Stagtine, 15. Interlinkages

Section 1, Chapter 12 (Free Chapter for All Members)

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My friend, Rosamund Young of Kite’s Nest Farm in the Cotswolds and author of the best-seller, The Secret Life of Cows, believes in the community of animals. This all—farming, agriculture, husbandry, production of foodstuffs, and more—goes beyond our current concepts of nutrition. “Every animal,” she writes, “needs congenial company of its own species.” They need a language, wholly their own. They need families. They need memory to be and to exist in any true sense.¹ Young has long asserted and has long put into practice on her family’s farm that the health of animals, including us humans, is inexorably linked to the congeniality of their lives.

This is easy to see in animals that have been well fed but yet mistreated. Modern humans are the only species that separate the landscape from our nourishment. While the landscape produces our food, the land itself is not our food in the same way that while big corporations produce the aspects of our life that we call “modern”—this laptop, that light bulb—big corporations are themselves not welcome in our homes. We need food but keep nature and its landscape out there, beyond that fence, outside this clean, plastic package. We separate what is produced from who is producing it— this is globalism, this is the industrial complex, the shield between us and the reality that keeps us smiling when we should be doing something else entirely.²

This is not the case for every other of our two and four legged cousins that walk and crawl and flutter amongst us. The land does not produce the herbivore’s vegetation. It is the vegetation. It does not seem to me that they separate the grass from its dirty roots. The air is not where birds take flight. The air is their flight. They do not separate that which gives them power from their powers. If Earth were to grow an arm and slap a cow every time she went to take a bite of grass, the cow would develop a distrust of the grass, not just Earth. They are one.

It is in this way that Young’s congeniality extends beyond simple friendship or amicability but dives deep into the complex well of life. Health is the interconnection and balance of all things—our friendships, our feelings, our landscape flowing through our veins and digestive systems, for instance. Disease is disconnection and its ailments are separation.

Interconnection and Kinship

In 1983, in the International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems, Dr. Elizabeth DeViney and colleagues discovered the universality of abuse—the polar counterpart of congeniality and, in part, the result of this separation. Surveying fifty-three families where physical child abuse had occurred, they found that eighty- eight percent of these households extended that same abuse to their animals.³ A few years later, the Journal of Emotional Abuse reported that seventy-one percent of abused women who sought shelter confirmed that their abuser—most often their partner—also abused or killed their companion animals or pets.⁴ Since then, a multitude of studies have supported these findings.⁵ Abuse extends beyond species boundaries. If this is true, then congeniality ought to extend in the same manner. Health is not simply the grass or the soil and it is not just about how we treat our human and non-human cousins, but the balanced universality, interconnection, and kinship between all life that seems to matter most.

Social change is ecological change. Ecological problems have social answers. Modern ailments have ancient sources. And so on. To remit well, we must remit all. To heal truly, we must step beyond our segmented understanding and limited perspectives of what truly affects our health. Then, we need to question: what are we? What comprises the “our” in “our health?”

A Chemical Legacy

What if the stress in and of our environment was inheritable? We are a people yearning for health and regenerative, sustainable, or organic agriculture as a modern movement attempting a better way of producing foodstuffs is a possible, although partial solution. But what if the disconnection in the landscape, the lack of congeniality, flows through biological communication pathways into our own bodies? What if being good to the land and bad to its animals produces net negative results in the land, its animals, and its people?

Is a lack of congeniality and its resulting stress edible? If it is, then is it also inheritable?

Yes, in the last decade, Certified Organic farms have increased across the United States by over ninety percent and nearly half of American consumers now purchase Certified Organic products monthly, a seven-fold increase over the same decade.⁶ Yes, nearly forty percent of the global food-chain by 2030 is promised, by organizational powerhouses such as Cargill, Bayer, and Nestle, to be sourced from “regenerative” agricultural systems—systems that rely less on chemicals and Earth destroying products. The world, to some small, local degree, is starting to rebel against the industrial machine and its addiction to production. Maybe.

But what if we are missing the point entirely? What if, in focusing on certain chemicals such as the pesticide Glyphosate, or Roundup® as it is known in the marketplace, we have allowed our linear and productionistic system’s forgotten and forlorn posterns to be overrun, absorbing and accumulating other equally harmful chemicals inside the city walls? What if, by focusing only on the observable enemy at the gate, we have missed, so entirely, the fact that our own people rebel against us? Do not get me wrong: Glyphosate is a monstrosity of industrial engineering, but we also live in a world with increasing depression, suicide, and alcohol abuse, the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.⁷ Over four million people die every year from diabetes, nearly half of which are under sixty years old.⁸ That is nearly four times as many as the total sum of casualties in the American Civil War or equal to the yearly casualty volume of the Allied Powers in the Second World War. And it happens every year, year over year. We are the lost generation.

