Isn't it amazing how some birds exactly fit their flowers? It's hard to say whether the food evolved the feeder or the other way around. That's what co-evolution is. Creatures adapt to each other and the geography of the land and nature selects the best partnerships for the future.

Nature's selection takes into account all factors of survival and sustainability including those we are unaware of and any bad choices are eliminated over a period of time. After a thousand or more years of co-evolution you have an amazing fit. Creatures don't have to think what to eat but just by living and following their nature and heritage they actually get the best in terms of nutrition, convenience, timing and even structure and size etc. out of their food.

For example: did you know that in the wild, humans have no chance in competition with squirrels in the breeding of strawberries? Squirrels engineer strawberries to be squirrel-sized. They do this without research laboratories, simply by eating the strawberries of their choice.

Why does this magic of food and feeder not work for most of us humans? We made a great shift by consciously or unconsciously mistrusting nature's provision for us and deciding to secure and guarantee our food supply. This went against the process of co-evolution. How did that happen? A proper explanation could fill a book. A lot hinged on settled farming practices, storing great surplus and using it to produce a population level which defies the limits of nature's cycle of seasonal provision. Settlers 'solved' the ensuing problems of natural resources and fertility by sucking sustenance out of wider and older natural cycles where things happen over a greater span of time although with more engulfing global effects.

Civilized humans' fiercest battle is against co-evolution itself. It is unthinkable in our culture to allow worms, bugs, insects or even the weather to regulate our lifestyle and livelihood. Entire disciplines are devoted to this effort: agriculture, medicine and engineering to mention a few. The capacity to end that regulation is applauded by the majority of civilized humans including those who are considered to be good, decent, moral and well-intentioned. Yet, it is precisely such regulation that ensures harmonious living.

Disharmony in our methods of acquiring food leads to disharmony in the food itself. This is because the new selection criteria are not as much about sustainability or health as they are about storability, perishability, machine-ability, transportability, controllability, marketability etc. Food is treated, preserved, processed, milled and de-constituted in many ways for the conveniences of modern life.

Civilized life offers us new kinds of food; for example white sugar, refined flour, polished rice, milk, salt, known by some as the 'five white poisons'; and it also offers us a new set of chemicals like chlorine, heavy metals, pesticides, preservatives, growth hormones and antibiotics for consumption whether intentional or unintended. And, we have new diseases to go with many of these foods and chemicals in our lives.

While most squirrels participate in the breeding of strawberries as mentioned earlier, it is only a few people who make similar choices for humans. Even in our great democracies it is only a small number of politicians, economists, agronomists, doctors and nutritionists who make the decisions. How well do these experts know - not bodies in general, but - your body in particular? Whether they can possibly care for individuals so distant is another matter altogether.

Having lost thousands of years of co-evolution as a selective natural force we now have to depend on all kinds of theories and fads about eating and we have the burden of testing these theories in one life time. Now we want an expert nutritionist to tell us how and what to eat! But, with conflicting theories we can ultimately trust only our own direct observations.

I will not provide ready-made solutions on diet, health or how to co-evolve which you can adopt at once and without stopping to think. Instead, I would like to share a part of my current operating paradigm or beliefs through these tenets which guide my experiments with food, health and living:

1. Trust Nature. Since mistrust was the first big mistake, if we want to discover the way back to balance, we must learn to trust life at a fundamental level. Today for most of us it does not mean wandering in the forest hoping for nature's gift of food. We can practice such a trust by choosing our livelihood without falling prey to the inner-voices of fear and insecurity. If such faith is missing, there is no hope of returning to natural balance even if you eat organic food and are an organic farmer. You would merely invent new ways to reproduce the old problem or create altogether new ones. So, if you follow your heart and your nature to your unique calling and trust life to provide for you, you are exercising the kind of faith that went missing in those ancient settlers, the founding fathers of our civilization.

2. Trust your body. The body has its own process of balance and healing which requires that we let it do its thing. A body that cannot balance by its self is already dead or at least partly so and should certainly not reproduce. The body is a little planet all by itself and even contains a host of co-evolutionary organisms. It resonates with echoes of the decisions we make in our communications with the big planet. These exchanges are through: what we sense, what we breathe, what we drink and what we eat. If the air smells bad you don't need a laboratory study of air-pollutants to tell you the truth. This shows that we must attempt to recover the scientific and objective powers of all our senses and tastes from the grips of saturation and obsession with human fabrications like junk-food, taste-makers, preservatives, artificial flavours, artificial food colouring and so on.

3. Be idealistic in a practical way. Living entirely by coevolution is so far away from us that there is no easy way back. But an ideal helps us to evaluate and choose the best of the options possible for us.
Small possible steps lead to bigger steps later. Each step offers a corresponding benefit. Moreover, it is not all tough going. We have been fed so many myths by a culture that has little trust in nature and the body that we are often pleasantly surprised by how unnecessary many of the civilized world's costly provisions really are. Each little step forward stretches the horizon of possibility.

Leslie Nazareth
Mumbai

Leslie has managed the farm at Asia Plateau for many years. He is a cofounder of Phase Five, a youthbased organization in Mumbai which creates awareness, supports advocacy and promotes alternative livelihoods that help restore natural systems of living.
Website: www.phasefive.org
email Leslie Nazareth