Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Whole Diets 239

its teeming population by means of the rule of return – the everlasting cycle of life
and decay; (c) all the foods are natural unprocessed foods; and (d) the diets start
before life begins; the parent is as healthy as the child.
There is a complete and continuous transference of health from a fertile soil,
through plant and/or animal to man, and back to the soil again. The whole carcass,
the whole grain, the whole fruit or vegetable, these things fresh from their source,
and that source a fertile soil. Herein appears to lie the secret. If this be true, then
the answer to our question, put at the beginning of this chapter, would appear to
be that any diet is a health-promoting diet so long as it conforms to these three
rules, and the first of these is a fertile soil.

The importance of the method of culture of food is primary, radical, and fundamental

in the matter of health. It exceeds all other aspects of nutrition – if, that is, one separates

any aspect of what is a whole.

In the case of diets based on agriculture, such a view brings us back again to humus
farming.

[It also served to emphasize the need for further investigation, and so led to the
establishment of the Haughley Experiment.]

Notes

1 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this chapter are taken from this book.
2 When Dr Wrench wrote this, he was clearly unaware of the intensive study of health carried out
by Drs G. Scott-Williamson and Innes Pearse known as ‘The Peckham Experiment’, and the
definition of health that resulted from it. (See Part II, also new introduction to Part I.) So far,
however, this extremely important and inspired piece of research remains the only investigation of
its kind ever to have been undertaken.
3 ‘Staircase Farms of the Ancients’, National Geographic Magazine, May 1916.
4 The capital of Hunza.
5 Ref. to ‘Medical Testament’.
6 For further information on health conditions in Tristan da Cunha see Erling Christophersen,
Tristan da Cunha, English translation published by Cassell, London, 1940.
7 It appears that to this list should be added the people of Prince Edward Island. See report by Dr
Enid Charles in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, VIII, 1942.