Between 2018 and 2019, well before the COVID-19 Pandemic walked its way into our communities, nearly forty percent of adolescents—children between the ages of ten and nineteen—indicated feeling hopeless, fifteen percent experienced more than one case of clinical depression, twenty percent considered suicide and ten percent attempted suicide, thirty percent of the latter requiring serious medical treatment following their attempts.⁹ The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention report around two million attempted suicides per year, with nearly one hundred and fifty successful attempts every day. It is hard to write this, let alone for you, I hope, to read this, without a serious bit of depression welling up, like a jagged stone in the throat.

It is time we begin to consider the deeper things. While this means many things to many people—such as religion, spirituality, the role of family or tribe, the reincarnation of ancestors in our mythologies—for us, here, it means considering the possibility that memory extends beyond death, that memories are inheritable, like nutrients and minerals.

When we consume sad cows, for instance, do we inherit their sadness? When we consume diabetic cows, are we increasingly susceptible to diabetes ourselves? Could this be why, in part, diabetes is rising so quickly today?

In my conversation hosted by the Savory Institute in 2021 with Dan Kittredge, the founder and executive director of the Biological Food Association, a Massachusetts based non-profit leading the largest, international Nutrient Dense Beef Study yet conducted, Dan questioned: “Why would you want to ingest the flesh of an animal that has inflammatory markers, the biochemical benchmarks of stress hormones, through the roof?” Pausing and leaning back in his chair, he exclaimed, “You are going to be building your body out of that? It’s transferable!”

In other words: life’s biochemical and emotional health, not just the soil it is grown in or the landscape it calls home, matters, deeply. Dan and other scientists are concluding that marbling in beef, that which the modern consumer yearns for and beef breeds over the last century or more have been bred for—easy marbling on grass—is really just deep, systemic disease wreaking havoc through the animal’s body that will soon terminate that animal’s life. It is early stage cardiovascular disease and we see it as healthy. No wonder we are so sick.

Dozens of books occupy the shelves of the conscious agrarian that speak to practices and paradigms surrounding animal husbandry, selective breeding for heat tolerance or grass-based genetics, how to grow more grass or more soil, agroforestry or food forest establishment and maintenance techniques, and so on. There are equally monumental mountains of books that speak to the nutrients in our soils and foods, drawing connections between Earth, her eroding womb, and our desertifying bodies.¹⁰

But what about memory? What about this biochemical transference? What about the transformation of an organism’s lived experiences—from stress to sadness—into a chemical legacy writ in the bloody grit of cells that we inherit when we partake in a meal? Does the memory of food actually matter?

Biological Inheritance

To understand the nature of biological inheritance, we must first understand the nature of biology.

The study of stress in animals is difficult to achieve with any measurable accuracy. The balance of their well-being centers on environmental, internal, and physical association. As we will see later in this book, an animal’s psyche swims in a great ocean of equipoise—a symmetry of balance that is internal (homeostasis) as well as external (allostasis) and is created and maintained through enduring adaptation with the forces around it. When the wind blows and the waves rise, equipoise must react. She is observant and her sustained observance is her swimmer’s lifeline.

Stress swims in this ocean as well—it is one of equipoise’s favorite tools. Stress is an associative feedback loop that helps the swimmers cope and adapt, exist and survive in the waving world around them. But the moment a team of white-garbed gods appear in the heavens and drop from the clouds, riding the wind earthward on needles and syringes, everything changes. Stress transforms from a swimmer’s natural lifeline to the overwhelming energy of the waves themselves and life pours over, purling, curling, and crashing. Invariably, any baseline of stress through a system that causes more stress, like a scientist in a farmer’s field, cannot be a system that produces accurate results. Of course, cows are stressed in head gates and corrals and when they are poked with pointy needles. Wouldn’t you be?

To understand the nature of stress in animals, it is helpful to look to the nature of their death. Death has the potential of great stress but it also delivers the great complexities of living systems over to minor scientific observation.

The Nature of death

In a 2005 study, a team of French neurogeneticists examined how premortal physiological characteristics—stress, for instance—influences the postmortem muscle metabolism and structure in slaughtered animals. How does stress affect meat quality? They considered the correlation between stress and health and whether stress lives on after death. They measured the stress hormones cortisol and catecholamines¹¹ before and after slaughter in a group of pigs and found that stress and carcass quality were inversely related: the stress placed over the pigs previous to slaughter increased carcass fat and decreased meat quality. As cortisol and adrenaline increased, meat quality decreased.

