in their bone density. Their skeletons became more fragile and subject to fractures, a weakness that continues to this day.11 At the same time the average height of human beings fell, and there was a big increase in infectious disease, iron-deficiency anaemia and degenerative conditions of the spine.

Studies on human stature over the past 40,000 years show that in Europe humans became shorter at the end of the Ice Age, partly because they adapted to warmer climates. As agriculture took hold their stature declined even further. It was only in the mid-20th century that Europeans returned to the height of their caveman ancestors.12

The starchy, high-carbohydrate diets of the first farmers kept more people alive. But they reduced the quality of life because of the illnesses they caused. Ten thousand years later nothing much has changed. Drive around the countryside today and you’ll see field after field of those same starchy crops – potatoes, barley, sugar beet, and most of all wheat. They’re destined to be processed into the very foods that doctors a century ago identified as bad for our health.

To make matters worse, the crops that are killing us are also killing the soils on which we all depend for our food and our health. The chemicals used to grow these crops are steadily destroying the life of the soil. To stay healthy and productive, soils rely on a vast underground army of living organisms from microscopic bacteria to earthworms.

But the high-yielding wheats and oilseed crops that fill our fields can’t survive without a routine fix of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Unfortunately these same chemicals damage the living communities of the soil. Robbed of this living component, soils are less able to supply nutrients to plants.

To compensate, farmers have to apply even more agro-chemicals, which further damages soil organisms. The whole soil ecosystem is caught up in a vicious spiral to destruction. It ends when the weakened soil becomes so unstable it’s easily eroded away by water and wind.

This is why so many of the world’s rivers are changing colour. They’re stained with the remnants of dying soils being washed away to the sea. It’s why we ought to take notice. The stains are a sure sign, not only that we’re growing the wrong foods, but that we’re demolishing the only guarantee we have of a healthy future – fertile soil. Offhand I can’t think of a more effective way for a civilisation to destroy itself, apart, perhaps, from engaging in nuclear war.

As it happens my local river – the Tone – rises quite close to where I live in west Somerset. So I get to see the whole colour-change process. Whenever we get a spell of heavy rain, torrents of red-brown floodwater come gushing off the fields and down the steep lanes. They swell the river and stain it orange-brown as it flows under the town centre bridge in Taunton. Much of this cargo of silt will be dumped in the Somerset Levels, where the river takes a slow, meandering course to join the River Parrett.

The river runs orange-brown because that’s the colour of our local soils, and because those soils are now sick. Healthy soils don’t get washed away in rainstorms. Soils capable of growing strong, nutrient-rich crops don’t go floating off downstream. They don’t clog up ditches and drains, or deposit a sandpit at the side of the road. They stay put. The run-off water – if there is any – is clear.

That’s how it is in our towns and cities most of the time. When I drive through my local town, even during a heavy rainstorm, the rain that comes gushing down the street isn’t a muddy-brown. It’s always clear. Our parks and suburban gardens keep soil in good shape. It’s the countryside where the damage is at its worst.

Shockingly, it’s modern farming methods that pose the main threat to our food supply. And all to produce crops that will make many of us sick.

In his book The Story of the Human Body, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman coins the phrase ‘mismatch diseases’ for the sort of illnesses that afflict us today.13 He defines them as diseases that result from our Paleolithic bodies being poorly adapted to our modern environment and way of life.

For example, natural selection over several million years adapted the human body for a diverse diet of fruit, tubers, wild game, seeds, nuts, and other foods that are rich in fibre but low in sugar. So it’s hardly surprising that we develop illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease from consistently eating foods that are loaded with sugar and depleted of fibre.

Lieberman produces a list of nearly 50 non-infectious illnesses that he suggests could be evolutionary mismatches. They include coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, some cancers, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s disease, glaucoma, hypertension, myopia, metabolic syndrome, multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis.

It’s an alarming catalogue of modern ailments, and Lieberman stresses that in the absence of good data it’s only a hypothesis, a guess. Even so, he believes it’s not possible to over-emphasise the importance of mismatch diseases. We’re most likely to die from a mismatch disease. We’re most likely to suffer from disabilities caused by mismatch diseases. Mismatch diseases account for the bulk of healthcare spending throughout the world.

