What is a healthy food system?
Food systems are made up of complex webs of interactions that provide access to food. 
Healthy food systems are economically and nutritionally secure. Ideally, a healthy food system provides access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food for everyone.
Because healthy food systems are essential to humanity itself, they also form the very foundation of every economy. When food systems thrive, people from all walks of life prosper.
However, when food systems crumble, the economies they support become unstable. Disparities between rich and poor increase. Civilizations erode and may even collapse.
Because contemporary food systems separate people from the environment and make cheap calories readily available, many of us have simply learned to ignore the role food systems play as the central foundation and the driving force of our economy.
When cheap empty calories form the bulk of our food, nutritional deficiencies manifest gradually as various forms of disease. These diseases contribute to rising health care costs. Since health care systems focus on medical prescriptions rather than nutritional causes, victims of disease may never even associate their sickness with the quality of food they eat each day.
As we look for solutions to rising health care costs, general inflation, and weakened economies, it is worth considering the role that food systems play in addressing these problems. Frankly, without a functional food system, health care costs will cripple our economy.
A food system can be illustrated resting on a foundation defined by four interconnected cornerstones. Because these cornerstones are interconnected, it is impossible to influence one cornerstone without influencing all four. Each cornerstone is defined as follows:
Cornerstone 1 – A Clean Environment
A clean environment refers to a functional ecosystem, complete with healthy soil, clean air and water, biodiversity, and all other natural resources that are necessary for growing food and cycling nutrients.
Cornerstone 2 – Regenerative Agriculture
Regenerative agriculture refers to the growing, gathering, processing, and distribution of food in manners that replenish natural resources while providing consumers with nutrient-dense dense whole foods.
Cornerstone 3 – Nutritional Health
Nutritional health refers to a state in which nutritional intake and waste elimination are sufficient to maintain a healthy, energetic, disease-free system. When nutritional health is present, chronic and infectious diseases are rare, healthcare costs are low, and people are productive. Other living systems, including plants and animals (and more specifically, crops and livestock) are also more productive when nutritional health is maintained.
Cornerstone 4- Freedom
Arguably the most difficult cornerstone to define, freedom in a healthy food system refers to both collective and individual capacities to access, produce, and make informed selections about food in ecologically sustainable and socially responsible manners. This kind of freedom requires both governance and education that rewards personal responsibility and collective morality, supports the growth of local, sustainable economies, and inhibits crime and corruption.
Symptoms and Consequences of a Damaged Food System
As with any kind of preventive health, learning to identify warning signs of a damaged food system is critical for maintaining or restoring good health. Since healthy food systems are fundamental to every other kind of health, these early warning signs are worth recognizing.
1. Decreased or decreasing environmental quality. As clean air and water, biodiversity, and natural resources become scarce, the capacity to grow food declines.
2. Inflated prices, including food prices (These are directly related to scarcity of natural resources, because inflation always indicates increased demand and/or diminished supply).
3. Decreased nutritional quality of diets.
4. Increased incidence of chronic and/or infectious disease.
5. Decreased quality and/or availability of farms, farmers, and farmland.
6. Decreased awareness of the connections between the environment, agriculture, food, and personal health and prosperity.
7. Economic decline.
8. Civil unrest.
The consequences of a damaged food system are felt at every level of our economy. As the incidence of disease increases, healthcare costs go up, and workforce productivity declines. As food and natural resources inflate, prices of food services and manufactured goods also rise. This means workers with less income are paying more to meet their daily needs. Meanwhile, those individuals who are not sick find themselves assuming larger roles, performing their own work, and filling in for those who cannot complete their own. Commerce declines and social unrest increases as more and more people are unable to meet their basic needs.
Many Local Food Systems Need Serious Repair
Around the country and around the world, local food systems are suffering from food scarcity and poor food quality. Since food systems form the foundation of every economy, these declines have serious consequences for the health, prosperity, and sustainability of every community.
Excessive Regulation Contributes to Food System Failure
Governments often respond to these symptoms with overarching “solutions” that restrict the behaviors of both businesses and individuals. While these solutions may be well-intended, regulations made too far beyond the local level/scale of government can merely confound the problem. “Solutions” offered through aid and stimulus packages fail again and again simply because one-size-fits-all policies don’t align well with the complex local dynamics of healthy food systems. Instead, such regulations limit both the cultural and biological diversity that enables food systems to respond to change. Notably, one-size-fits-all regulations also limit transparency and concentrate resources. This makes them prone to corruption.
Constant change in the local climate, environment, and economy is both natural and necessary to the health of any local community. When government controls become excessive, change is limited, and local economies fold. When government actions are limited to protecting its citizens from direct infractions on life, liberty, and private property rights, local innovations can resolve disparities and build industries that keep families and communities healthy, well-fed, and gainfully employed.
So, How Do We Fix Damaged Food Systems?