They showed that “adrenal hormones favor the accretion of fat at the expense of muscle proteins.” Some animals in their study underwent severe weight loss and others died.¹² In other words, the stress incurred around lairage (the holding period before slaughter) and slaughter completely changed the composition of and health contained within the animal’s body—from its fat composition to its muscle quality to its overall pH, a metric relating to both nutrient delivery and flavor.¹³ Keep this in mind—we will come back to pH later.

Another study with similar characteristics but on beef cattle revealed that, of the 448 cattle studied, nearly seventy percent demonstrated severe postmortem cases of hyperglycemia, or high blood glucose. The carcasses measured 6.91 Millimoles Per Liter (mmol/L) on average. It is important to consider that, at 7 mmol/L, diabetes is officially diagnosed. While the group of cattle were considered healthy entering the slaughterhouse, their carcasses came out on the threshold of diabetes. What happened? Like a mathematical function or a diabolical magical spell, the stress around slaughter impaired their insulin production and imbued their postmortem bodies with disease.¹⁴ Stress, it seems, lives on in death—as disease.

But is there nuance in the method of slaughter? In 2002, a team of Italian veterinarians compared three different slaughter techniques on the moderation of stress hormones and muscle glycogen.¹⁵ Glycogen is a form of carbohydrate that mammals store in their muscles. During intense physical activity or prolonged stress, these particles break down, become free glucose molecules, and oxidize, producing adenosine triphosphate (ATP), or energy. This allows the muscles to contract. But this process has its limits—within a few hours, depending on the animal in question—carbohydrate consumption is required to match (or resynthesize) rates of ATP hydrolysis (chemical breakdown).¹⁶ Therein lies the problem. Prolonged, acute stress produces hormones that stimulate glycogen mobilization. This then leads to depleted glycogen levels which, around slaughter, is one of the most essential and critical factors affecting meat quality, as we have seen. Low glycogen reserves at slaughter, produced by high amounts of stress, results in high pH values, leading to serious problems in meat quality and decreased shelf-life.¹⁷ High pH also negatively affects the meat’s vulnerability to bacteria and slime formation.¹⁸ The higher a meat’s pH the less healthy and the more susceptible it is to bacteria. Stress affects meat quality.

Studying a group of Charolais cattle, the Italian team worked to compare the modern captive bolt technique exhibited by the European Union’s Food and Agriculture Council to Kosher and Halal religious rites. Unexpectedly, they found only minor correlations between slaughter type and glycogen related pH levels. That is, the measurable stress of slaughter was nearly uniform in all of the animals across the different slaughter techniques and rites. The only important difference was the time it took for the carcasses to reach their ultimate pH level—between 6 to 24 hours. The modern carcasses dropped nearly two percent of their pH during this period, while both the Kosher and Halal carcasses only dropped one and a half percent, showing that the modern technique reduced its overall pH faster than the other methods. This, the authors concluded, was not noteworthy, although it was the only clear difference.

Ultimately, the modern slaughter technique resulted in an ultimate pH of 5.75, whereas the Halal and Kosher resided closer to 6. A small difference. Any pH measuring around 6 has been proven to correlate to increased bacterial decay and decreased overall meat quality, including shelf-life, color (dark-cutting), flavor, and taste.¹⁹

And so, if it is not the slaughter technique that impacts cortisol or glycogen levels—acute stress producing near diabetes and more in the carcasses—then could it be the way the animals are raised?

Another study, conducted one year later by a separate research team considered the stress hormones present before and after slaughter between two different groups of pigs: one, raised indoors and the other, raised outdoors. They expected to find that the animals raised outdoors would be more resilient against their climate’s changing factors and, perhaps, would be able to moderate their stress and its reactions within their bodies. They also speculated that the study could very well produce the opposite result—the outdoor reared pigs may experience heightened stress when brought indoors, whereas the indoor pigs may not well notice the difference at all.

Their findings diverged from both of their projected hypotheses. Instead of discovering that animal husbandry practices matter, the team discovered no measurable divergence between the production systems and the stress reactions and premortal cortisol production in either group. The trauma around lairage and slaughter leveled the different production systems’ effects on meat quality, flavor, odor, and more. The pigs raised outside exhibited, for example, nearly identical levels of the adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), a chemical that regulates cortisol and androgen production and, when under sustained stress (lairage and slaughter is a fine example), leads to Addison’s disease: which causes depression, severe fatigue, lack of energy, and more.²⁰

From pigs to cows, from this slaughter technique to that, from conventional to more sustainable and holistic husbandry, the stress inherent in accepted approaches to slaughter is a leveling force.