Why, then, are our fields full of crops that will be turned into the starchy, sugary foods that will probably see us off? Our countryside is quite capable of producing the kinds of foods we once enjoyed as hunter-gatherers. We don’t have to head out to the woods with our bows and arrows. As a society we’re smart enough to reorganise our agriculture so that it produces the kinds of foods that protect our health rather than the deadly stuff it’s now turning out. As we’ll discover, there’s one simple dietary change we could all make to put ourselves and our countryside back on the path to good health.

The reason why our soils seldom used to disappear downriver was that farmers always planted at least some of their fields with one particular life-enhancing crop. It’s so familiar that few of us even think of it as a crop at all. It’s grass – or rather, pasture, because it usually included plants such as clovers and herbs as well as grasses.

Over the centuries, farmers learned that they couldn’t go on growing food crops year after year on the same land or it would quickly become exhausted. For a long time the only remedy was to rest the land, to leave it lying fallow. Later they discovered that rather than leave the land lying idle it was more profitable to sow it to pasture and graze it with cattle or sheep. In some mysterious way this would revitalise the land, giving it a new burst of fertility so it would grow more food crops.

What these farmers had stumbled upon was the power of crop rotations. Here was the secret of a dependable food supply. Somewhere around the middle of the 18th century the mixed farm was born. It was to create a revolution as momentous as the industrial revolution that would follow.

By alternating grassland and grazing with the growing of food crops such as wheat, farmers succeeded in harnessing nature’s methods for keeping land fertile. No chemical fertilisers were required. No pesticides. The whole system was driven by the power of the sun, channelled through pasture plants and the microscopic organisms of the soil.

The mixed farm turned Britain into a premier-division farming nation. It fed a growing population at a time when our industrial towns were rapidly expanding. And the foods it produced – grass-fed meat; grass-fed milk, butter and cheese; pasture-raised poultry and eggs – were near-perfect foods for human nutrition.

By including pasture into their crop rotations these pioneering farmers had, in effect, recreated the foods of hunter-gatherers. The Paleolithic diet – the diet of hunter-gatherers – was rich in the meat of animals grazing on wild, natural grassland. The new cropping pattern of the mixed farm included species-rich grasslands not so very different from the wild grasslands of the forest glade and the savannah. The meat this produced was scarcely any different from that eaten by our early ancestors.

Today scientists have begun to discover the health-enhancing benefits of foods from pasture-fed animals. In the popular media, debates over the health value of fresh foods all too often end up in a sterile argument over the pros and cons of organic produce. But we ignore the change that would bring about a huge improvement in our nutrient intakes: the reintroduction of grass-fed foods into our daily diets.

As well as improving our health, pasture and grazing would make our farming more sustainable and our food supply more secure. Science is at last beginning to reveal the way pasture enriches the land and stops soil eroding away downriver. Ironically this is the very time when many farmers are deciding they no longer need pasture to keep their land in good shape. Most now believe they can do the same job using chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

The muddy rivers are a sure sign that they’ve got it wrong. And we’re all paying a high price in degenerative disease. Jared Diamond’s savage condemnation of agriculture turns out to be true. But it doesn’t have to be. Farms – not the health service or drug companies – are our best hope of leading long and healthy lives. We simply have to make sure our food comes from the right sort of farm.

In the 2.5 million or so years before agriculture came along, we humans went around eating the foods that nature provided. We hunted grazing animals and harvested plants, berries and nuts from the well-stocked forests. Birds’ eggs in season were an occasional treat.

Tribes living close to the seashore or a lakeside acquired a taste for fish and shellfish. Some scientists think it was this habit of fish-eating that led to the rapid increase in the size of the human brain.

On these natural foods human beings stayed in tip-top physical condition. This is not to say life was a bed of roses. Far from it. It could be brutish and short. Chasing after woolly mammoths or wild cattle was fraught with danger. But if you could avoid getting injured, the chances were you’d be able to keep up the chase without becoming exhausted. You’d easily manage the stone-age equivalent of two dozen flights of stairs without becoming breathless or showing any great increase in heart rate.

In hunter-gatherer communities even ordinary members of the tribe had the stamina and fitness we’d associate with top athletes today. This was partly because of their physical activity but also because they were generally well nourished. Unless there had been some local environmental catastrophe, people were able to provide their bodies with exactly the right nutrients to keep them functioning at peak efficiency. We were part of nature’s grand plan. We ate the foods that evolution had prepared us for. We hadn’t yet become smart enough – or crazy enough – to make our own.

