Background: As I have been sharing on Instagram and in this new Daily series, I believe local food production is the most quantum hobby, side-hustle, or “job” you could have. For me, food is a hobby—something I invest significant time, money and energy into, but don’t extract money from. As usual, things are syncing up interestingly in my cross-disciplinary study!
The farmstead wisdom from the Dougherty’s pairs so well with all this circadian stuff for humans because mainstream agriculture has also divorced its practices from the Sun.
Here’s one of their passages that really spoke to me:
PHOTOSYNTHESIS 101
We learned it in grade school. Sunlight falling on the leaves of green plants powers the solar energy collection and storage system we call photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water taken up from the soil by the plant’s roots, are disassembled and reconfigured into carbohydrates—starches and sugars—and oxygen. This provides a source of energy for the growing plant, which in turn feeds, directly or indirectly, all animal life. When plants and animals die, the energy in their tissues is returned to the soil by the process of decay. where much of the carbon will be stored and the nitrogen and minerals released for the growth of the next generation of plants and animals.
But on the standard industrial farm of today, photosynthesis happens without the vigorous biological commerce that builds natural fertility. In a monoculture, nutrients are not efficiently cycled from soil to plant to animals and back to soil; instead, huge concentrations of a narrow range of nutrients are produced and then taken from the farm and exchanged for stored energy, in the form of money. As a result, money, not soil fertility, has to power the next crop with further applications of chemical fertilizers and biocides. Meanwhile, the soil, deprived of its perennial ground cover, lies bare to the forces of wind, rain, and oxidation, bleeding away what little nitrogen, topsoil and microbial life remains. Sunlight, rather than being banked in the topsoil to feed us today, tomorrow, next year, and for years to come, is reduced merely to the motive force in an assembly line, producing cheap commodities for conversion to cash. Gone is the elegant complementarity of natural growth and fertility that exists in nature.
CARBON COMMERCE
But as it turns out, there is more to photosynthesis than we were taught in elementary school. Scientific understanding of biological systems has come a long way, and we have today a much more detailed picture of the elegant and intricate commerce in carbon that is carried on between green plants and the living soil. Understanding of this commerce, along with an appropriate and corresponding husbandry of green things and livestock, gives us the power to rebuild our land and to harvest, store, and convert solar energy on a scale that makes petrochemical fertility assistance look like the poor crutch that it is.
To date, chlorophyll was considered the only one biological molecule capable of carrying out such a transformation, but now that melanin makes its appearance as bioenergetic molecule of first order, the old paradigm of chlorophyll is broken into a thousand pieces… This unsuspected bioenergetics pathway allow us to discern the true function of the glucose as source of carbon chains, biomass, but not energy, as our body takes the energy of the light, visible and invisible; by means of the water molecule dissociation, like plants.
Hererra (2014)
This idea that eating is not supposed to be for energy, but for biomass, transforms our understanding of animal life and this whole concept of “the food chain”. This also clues towards glucose regulation and why can people fail for decades in their fights with insulin resistance. As anyone in the birth space knows, gestational diabetes and carbohydrate intolerance come up a lot, to varied level of understanding. All this will be completely rocked when we collectively begin to live in a light-based, rather than gross material, way.
I came to be writing about this today after feeling frustrated by a post I saw going viral on IG about how toxic minerals can be to humans who consume them in forms that haven’t been first processed by plants and animals. The post had super great info, but without understanding melanin’s true role in animal life… I felt the whole concept again fell far short of being able to truly offer a solution to our mineral woes.
Not only is melanin actually an energy producer like chlorophyl, melanin is also a metal sink affected by mineral intake. Melanin interacts with iron, copper, zinc, and many other heavy metals, helping them stay bound up and out of the way until they are needed. In animals, a lot of the melanin (and toxic metals) is in fur and feathers, which are parts humans don’t eat. Without sunlight to activate this process, those metals bind up elsewhere in the body.