It is important to note that not all organisms are the same in their response to stress. Another study of African catfish (Clarias gariepinus) found that the density of their raising conditions in the days prior to slaughter did in fact impact their ability to manage the stress of slaughter. The higher the number of catfish raised together produced higher levels of cortisol and glycogen in the postmortem carcasses. In this case, husbandry did matter. But African catfish are wild, solitary bottom dwellers and so any concentration of them, let alone in a farmed environment, would skew the results immensely. Any findings, regardless of other variables, would be invariably unnatural.²¹

This is not to say that raising pigs outside is a negative thing, neither is it to say that you should raise pigs (or catfish for that matter) indoors. These reflections also do not say if different slaughter techniques are better than others in some larger, truer, perhaps spiritual sense. These studies have nothing to say. Rather, these considerations in all their forms and across nearly twenty years of research and multiple nationalities suggest what our ancestors and the modern wisdom holders already well know: life is memory and memory lives after death. It is infinitely more complex than the house you live in or the space you have to roam or the foods that you have the blessing to eat. Life and its memory must be holistic and its health resides within the infinitely complex web of a sacred life and a sacred death.

Wildness Revisited

If it is not slaughter or husbandry that matters, then what about hunting? While hunting wild game is both a spiritual and ancestral tradition (and deserves unequivocally to remain, purely, as such), it should not here pass our observational purview. Analyzing the stress hormones resulting from hunting provides an intimate reality check upon which our story so depends.

In a recent study of red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), and wild boar (Sus scrofa) within the Dinarides region—the Dinaric Alps—of Croatia, a joint, international team studied the connection between hunting and stress. In particular, their team surveyed two, key metrics. The first questioned the differences between selective hunts, wherein hunters silently stalked the game in their natural, free environment, and driven hunts, wherein hunters drove game into kill zones with either dogs or hunting parties. Secondly, they studied the scope of time between shot and ultimate death. They then analyzed the impact of these converging metrics on meat quality.

The Dinarides region has one of the greatest concentrations of large predators in the whole of Europe—grey wolf (Canis lupus), European lynx (Lynx lynx), and brown bear (Ursus arctos), to name a few. The prey animals of this region (the studied deer and wild boar) would be habituated to a life under predator pressure. The long relationship between predators and prey was, in some general sense, their study’s control. While these animals freely lived with predation stress, their domestic counterparts in the other studies I have previously mentioned were subject to lairage and slaughterhouse stress.²² Through this comparison and in view of both the hunting type (selective or driven) and the time between shot and death, the team could conclude the nature of stress in the wild—or more-wild systems.²³

But what they discovered may surprise you. Examining the final pH in the Musculus biceps femoris muscle—that is, the glycogen present just prior to death which results from both physical and psychological stress—the team observed that hunting type and not time or any other factor determined the levels of postmortem stress. That is, the stress of the hunt mattered more to the overall glycogen and pH value than did the time in which it took for death to occur or the gender or the species of animal. Stress corresponded to hunting type only. It was not the slaughter technique or even the management that mattered. It did not matter where the bullet struck. Rather, the nature and degree of an animal’s unhindered wildness²⁴ up until the point of the shot is the only delineation between low and high stress and corresponding adrenal processing.

Even more, the team confirmed this thesis through a comparison of the selectively hunted red and roe deer and slaughterhouse dispatched farmed deer of the same species. They determined the cortisol (low average plasma cortisol) at three times less in the selectively harvested wild group than their farmed counterparts.²⁵ They found the average pH of the wild group to be lower than the farmed and, even lower than the Italian team that we saw earlier, who studied the group of Charolais cattle under modern, kosher, and halal slaughter techniques.²⁶ In every case, the degree of wildness was inversely akin to the degree of stress.

This changes everything. The more wildness, the less stress. The data contends that it is not the particular slaughter technique, animal species, or method of husbandry that matters most when considering stress in meat—but the degree of wildness defined as the level of autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are through an animal’s life but especially in their death. Wildness in this way is presentness. It is the ability to be and live in the present. And it is the present locked away, safely, for those who can autonomously act as they need.

