This chapter continues along the food and health perspective. The author recounts the story of being diagnosed as asthmatic in childhood, and (re)discovering clear breathing through a strange diet of rice and tea – of course, it wasn’t so much what he ate on that diet, but what he didn’t that was important.

This hits home personally for me, because a few years ago, through a very strange external ear inflammation, my spouse was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called Relapsing Polychondritis (RP). It’s an insidious disease that causes the body to attack cartilage. This is when you realize how pervasive and critical cartilage is to the human body, and how losing it means horrible consequences like ribs floating in the body, lungs collapsing etc.

She and I joined a few facebook groups about RP where you could see a daily news feed of people struggling with the disease, suffering from relatively simpler symptoms like ear inflammation, eye issues down to more serious internal organ issues. As she researched the disease and all the different symptoms, she realized that most of the childhood ailments that she had been through were likely due to RP. But she’s a natural food warrior and even though we had gone vegan a few years ago, our diet was far from healthy, with plenty of sugar, salt and oil, and who knows what else, in the food we ate.

Through her research, she found Dr Brooke Goldner, who had completely cured her own Lupus diagnosis by switching to a raw cruciferous veggies and omega-3 (through flax and chia). This diet is far more restrictive than even your typical whole food plant-based diet, because you give up grains, nuts, seeds, legumes etc. After strictly following the diet for over 6 months, she saw incredible health benefits. This diet has, for the most part, ensured that my spouse has only mild symptoms compared to what she sees in the facebook groups.

Coming back to the book and the chapter, in a nutshell, the food and pharma industry have “domesticated” humans by feeding us an incredible array of artificial concoctions to which we are now addicted, and are completely ignorant about.

What’s absolutely stunning is the claim that life expectancy in W. Va is the same as that of Syria, and in Mississippi, it’s less than Bangladesh.

Since we don’t eat at McDonald’s or most other such fast food places (except Taco Bell; yeah, yeah, I know…), I wasn’t as interested in the factoid about the McD salad having more calories than the Big Mac.

Our brilliant capitalist society continues to create new businesses – fast food creates health issues; big pharma creates extremely expensive drugs that manage symptoms; diets and diet books/videos/supplements abound; health care and health insurance companies mint money. These “business models” can’t afford people to eat naturally and be healthy.

The chapter devotes the last several pages to the wisdom of the indigenous people across the world, who live so closely connected to the land that they have an innate sense of what’s truly beneficial for all life. I quote the last few lines below:

“The climate crisis is not up in the sky. It is down here, on dinner plates, in take-out cartons, drive-up windows, denatured soils, and confined-area feeding operations for cattle, chickens and pigs. The crisis is a direct outcome of what we choose for food.”