All this is really to say, it’s important not only for us to get ourselves smart solar exposure, but also for the food we consume to have had smart solar exposure. Indoor grown plants and indoor raised animals (dairy cows, poultry, and hogs all get confined to indoor spaces in large-scale agriculture) unlikely to have the right mineral balance even on a “perfect” whole foods diet, due to the fact their chlorophyl/melanin isn’t getting exposed to real sunlight frequencies.
Ahhh. I do love being a little long-winded (one of the reasons I decided to take these “short posts” off of Instagram and over here to the community), so the final piece I would like to leave you with is this: when it is more widely accepted that melanin—not glucose or even ketones—is the primary driver of the electron transport chain, ecologists will have to re-write the entire philosophy of the food-chain.
Here are Hazel and Lucy, the grandbaby and baby of Molly—and Molly generously nursed both babes even when it gave her sores on her teats! Such sweeties this whole family is.
What insights are you getting from your reading lately and why should we also read them? Bonus points for any juicy cross-disciplinary insights!
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Melanin discovery rewrites the food chain
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I’m working on a new post for you about melanin and understanding the different kinds of tans (yes, there is more than one kind of tan—did you know that before? I didn’t but it’s fascinating and practical to know the differences and what they each can signify for health). As I’ve been working on it, I’ve also been reading The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management by Shawn and Beth Dougherty.
By the way, what are you reading right now? I’d love to hear about it and why we all should read it too!
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Background: As I have been sharing on Instagram and in this new Daily series, I believe local food production is the most quantum hobby, side-hustle, or “job” you could have. For me, food is a hobby—something I invest significant time, money and energy into, but don’t extract money from. As usual, things are syncing up interestingly in my cross-disciplinary study!
The farmstead wisdom from the Dougherty’s pairs so well with all this circadian stuff for humans because mainstream agriculture has also divorced its practices from the Sun.
Here’s one of their passages that really spoke to me:
Now, you can take this even further when paired with this: melanin also transforms light energy into chemical energy.
This idea that eating is not supposed to be for energy, but for biomass, transforms our understanding of animal life and this whole concept of “the food chain”. This also clues towards glucose regulation and why can people fail for decades in their fights with insulin resistance. As anyone in the birth space knows, gestational diabetes and carbohydrate intolerance come up a lot, to varied level of understanding. All this will be completely rocked when we collectively begin to live in a light-based, rather than gross material, way.
I came to be writing about this today after feeling frustrated by a post I saw going viral on IG about how toxic minerals can be to humans who consume them in forms that haven’t been first processed by plants and animals. The post had super great info, but without understanding melanin’s true role in animal life… I felt the whole concept again fell far short of being able to truly offer a solution to our mineral woes.
Not only is melanin actually an energy producer like chlorophyl, melanin is also a metal sink affected by mineral intake. Melanin interacts with iron, copper, zinc, and many other heavy metals, helping them stay bound up and out of the way until they are needed. In animals, a lot of the melanin (and toxic metals) is in fur and feathers, which are parts humans don’t eat. Without sunlight to activate this process, those metals bind up elsewhere in the body.
All this is really to say, it’s important not only for us to get ourselves smart solar exposure, but also for the food we consume to have had smart solar exposure. Indoor grown plants and indoor raised animals (dairy cows, poultry, and hogs all get confined to indoor spaces in large-scale agriculture) unlikely to have the right mineral balance even on a “perfect” whole foods diet, due to the fact their chlorophyl/melanin isn’t getting exposed to real sunlight frequencies.
Ahhh. I do love being a little long-winded (one of the reasons I decided to take these “short posts” off of Instagram and over here to the community), so the final piece I would like to leave you with is this: when it is more widely accepted that melanin—not glucose or even ketones—is the primary driver of the electron transport chain, ecologists will have to re-write the entire philosophy of the food-chain.
What insights are you getting from your reading lately and why should we also read them? Bonus points for any juicy cross-disciplinary insights!
Leave a comment