In those pre-farming times human diets were rich in protein and essential fatty acids, especially linoleic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid) and alpha-linolenic acid (an omega-3 fatty acid). They were high in saturated fats, the sort that until recently were supposed to be bad for us. What didn’t figure much in our diets were sweet things. Ripe fruits and berries were highly seasonal, and honey would also have been a periodic delicacy. There were no cereal grains. Most carbohydrates came from vegetables and were of the complex, slowly-digested form. And there were, of course, no processed foods.

We humans obtained all the nutrients we needed to thrive and spread across the planet. We flourished, not simply because we ate the foods that evolution had adapted us for, but also because those foods were themselves rich in nutrients. The animals we hunted on the plains and grasslands had grazed and browsed on the vegetation they themselves needed to stay healthy. And those grasses, shrubs and trees had grown in fertile soils, enriched by flourishing populations of microbes.

You could even say the teeming masses of microscopic life below the soil surface were themselves perfectly nourished. They were fed by the wild profusion of plants that handed them ‘sweeteners’ or exudates, sugary compounds passed through their roots. Powered by the energy of the sun, the vast, interconnected web of life on Earth did the job of distributing and recycling nutrients. Each organism had its place, and each received the nutrients it needed. Like other species on Earth, humans merged seamlessly into a well-functioning ecosystem.

That was until we humans hit on the idea of growing our own food. We started cultivating grasses with large seed-heads, the beginning of cereal growing. We also learned how to domesticate food animals such as cattle and pigs, herding them across the open lands we had cleared of trees. Farming was born. Since then the quality of human nutrition has headed steadily downhill.

In modern western agriculture, crop growing is now the main activity. Drive around much of Britain today and you’ll see fields full of the same few plants – wheat, sugar beet and yellow-flowering oilseed rape. And the most important of these is wheat. We now grow massive amounts of the stuff, far more than we can ever eat. We get rid of the surplus by feeding half of it to animals, mostly pigs and poultry, but also to dairy cows and beef cattle, animals for which cereal grains, in any quantity, are neither natural nor healthy.

As a result our diets are unbalanced – depleted of some essential nutrients and over-rich in substances we could well do with less of. Add to this our taste for highly processed products – cakes, biscuits, white bread and the rest – and you have a recipe for disaster. Our bodies are loaded up with materials they weren’t designed to handle.

A growing number of nutrition experts now recommend that we give up the foods that followed the farming revolution and stick to the kinds of foods chosen by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Doctor and nutritionist Andrew Stringer – author of The Food Fallacy – recommends our ‘ancestral diet’ as the best way to stay free of chronic, degenerative disease. The diet includes meat from grazing animals; fish including shellfish; green, leafy vegetables; seasonal fruits, berries and nuts; and occasional eggs.14

Loren Cordain, a leading researcher in environmental medicine, put together the essential nutritional principles as part of his Paleo diet, sometimes known as ‘the caveman diet’. To stay fit he recommends that we eat a relatively large amount of animal protein and far fewer carbohydrates than most modern diets recommend.15 And these carbohydrates should come – not from sugar or starchy foods like grain and potatoes – but from fruits and vegetables. Cordain also recommends that we eat ‘moderate’ amounts of fat. These should be what he describes as ‘good’ fats of the kinds known as ‘monounsaturated’ and ‘polyunsaturated’ fats.

This new hunter-gatherer style of eating emphasises the importance of meat from grazing animals. Yet modern agriculture, with its obsession for growing wheat, is fast removing them from large stretches of the British landscape.

Not long ago I took a long, slow drive through the East Anglian countryside. I was on a cattle hunt. It was early June and the trees were draped in spring foliage. The hedgebanks were crowded with wildflowers. This was just the time you’d expect to see cattle grazing on lush, green pastures.

I left the motorway at Stevenage and took minor roads through the rural heartlands of Hertfordshire and Essex. On my journey I passed through villages that might have come straight from P.G. Wodehouse – Buntingford, Starling’s Green, Steeple Bumpstead. The fields were dark green with young wheat crops or yellow with the flowers of oilseed rape. But there were no cattle to be seen. This came as something of a shock. A few decades earlier you’d have seen plenty of them, even in a part of Britain not traditionally known as ‘livestock country’.

