Food quality and soil health

[cmtw]

I am mum to 4 fab teenagers, 22 years after the birth and death of our first baby girl at just 26 weeks, this followed in quick succession by 3 earlier miscarriages.

Long story short, no medical reason found for any of the losses, so had to help myself, discovered Foresight - Association for the promotion of pre-conceptual care. My contact with them instigated my interest in organic produce back in the day when there really wasn't very much to choose from and began my mission to source the best quality, freshest produce I could buy as part of my Forseight programme - my body was to become a temple!

They were the first people that I had come across who were warning of the depletion of our soils due in the main to the way modern farming techniques had evolved to produce ever more produce, but with very little thought to adding anything back to the soil. This was leading to foods losing the nutritional content of old.

Not a lot changed regarding the improving of our soil over that 22 year period until now when we are in a perilous state. Our soils are lacking in every way, they are being washed away thus silting up rivers, they are lacking in many of the vital minerals essential for health, they are lacking in naturally occurring nitrogen resulting in farmers adding tonnes and tonnes of it to feed their crops, to feed us nutritionally comprised foodstuffs, I could go on and on but you could look it up!

My point - I would love for all parents both urban and rural to stop for a moment and just really think about where all that stuff in the supermarkets comes from. Industrial scale food production is really not about quality or health giving foodstuffs, think hormones and antibiotics, think bacteria, think pesticides, fungicides, insecticides, think parasites. If you can get hold of a copy, Food,Inc a DVD by Robert Kenner will shock you, most especially when we have vulnerable tiny children to feed. Maybe not so easy for urban folk, but crack a fresh egg laid by a hen scratching around on the lawn and in the flower beds and compare it to the look and taste of even the best that free range has to offer and see the difference.

Government, massive agricultural businesses, (not talking your small family run farms here who have a vested interested in not exhausting their soils,) seem scarily lacking in motivation to do anything about this huge environmental problem. Indeed the government has recently rejected an EU directive (one of their more sensible) to put in place soil protection measures.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we need our soils to be in a state of good health, we need to be able to feed ourselves with the best quality foodstuffs to ensure good health in them. Parents are a powerful force, there are many of us, we need to demand that action is taken, we really need to save our soils.

Off the soapbox! Post Foresight, post 'my body is a temple' days I gave birth to my 4 gorgeous babies, babies I never thought I would have, all glowing with health in the space of 6 years and am just now emerging from those all consuming days of fun and laughter, tears and tantrums, chubby little limbs and gummy grins, I miss them like mad! Enjoy your tiny ones, they really do grow up too fast. Eat well and please think about that soil!