First, we need to focus on the right sectors. This means we need to shift our economic focus from the intermediate levels of commerce and industry to the foundational cornerstones of health, environment, agriculture, and freedom. If the foundation is solid, the economy will grow. But when we put the economy first, growth is prone to collapse. When the foundation comes first, growth can be sustained.
Because the cornerstones are interconnected, efforts that focus on regenerating natural processes, reducing regulations, educating the public, and promoting free and fair markets offer great leverage for fixing our food systems.
Reduce Regulations that Limit Diversity
In the book,
Sustainable Agroecosystems in Climate Change Mitigation,
chapter 10 details how microbial diversity can be leveraged to increase food production while restoring agricultural soils. This powerful approach, which has already been adopted by many regenerative farmers, has the potential to decrease input costs for growers, improve plant resistance and resilience to disease, and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Today, agroecology experts and leaders in sustainable agriculture are demonstrating that the technology necessary to implement microbiome-friendly practices that increase food production is already
available and
affordable. Such practices are beneficial to both growers and consumers. In fact, it is now safe to say that
more research is not really needed to increase food production. What is needed is increased
understanding of benefits of microbially driven agriculture to growers and consumers, and
elimination of regulations that encourage or even force growers, food processors, and health care providers to implement practices that reduce the diversity and abundance of beneficial microbes in our soils, our diets, and our bodies. This can be accomplished through education and outreach efforts.
Data from the human microbiome and epigenetic (including nutritional and nutrigenomic) studies indicate that improved nutrition, reduced exposure to toxins, and microbiome restoration will also have significant impacts on environmental health and disease prevention. Since health care costs are currently draining our economy, microbiome stewardship from the soil to the gut has potential to improve both health and prosperity.
Unfortunately, current regulations in many industries support efforts that reduce, rather than enhance, beneficial microbes in our food system.
Agricultural regulations
In agriculture, enhancing crop and soil microbiomes requires a reduction in chemical pesticides and mechanical practices that inhibit growth of beneficial microbes. When talking to commercial growers, I often find that the biggest factors influencing their decisions to use chemical and mechanical methods that reduce the microbial biodiversity of their croplands are:
1) programs and incentives that influence how crops are grown, harvested, and handled. Such programs often offer funding and/or technical support for practices that disrupt soil microbial ecology. For example, a county extension agent may recommend a herbicide as the “best” way to eradicate a weed problem while failing to describe the impact this will have on soil health, or omitting steps that will minimize the soil health impact.
2) government funding for research and education initiatives that highlight the benefits of agrochemicals without fully describing the negative impacts these chemicals have on the diversity, structure, and function of soil ecosystems. Much of US agricultural science since the 1950s has been dominated by funded efforts promoting the use of agrochemicals that damage soil health.
Health regulations
Beliefs influencing consumer preferences for processed foods that lack microbial, biochemical, and nutritional complexity, or for primary health care routines that damage cellular pathways and microbiome integrity, are supported by government-mandated labeling requirements, government-sponsored healthcare systems, and government-supported school lunch programs. With so much government support, it becomes easy for many to believe that the food and medicine choices they are making represent the best choices available for their condition. Too often, better health options are simply invisible to the consumer.
Regulations that have been designed to eliminate pests and disease in crops, livestock, and people have led to the implementation of practices that simultaneously eliminate the multitude of nutrients, beneficial microbes, and active enzymes in food crops that help people resist disease. For example, food safety regulations focus on eliminating microbes from food with radiation, pasteurization, and even chemical sanitization. These methods, which eliminate both harmful and beneficial microbes, are currently essential for safe, widespread distribution of packaged foods. However, human health might benefit from more fresh, locally grown produce that has not been exposed to such stringent sanitization. Of course, this would require consumers to develop some judgment about who they purchase local food from.
Regulations that determine the kinds of environmental analyses necessary to approve chemicals for agriculture, food safety, and pharmaceutical applications impose no real penalties or restrictions on chemicals that disrupt or destroy beneficial microbes associated with living systems or with the food we consume. Such microbes are important because they cycle nutrients, detoxify wastes, and defend against disease.
Because they fail to acknowledge the loss of beneficial microbes or nutrients, most food safety regulations provide only false impressions of safety. Finally, incentives to produce high yields of a few key crops like corn and soybeans reduce both the plant and the microbial diversity associated with agricultural soils, while providing an unfair economic advantage to those growers producing crops in the least natural, least sustainable manner.
In health, as in agriculture, regulations that dictate acceptable practices for healthcare are often biased towards products that eliminate both hazardous and beneficial microbes. While these regulations can reduce infectious disease, they also contribute to chronic disease by altering the structure and function of the human microbiome. Deregulating health care to allow natural and alternative care providers a larger role in preventive care would help consumers optimize their own disease risks.
Public Education and Other Socioeconomic Regulations
It can be humbling to consider that, as a society, we have deliberately and methodically destroyed microbial communities which serve to build our soil, clean our environment, grow our crops, and maintain our health. Really, seriously, how can we be doing this to ourselves?