As an agricultural student I’d made a similar journey back in the 1960s. In those days there were plenty of mixed farms – farms with pasture and grazing in the rotation as well as crops. Grazing animals were a familiar sight. Today they have all but vanished from many parts of eastern Britain.

I pressed on with my search along quiet country roads. By the time I reached Sudbury I’d clocked up more than 50 miles. And not a single grazing animal had I seen. At that point I called it a day and headed home.

The reason animals have disappeared from the fields is that farmers find it more profitable to keep them in sheds. They can then plough their pasture fields, freeing up the land for growing crops. The traditional landscape of mixed farming, with its patchwork of grazing fields and crop fields, has been turned into a wide-open arable prairie. This change has happened because people in western countries like Britain have invented a whole new way of eating.

We’ve turned our backs on the foods nature provided. Instead we’ve been persuaded to eat a range of processed, food-like products. Pies and pastries, pasta and pizzas; cooking oils and yellow-fat spreads; white bread and biscuits. To man and woman the hunter-gatherer all these would have been unrecognisable. But not to man and woman the Tesco-shopper or the Lidl-browser. In my own favourite coffee shop it’s virtually impossible to find anything to eat that isn’t made with refined white flour.

Our chief public-service broadcaster has even developed a hit TV show, The Great British Bake Off, celebrating the commodities that now pour off our farms – wheat, vegetable oil and sugar. We’ve made a festival of the very things that are making many of us ill.

At the same time we’ve transformed what were once healthy, nutrient-rich foods like beef, milk and dairy foods into far less healthy products. We’ve done it by taking cattle off the species-rich pasture that evolution prepared them for. Instead we keep them shut up in barns where we feed them on high-energy foods such as cereal grains and high-protein foods like soya.

It’s often said ‘we are what we eat’. But when it comes to meat it would be truer to say ‘we are what our animals eat’. And what our animals are eating in ever greater amounts are the same starchy foods that are damaging us. We’re all busily degrading every part of our diet.

For thousands of years the countryside provided us with foods rich in nutrients, the foods that kept us healthy. Today the crops that fill our countryside aren’t so much foods as industrial raw materials. They’re grown for manufacturing companies to process into edible products that scarcely merit the name ‘food’. Or they’re grown as animal feed for factory farms to turn into second-rate versions of the foods that once sustained us. It’s hard to believe that we could have devised such a crazy food system.

In her book The Obesity Epidemic nutritionist Zoe Harcombe analyses the government’s Family Food Survey to find out the sort of things we’re all eating these days.16 The government figures split our foods into 24 categories from fish to biscuits. The stuff we eat most of comes under the heading ‘other cereal products’. Accounting for over 10 per cent of our daily calorie intake, it includes breakfast cereals, pasta, pizza, rice pudding, frozen cakes and pastries, cake and pudding mixes.

The next most popular category is ‘bread’. Then in third place come ‘other meat and meat products’. Of these, three-quarters are processed meats combined with yet more starchy foods – pies, pasties, sausage rolls and puddings. Zoe calculates that one-third of our average calorie consumption comes from these three food categories.

It seems we get no less than 1,536 calories a day from processed foods, with just 491 calories coming from ‘real foods’, such things as meat and fish, milk, cheese, eggs, real dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables, real fats such as butter and olive oil, and whole grains.

It’s clear now why the countryside has changed. The farmed landscape, once designed around the growing of real, nourishing food, has been reshaped for the production of processed products. Vast areas of our best farmland are now dedicated to growing low-cost cereals, rapeseed oil and sugar. Even the real foods – meat, milk, cheese and eggs – have been downgraded by the need to find a use for the torrent of industrial starches and vegetable oils pouring from our arable fields.

We’ve given up our ancestral foods for manufactured fakes. This is the principal reason so many of us are succumbing to modern diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and the rest of them. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t get them. As long as they avoided accidents, infections, violence and predators, they stayed healthy, lean and strong throughout their long lives.17

We weren’t made to go down with these conditions either, at least not on anything like the present scale. But while we choose to let manufacturing companies feed us rather than nature, the epidemic can be guaranteed to continue.

Here’s the reason healthcare costs are swallowing up more and more of our national wealth. Here’s why Britain’s National Health Service can barely keep up with demand. Yet in an odd way it’s good news. It means we have a solution. We could return to our heritage foods, the foods our ancestors thrived on. Our ancestral diet.