This could also be understood through the lens of experience and expectations. As we saw in the study of pigs earlier in this chapter, expectations play little on an animal’s ability to regulate stress during slaughter. Pigs raised indoors and pigs raised outdoors experience similar levels of slaughter stress. But if the expectations of experience mattered, then the pigs raised outdoors should be much less accustomed to indoor situations with shiny metals and loud noises and would be less able to manage the ensuing stress. But this is not the case. In both groups, their lived experiences did not matter with regard to the levels of post-mortem stress. This is in the same way as the drive-hunted red and roe deer. Because these animals freely roamed in the Dinaric Alps, a region chock-full of apex predators, we should think that being chased by human predators would be their evolutionary expectation and would not heighten their stress. But it did and it did so exponentially. Their expectation (if they had one) should have been the chase but the chase greatly increased post-mortem carcass stress. Expectations seemingly have little to do with stress.

These findings both demonstrate that humans alone are not the cause of stress (this is also why human occupancy in the world has nothing to do with the term “wildness”) and that stress is relatable to life’s ability to autonomously manage itself within the grand complexities of interbeing and community, what I have called “the basic conditions” throughout this book. We will explore the reality of this at greater depth later on.

Inherited Legacies

While interesting, this is not yet grounding. Why does the post-mortem carcass instillation of stress matter? Drip by drip, that is, how does the chemical legacy of meat matter? Simply this: intergenerational and interspecial genetic transmission.

“Intergenerational transmission” is a term utilized by neuroscientists Mallory Bowers and Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to describe genetically-bound, biological variations from parents to children. Can a parent’s experience with trauma have hand-me-down effects in their offspring? Is memory transmitted through intergenerational linkages? Bowers and Yehuda’s work studied the stress exposure in parents that flows, like an unbarred river, into offspring through reproductive cells—gametes—while yet in the womb.²⁷ Are children the heirs of biological memory?

Cortisol, given its role as a glucocorticoid receptor (GR)—or, a system that regulates gene transcription and expression through either binding or tethering to DNA—has been a focus of intergenerational genetics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.²⁸ GR, especially GR-1F, can affect what is called “gene transcription,” that is, the permanent altering of an offspring’s epigenome given parental exposure to something like stress before an offspring is even in its developmental stages—even before its conception.²⁹

Bowers and Yehuda have long analyzed the intergenerational trauma linkages between Holocaust survivors and their children, utilizing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the metric of their study. By 2002, they discovered an inverse relationship between PTSD and cortisol response.³⁰ That, because of the “premature termination of the cortisol response” at the moment of exposure, writes Yehuda and her colleagues, the individual’s lasting trauma results from their body’s inability to contain the now bursting sympathetic nervous system.³¹ But, when they studied the children from PTSD suffering, Holocaust survivors—children who were conceived years after the trauma—they found the same cortisol patterns and neuroendocrine changes. This, they concluded, demonstrates that both the stress effects of trauma and the psychopathological realities that are often packaged with that trauma, PTSD for instance, are transmitted from parent to child.³²

The children inherited their parent’s inability to regulate and respond to certain chemicals alongside inheriting their parent’s actual chemical imbalances. They inherited their parent’s inability to regulate their cortisol response alongside inheriting the traumatic psychological effects of that cortisol—the PTSD. They were not only predisposed to cortisol misbalancing. They were imbalanced themselves.

Scientists differentiate between organizational and activational effects. Organizational effects are those that occur early in an organism’s existence that produce permanent adjustments in the genetic structures or functions, deep inside their cells. Activational effects, on the other hand, are those that develop through experiences later in an organism’s life. What Bowers and Yehuda have demonstrated is that memory is both an organizational and activational reality—organizational in the sense that a parent’s trauma impacts the genetic reality of their children and activational in the sense that this genetic coding inclines the child to exhibit a similar result when faced with similar experiences as it grows and interacts with the world around it.

Genes, it seems, are coded memories. They are inherited legacies.

Interspecial Memory

If memories and their chemicals can be transmitted through uterine processes, can they also be transmitted through food? That is, interspecially? In other words, what is the difference between the placenta and its umbilical cord and the Earth and her nutrient cycling through ingestion, eating? If we are her Earthlings, isn’t Earth our womb?

Great volumes of research exist indicating the intergenerational linkages of chemicals and trauma. There are equally large volumes about particular chemicals in food, from Glyphosate to endocrine disruptors (ED), like estrogen, that can be harmful when you eat them.³³ But none of this literature connects these two realities—that you can inherit memory through your food, either good or bad. Intergenerational linkages of cortisol, GR, and stress exist but we have never questioned interspecial linkages.

