001, Dan Kittredge: Living Up to Our Potential With Nutrient-Dense Foods

Soul Soil: Where Agriculture and Spirit Intersect with Brooke Kornegay

What happens when you choose quantity over quality, short-term over long-term, uniform and shelf-stable over regional and flavorful, over and over for decades? Many things...including loss of genetic diversity, loss of soil fertility and soil life, and loss of nutrients in food. Dan Kittredge has been an organic farmer for more than 30 years, and is the founder and executive director of the Bionutrient Food Association, an 8 year old non-profit educational organization whose mission is to “increase quality in the food supply.” Known as one of the leading proponents of “nutrient density” globally, Dan has worked to make the connections between plant health, soil health, carbon sequestration, crop nutritional value, flavor and human health. The Bionutrient Food Association has engineered the Bionutrient Meter, a hand held consumer spectrometer that is designed to test crop nutrient density at point of purchase. The strategy is to connect the economic incentives from consumer to grower to drive full system regeneration.

The answer is so simple...just eating food that tastes good can actually solve many of the world's problems!

In This Episode

→What conditions in our food system have led to the need for nutrient monitoring? (2:25)

→What creates bionutrient-rich food? (6:25)

→Your health, your vitality, and the vitality of your children, has a direct correlation to the health of the environment (15:00)

→What happens to people when they eat foods with the nutrient levels they are supposed to have? (16:10)

→How nutrient-dense food affects our genes and the way they are expressed (epigenetics) (22:30)

→Physicists tell us that 95+% of reality can't be measured with the tools we have, and Eastern traditions tell us we are hard-wired to perceive on levels other than the physical plane (26:00)

→The more our bodies are built the way they were intended (with the nutrient "tools" we are supposed to access), the more subtle awareness we will be able to perceive...affecting everything in our culture, including the decisions we make (27:50)

→Dan's story of how he arrived at this work (30:30)

→Plants grown well are not only more nutritious, but they will sequester far more carbon than plants grown poorly (38:00)

→The Strategy: connect this understanding of crop quality, environmental health, and human health to money, a driving force that determines much of what happens in the world (40:15)

→Enter the handheld spectrometer, a tool that empowers the consumer to determine a food's nutrient value at point of purchase (41:00)

→Building the database of fruit and vegetable nutrient values (46:15)

→What Dan does to center, ground, and feed his soul (52:00)

→What book he turns to for inspiration (54:00)

Resources

→Dharana Darshan by Swami Paramahamsa Niranjanananda

→The Bionutrient Association: bionutrient.org

→Dan will be a featured speaker at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association's Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Durham, NC Nov. 1-3