Long before there was any kind of health service – long before ordinary people could afford to see a doctor – food was our medicine. And food was the traditionally-grown plants and traditionally-raised animals from a fertile countryside. Everyone knew this. Each generation learned what was good to eat from the people who’d gone before.

Today we look to experts to tell us the things we should be eating. Instead of our parents and grandparents we rely on dieticians, nutritionists and, sometimes, research scientists. We expect them to unravel the mind-numbingly complex interactions between our bodies and the materials we put into them. It’s not surprising they sometimes get it wrong. And when they finally arrive at the right answer it’s often long after real damage has been done.

Fortunately the laws of nature don’t change. The foods that made us healthy 10,000 years ago are the very same foods that would make us healthy today. They are what they always have been – the traditionally-grown and unprocessed foods from a fertile, diverse, brimming-with-life countryside. And at the very heart of this power-house system are grazing animals.

One of the most remarkable studies on the link between food and health was carried out by an American dentist, now hardly remembered. In the early years of the 20th century Weston A. Price ran a flourishing dental practice in the industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio. At the time, people in his home city were abandoning their traditional diets in favour of the new, manufactured foods – white bread, margarine, pasteurised milk and refined white sugar. He saw the results daily in his surgery. Most of his adult patients had rampant tooth decay, often accompanied by degenerative diseases such as arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes and chronic fatigue.

In the early 1930s Price gave up his dental practice. He and his wife set out on a series of epic journeys to some of the most remote places on the planet. His plan was to visit peoples untouched by ‘civilisation’ – peoples reputed to display remarkable health, and to enjoy long lives, untroubled by sickness and disease. He wanted to find out whether these stories were true. And if they were, he wanted to know what foods these peoples ate.

The couple’s first visit was to a valley high in the Swiss Alps. Until the building of an eleven-mile railway tunnel a few years earlier, the Loetschental Valley in the Bernese Oberland had been virtually isolated from the outside world. There Price was astonished to find children tough enough to walk barefoot in freezing mountain streams without ill effects.

They seldom caught colds, and infections were virtually unknown. No case of tuberculosis had ever been seen in the valley community, though the people had been exposed to the bacillus. The children’s teeth and gums were in perfect condition, Price discovered, with no sign of dental decay.

The people of this Swiss valley lived mainly on raw, unpasteurised milk and dairy products from their own cows, grazing on the steep mountain pastures. These traditionally-produced dairy foods were supplemented with a little meat, plus vegetables grown in the local terraced gardens. The local diet was high in fats. But they were natural fats, rich in fat-soluble vitamins like A, D and E. They were also rich in polyunsaturated fats including omega-3s and the anti-cancer compound CLA (conjugated linoleic acid).

The foods of the valley were produced on farms, but not the sort that we’re used to. They were farms dedicated to producing the kinds of food that human beings had thrived on since they were hunter-gatherers.

The American couple went on to visit remote peoples all over the world. They included Scottish islanders; Inuit communities whose diet was almost entirely made up of animal products; cattle-herding people in Africa who lived exclusively on beef, raw milk, offal meats, and – in times of drought – blood. They visited tribes of hunter-gatherers in northern Canada, the Florida Everglades, the Amazon rainforest and Australia.

Wherever they travelled the couple found these remote populations to be in good health. The foods they ate were, without exception, natural and unprocessed. There were no preservatives, colourings or additives; no refined oils or hydrogenated fats; no processed foods such as white flour or skimmed milk. Nor was there added sugar, though a number of peoples ate naturally sweet foods such as honey or maple syrup. All the foods were grown or raised on fertile soils, uncontaminated with pesticides or chemical fertilisers. Milk and dairy products were always consumed in their raw, unpasteurised state.

Price published his exhaustive findings in his classic book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.18 But by then the world was at war and no one took much notice, either in America or in Britain. If they had, a lot of today’s disease misery might have been avoided.

To live long and healthy lives, Price discovered, human beings needed the traditional foods of the countryside, including animal products with their natural fats. As many doctors were discovering from their work overseas, it was western processed foods that were at the root of the emerging disease epidemic.

The message today is that, wherever we live, our farmlands are quite capable of delivering the foods that will make us healthy. The farming methods that once protected our health can begin to heal us today if we let them. Doctor and nutritionist Natasha Campbell-McBride believes our best – perhaps our only – protection against the tidal wave of degenerative disease is to return to real food; the kinds of foods Weston Price wrote about in the mid-20th century.