Wild Foods vs Processed Foods

WILD FOODS v PROCESSED FOODS (or Traditional Indigenous Diet v the Modern Industrial Diet)

An argument for returning to a part or predominantly bush-tucker diet by enrichment planting of horticulturally-produced endemic natives and using Wild Food Nutritionals to help eliminate sickness.

There is a powerful argument in our on-going concerns over the efficacy of Big-Pharma and Big-Agri processed foods and medicines, that puts forward the fact that we humans have evolved over at least 2 million years during which time we have been hunter-gatherers of Nature’s bounty, i.e. our bodies are intrinsically, inextricably integrated into absorbing and utilising complex organic whole foods derived directly from the wild, or to put it another way, natural selection has metabolically adapted our bodies to wild foods. Modifications of our food resources by agriculture began only a few thousand years ago and as Vic Cherikoff, nutritional scientist and wild food expert purports, this is not enough time for humans to evolve new mechanisms to adjust to these modified foods. Additionally, even in the last two decades our fresh produce has been altered to suit our modern food distribution systems; mechanised post-harvest handling, un-ripe harvesting and artificial ripening for robustness during transport etc. These ‘innovations’ on the factory farms have led to a falling nutritional quality of our foods as well as high sugar, low fibre, watery fruits and vegetables depleted of antioxidants in comparison to the wild counterparts. In fact, today’s supermarket foods are nutritionally deficient even by comparison to produce of just 25 years ago.

Vic Cherikoff points out the situation as it was when Europeans first arrived on this continent:

The Australian Aborigines have the longest living cultures on the planet and not just by a few hundred years or even a few thousand years but tens of thousands! What’s more, Aborigines were living to 60 and 70 years of age with some living 90 years in less harsh environments. By comparison, their contemporaries in ‘civilized’ Britain or its colonies were lucky to manage 35 years of age. Villagers and townsfolk were dying of plagues and viruses spread by close human contact, unsanitary conditions and living in conditions which fostered large populations of rats, mice, flies, cockroaches and other pest species.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional foods are now revealing their nutritional secrets and are proving to be the perfect foods for us all as modern humans.

Pharmaceutical drugs and vitamin pills may have a place in curative medicine, to give first aid, an immunity boost or where a specific deficiency has been identified, but they have serious shortcomings, numerous deleterious side effects and pharmacological pitfalls, such as the recently widely exposed grapefruit risk. The very best way to address illness and to replace the complex nutrients and substances missing in our diets is with preventative means; adding wild foods wherever possible and avoiding processed foods is the ideal health solution.

Indigenous communities are particularly well-placed to take full advantage of recent horticultural developments in regenerating biodiverse native habitats, such as ‘enrichment planting’, but indeed, everyone can grow these native foods and medicines in their own gardens, and everyone can become health ambassadors with innovative products such as Vic Cherikoff’s Wildfood Nutritionals.