Can you inherit the chemicals alongside the inability to regulate those chemicals—the trauma—that are organizationally and activationally coded in the legacy of the foods we consume? If we consume highly stressed foods, is it possible to become highly stressed? If we consume traumatized foods, it is possible to lose our own ability to cope with the world around us? To manage and regulate our own stressors and experiences? If we consume foods with postmortem diabetes, are we more likely to suffer from the disease?

These questions lie beyond the forefront of scientific research— just beyond its next hill or behind that fence, like the modern wild. The esteemed nutrition and metabolomics expert, Stephan van Vliet remarked in a 2021 paper co-authored with Fred Provenza and Scott Kronberg that future scientific inquiry must gravitate toward linkages and relationships and not purely on physical existence of nutrients, chemicals, and so on.³⁴

While no direct, scientific research has centered on interspecial linkages, I believe there are many indirect links that, when accumulated through extended synthesis, demonstrate and establish a direct linkage. That is, we can reach understanding through a co-creative convergence between physiological and psychological feedback loops between plants and animals, including humans.

β-carotene, or beta carotene, is a potent antioxidant and key supplier of Vitamin A that helps reduce or prevent oxidative stress in an organism’s body.³⁵ It has many health benefits for humans. As an antioxidant, it scavenges the body for reactive oxygen species (ROS), or free radicals that contain oxygen and contribute to chronic health problems such as cardiovascular disease, cataracts, cancer, and general inflammation.³⁶ As a protovitamin A compound, β-carotene also activates retinol pathways that regulate a large variety of biological processes, such as system homeostasis, protection against diseases and, thanks to its DNA-binding receptors, gene transcription (remember this one).³⁷ It supports healthy vision and a strong immune system. And, given that vitamin A is one of the world’s most diagnosed micronutrient deficiencies, especially in developing countries, maximizing the bioavailability of β-carotene is of great importance in the sustenance of life.

Naturally occurring β-carotene, like that found in grass-fed beef raised on richly biodiverse meadows,³⁸ is often complexed with protein molecules, or lipoproteins.³⁹ These structures limit the solubility and absorption of micronutrients in the human body, allowing the carotenoid’s intestinal uptake to occur through a slow, passive diffusion.⁴⁰ These lipoproteins control the absorption of fat-soluble micronutrients to support human health.

But here is the problem: a high muscle pH (like that found in slaughtered animals discussed previously) increases the solubility of these proteins and decreases β-carotene’s transference into what is called the oil phase. This mechanism directly correlates to its bioavailability. In other words, as the muscle pH increases, β-carotene’s bioavailability decreases.

When you allow this to converge with the postmortem stress studies of pigs, cattle, and deer, where muscle pH fluctuates with stress, a new truth arises from the scientific ashes: stress in food, that is, the memory behind life within that food, is directly related to that food’s nutrient delivery. While one farmer may pride themselves in the phytochemical richness of their pastures, claiming that their beef is “nutrient-dense” because their cows graze on rich polycultures of grasses and forbs and the like, the stress around those animals’ lives and slaughter may negate or severely limit those micronutrients’ bioavailability and accumulation into the human body when consumed.

Stress may very well be the gatekeeper of nutrient delivery. It is nutrient density’s master.

The First Social Network

The specifics and sacredness of life and death tells the story of our food, but what about its memory? While the former impacts bioavailability, does the latter transpose biology between species— from the consumed to the consumer? In other words, stress impacts bioavailability, yes, but is stress transmittable?

While the scientific research is lacking, an introspection into evolution could be the light we need. Maybe one day, someone smarter than I will study these things. Until then, the commonsensical laws of relationship will have to do (and maybe, just maybe, this is all we will ever need).

In an article titled, Are we eating more than we think?, Stanford researcher, Anthony Yun and colleagues postulate that energy is the currency of evolution.⁴¹ An organism’s successful evolutionary development is a co-adaptive process of energy recognition and energy acquisition. To successfully stick around, that is, an organism must have limits—energy limits. All organisms are bound by the amount of energy they can successfully procure. This is based over the span of a life’s local place and time. If it spends more than it can acquire, it biologically ceases to exist. If it procures more than its environment can sustainably produce, it destroys its biome and ignites its own social demise. But modern, human lifestyles have “decoupled” this evolutionary framework, Yun writes, and chronic stress is the signal—the beacon of our undoing.⁴²

Yun’s decoupling is Darwin’s demise. Homo sapiens’ neurohormonal pathways have long orbited their autonomic nervous system, their energy source, their sun, if you will. This sensory solar system modulates through adaptive feedback loops with organisms gaining precious information about the world around them through the act of eating. As bodies work to digest the “nature of food,” writes Yun, through seasonal and biometric associations, they learn the state of stress in the food chain and the upcoming seasonal shortages or buffets that other organisms are preparing for. This adaptive process extends even into one’s phenotype, as organisms assimilate their internal processes to match the external realities around them—those on their dinner plate. Eating is an adaptive and educational process.