To answer this question, we must look more closely at the regulations designed to influence choices individuals make. These include regulations that influence how people learn. This includes re-examining mainstream approaches to education. After all, education that works is a powerful development tool. It offers ladders of opportunity to those who might otherwise live in poverty. But when public education fails, it becomes a tool of repression, control, and manipulation. Failed education actually creates the poverty it seeks to eliminate. Sadly, education fails too often.
In a society where
public education is mandatory and curriculum is standardized, entire generations of our youngest and most vulnerable receive information daily that promotes
conformity, compliance, and dependence at the expense of
innovation and
creativity. These children are taught to accept and obey the rules. They are rewarded for compliance. Their innovation and leadership are stifled.
Too often, children in public schools are taught to sit still, do as the teacher says, and prepare for employment that requires them to work for someone else. For more than a century, we have discouraged innovation and encouraged conformity by teaching our children that the “right” answer is the one that helps them pass the test or qualify for the job.
Yet when we look at leaders who excel in innovations that diversify our economy and improve our lives, we find they are often the rebels who questioned the status quo, followed their own instincts, and created new ways of being. In doing so, they not only created jobs for those who seek them but they also launched new industries and diversified their economies. It is this kind of leadership that should be fostered through education. To get from here to there, school systems must start by honoring the needs of the student rather than fulfilling the demands of the administration and the curriculum. This includes honoring the student’s need for self-determination and for relevant learning experiences. When students are encouraged to lead, rather than to follow, new ideas are generated, learning becomes experiential rather than prescribed, and entrepreneurial spirits emerge.
Entrepreneurship can drive socioeconomic diversity and reduce the wealth gap
Rather than using public schools to build a labor force among students who are forced to attend, we should be using public education to build entrepreneurial skills among students who choose to learn. Graduates of such schools would be innovators. They would create new opportunities and stimulate change. By placing themselves in positions where they make decisions rather than follow directions, students become lifelong learners. They also become entrepreneurs.
An explosion in entrepreneurship could benefit our food system at every scale. As new businesses (small businesses in particular) develop, opportunities for local and sustainable agriculture can improve. With more business opportunities, more individuals would accept the challenges of growing and processing food in natural ways, and more food services would be available to meet growing demands for locally grown, naturally processed foods. Such businesses would offer consumers healthier choices and help change the mindsets that accept packaged, processed, nutrient-depleted foods as inevitable.
Biodiversity in a healthy food system
Regenerative agricultural practices that restore ecosystem services by promoting biodiversity and environmentally sound practices can help restore the entire food system foundations. This is because regenerative practices promote clean environments and healthy economies. Regenerative methods also support both large and small agriculture. Regenerative methods are safer for farm labor and well-suited to local markets. Because regenerative methods require fewer amendments, they can lower production costs and (where available) reap carbon credits. This makes regenerative farming attractive to large corporate farmers as well.
Free trade in a healthy food system
Although carbon credits and other stimulus packages are thought to promote sustainability, the most regenerative systems will be based on free trade in consumer-driven markets.
The relationship between a food system, the economy at large, and the governments that regulate economies can be illustrated with a pyramid that places the food system at the foundation. Commerce systems, including industries like transportation, communication, and manufacturing, are in direct contact with the food system because they rely on the food system for human and natural resources that support their business industry. For this reason, in an ideal free trade society, commerce that emphasizes restoration and regeneration will always be the most productive. Unfortunately, such “free trade” economies are scarce. This is because most governments impose regulations that bind the invisible hand guiding free markets and direct the flow of goods and services towards those with the most political influence. Since both markets and ecosystems are in constant flux, these relatively permanent regulations simply cannot work quickly enough to guide markets sustainably.
The governments most able to create sustainable, healthy food systems will be those that limit their size and scope to enforcement of free trade and minimizing corruption. (2025 update: This opinion, stated in 2014, was recently supported by a 2025 study in Frontiers in Environmental Science. See https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2025.1568601/full ) Rather than rigidly controlling prices, salaries, and workforce development (ie, education), such governments might emphasize work to ensure truth in labeling, limit price-fixing, and access to information that buyers and sellers are on equal playing fields.
Conclusions
Food systems form the foundation of our economy at personal, local, national, and global scales. A process of diversification catalyzed by
deregulation, appropriate education, free enterprise, and restoration of biodiversity would simultaneously:
1) restore microbiomes to the agricultural, environmental, biological, and health care systems that define our food systems. This can be accomplished with regenerative agricultural practices and more informed consumer food choices.
2) empower free markets by liberating education systems from the conformity, compliance, and dependence promoted by government overreach while fostering entrepreneurship with true free market policies. The combination of liberated citizens and liberated local markets would ignite the renaissance of small businesses that would support healthy food systems.
This two-pronged approach of biological (microbiome-based) and economic (people-based) diversification would rebuild food systems ethically and organically while restoring human and environmental health.
This post was originally published October 16, 2014. It was lightly updated May 14, 2025, to clarify the definition of freedom in the context of healthy food systems and to add more current references.
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