If Yun is correct, food was the first social network.

But why does this matter? How does it all connect? Modern humanity has divorced itself from this adaptive behavioral pathway. We are disconnected from our evolutionary currency. When our ancestors consumed indigenous autumnal foods, for instance— organisms that were themselves managing the scarcity of the fall season and were preparing for hibernation and for less energy demands—their own internal systems self-organized and they adopted the behaviors of their plates: their systems slowed down, they began hoarding calories, and their bodies prioritized energy storage. But what happened when we began consuming these same foods in the middle of the summer? Or the spring? False adaptive pressures rise: false growing environments produce chronic stress in the food—the organism that grew out of its season. Obesity rises inevitably, for our bodies, long out of season, begin to hibernate and prioritize fat storage. Chronic stress rises, for our bodies, long cleft from Earth, circulate around false feedback loops of adaptation to a land that does not exist.

Even more, what happens when we consume stressed, farmed animals that are bred and born and grown and finished in false environments? Landscapes that know not the seasons and know not the undulating realities and communal (interspecies) solar systems of energy production and regulation. Animals that breed every year or else they are culled; animals without their social networks, as they are castrated, weaned, and separated from their mothers and families; animals that eat what they are given and not what they have biologically co-evolved with over the eons.

Yun argues that this maladaptive process is one of the leading causes for obesity, chronic stress, and atherosclerosis (or heart disease). Modern disease may be a lack of respect for memory in our food, in the life around our plate.

But Yun is not alone. The interspecial, neurohormonal inheritance from food is called the Xenohormesis Hypothesis.⁴³ It postulates that plants deliver non-nutritive molecules when consumed to assist in the consumer’s stress resistance, health, and overall survival. It was first postulated by a team in 2004 studying resveratrol, a natural phenol or phytochemical produced by grapes when injured or under attack. Observing the surprising and yet unconsidered relationship between resveratrol and yeast in wine production, the team theorized that alternative pathways must exist where plants influence organisms beyond their nutrient delivery. These pathways correlate to “chemical cues in the environment,” where consumers of stressed foods inherit that stress or its response and don a stressed phenotype.⁴⁴

This is not a negative thing. Far from it. Perhaps it is helpful to see the life on our plates as the wardens on the walls who warn when an invading army appears outside the city gates. The city’s inhabitants, dwelling happily inside the walls, cannot see the invading army and rely on the warden’s call to arouse an armed response. If the warden’s cry is empty, calling attention to an army that does not exist, like the stress of plants grown outside of their season or the stress of animals slaughtered outside of the sacred harvest, the now stressed and aroused inhabitants struggle for no purpose. We struggle, often. Eating locally and in season tells your body how to live, how to handle stress, what to feel, and so much more.

Bacteria, it seems, are not surprised by our hypotheses. Through what is known as quorum sensing, some bacteria produce certain molecules that control populations in other species.⁴⁵ Some bacteria and fungi “become virulent,” write pathologists Joseph Baur and David Sinclair, when they sense “particular flavonoids indicative of their preferred hosts.”⁴⁶ Mammals are just bacteria and fungi that took their soil with them, as it has been said. To consider that mammals could very well have also adapted to this non-nutritive feedback loop, especially given Yun’s work around energy and adaptative learning through consumption, is to consider mammals as an integral aspect of the world we inhabit. As heterotrophs, organisms without internal energy production that rely on other organisms for food, like plants, this would only seem natural.

Truth yet unseen

If this section presents anything it presents questions: what is stress and how does it accumulate in the body? If it has been shown to transfer intergenerationally, between parent and child, could it also transfer between species, between the consumed and the consumer? If a phytochemical’s bioavailability decreases when stress is present, what does that tell us about nutrient density in foods? What role does the Xenohormesis Hypothesis play in stress transfer and local food systems?

But the science is yet unclear. I have written in the past that science is like two friends who know what the other thinks and often gets it wrong. Science is a wonderful tool in acquiring data but, occasionally, understanding some deep truth only requires a faith that deeper realities exist, like friendship. Nature abhors a void. Science has proven that much is true. And if that is true then the deep voids of interspecial inheritance passed through consumption, eating and nourishment, the relationship between time and space is filled with truth yet unseen but not unknown.

Memory is something known but not seen. Death is to life how breath is to life—inhaling, new worlds are born and exhaling, old worlds become new. Memory is calling. She is calling husbandmen and hunters.

“What do you remember?” she asks.

1. Young, Rosamund. The Secret Life of Cows. New York: Penguin Press: 2018.

2. While not a subject in the purview of this book, Dougald Hine’s At Work In The Ruins and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity are fine first steps in understanding this delirium. Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress and John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards are also fine books.

3. De Viney E., Dickert J., Lockwood R. The Care of Pets within Child Abusing Families. Int. J. Study Anim. Probl. 1983;4:321–329.

4. Ascione F.R. Battered women’s reports of their partners’ and their children’s cruelty to animals. J. Emot. Abus. 1998;1:119–133. doi: 10.1300/ J135v01n01_06.

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6. Data derived from USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service surveys (2011 and 2021) https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/natural-resources- environment/organic-agriculture. Accessed 10 Nov. 2023.

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10. I provide an expansive Recommended Readings appendix at the end of the book with recommendations on titles that we have found helpful over the years, filled with over 50 titles.

11. Chemicals such as dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine.

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15. Roberta Barrasso, Edmondo Ceci, Vincenzo Tufarelli, Gaia Casalino, Francesco Luposella, Fanny Fustinoni, Michela M. Dimuccio, Giancarlo Bozzo, Religious slaughtering: Implications on pH and temperature of bovine carcasses, Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences, Volume 29, Issue 4, 2022, Pages 2396-2401, ISSN 1319-562X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. sjbs.2021.12.002.

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21. Hematyar, Nima et al. “Considering Two Aspects of Fish Welfare
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22. Smith, R.F.; Dobson, H. Effect of preslaughter experience on behaviour, plasma cortisol and muscle pH in farmed red deer. Vet. Rec. 1990, 126, 155–158.

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24. Remember, wildness is the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are and not a linear measure of how far “over there, beyond that fence” one lives. A tree is wild when it is a tree. A tree becomes domesticated when it is planted for purpose.

25. The wild red and roe deer’s plasma cortisol concentrated around 7 ng/ML, whereas their farmed counterparts surpassed 20 ng/ML.

26. It is important to note that wild ruminants and ungulates naturally exhibit muscles—or meat—that are firmer, darker, and of a higher pH than their domestic counterparts. This is due to the structure of their muscles, most likely, and is either created or aided by their free-moving migration and seasonal food and energy demands. To obtain an ultimate pH that is lower than domestic animals is a truly surprising feat.

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33. Two excellent books include: Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment by Stephanie Seneff and Estrogeneration: How Estrogenics Are Making You Fat, Sick, and Infertile by Anthony G Jay.

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35. β-carotene is really a provitamin A carotenoid, or a nutrient that
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38. Darwish, Wageh Sobhy et al. “β-carotene and retinol contents in the meat of herbivorous ungulates with a special reference to their public health importance.” The Journal of veterinary medical science vol. 78,2 (2016): 351-4. doi:10.1292/jvms.15-0287.

39. Parker, R S. “Absorption, metabolism, and transport of carotenoids.” FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology vol. 10,5 (1996): 542-51.

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41. This idea is represented in another of Yun’s work. Yun AJ, Lee PY, Doux JD, Conley BR. A general theory of evolution based on energy efficiency: its implications for diseases. Med Hypotheses 2005;66(3): 664–70.

42. Yun, Anthony J et al. “Are we eating more than we think? Illegitimate signaling and xenohormesis as participants in the pathogenesis of obesity.” Medical hypotheses vol. 67,1 (2006): 36-40. doi:10.1016/ j.mehy.2005.11.022.

43. Lamming, Dudley W et al. “Small molecules that regulate lifespan: evidence for xenohormesis.” Molecular microbiology vol. 53,4 (2004): 1003-9. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2958.2004.04209.x

44. Baur, Joseph A, and David A Sinclair. “What is Xenohormesis?.” American journal of pharmacology and toxicology vol. 3,1 (2008): 152-159. doi:10.3844/ajptsp.2008.152.159.

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45. Diggle, Stephen P et al. “Evolutionary theory of bacterial quorum sensing: when is a signal not a signal?.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences vol. 362,1483 (2007): 1241-9. doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2049.

46. Baur, Joseph A, and David A Sinclair. “What is Xenohormesis?.” American journal of pharmacology and toxicology vol. 3,1 (2008): 152-159. doi:10.3844/ajptsp.2008.152.159.