The Return to Real Food

CAttle_Wetlands_800x1000 January arrives with its usual promises and resolutions — new diets, detoxes, and rules for how we should feed ourselves. Social media is awash with so-called experts giving conflicting advice: avoid red meat, shun carbs, juice everything. The endless barrage of noise leaves us overwhelmed, confused, and utterly exhausted. Yet, when you look away from the screens and into nature, the picture becomes clear. Nature doesn’t deal in trends or hashtags — it has successfully guided us for millennia. It’s only since we have tried to fiddle with it that we have lost our way.

Over the past fifty-five years, as a society, we’ve quietly drifted away from that truth. Ultra-processed foods — factory-made products built from refined starches, industrial oils, artificial flavourings, and additives — now make up around 60% of the average British diet. These foods are convenient, cheap, and engineered to keep us snacking by hijacking our body’s natural “fullness” signals.

When we eat ultra-processed foods, our bodies lose touch with what real nourishment feels like. The instant gratification rapidly fades as we feel less satisfied, our health declines, and we start searching for miracle diets and solutions that promise to fix the problem they helped create. As Chris van Tulleken highlights in his book Ultra-Processed People, the issue isn’t salt, sugar, or fat; it’s the physical structure of the “food” itself. These products are “pre-chewed” in a factory, stripped of fibre and natural fat, then reassembled with emulsifiers that disrupt our gut microbiome. We aren’t failing through lack of willpower; we are simply outmanoeuvred by chemistry.

By demonising traditional fats and whole meats, we have inadvertently created a vacuum filled by these laboratory-designed alternatives — highly profitable for corporations, but devastating for our health. Our ecosystems also suffer at the hands of this food system, as 60% of our calories now come from just three crops — maize, wheat, and rice — mostly grown in chemically intensive monocultures. This lack of diversity starves our guts while feeding the belly of corporate greed.

Butchers_1000x600 Somewhere along the way, meat became the scapegoat — but not all meat is created equal. There’s a world of difference between factory-farmed animals and those reared naturally, like the meat you’ll find on our butcher’s counter. Livestock raised on diverse pasture is rich in bioavailable protein, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA — linked to reduced cancer risk and improved insulin sensitivity), and crucially omega-3 fats, which reduce inflammation. We know inflammation is the root cause of many chronic diseases. This is dense, natural nutrition that our bodies truly understand.

These animals are also fundamental to a healthy natural ecosystem. Through grazing, they build soil and contribute to a diverse soil microbiome, which in turn supports our gut microbiome. Healthy soil also helps sequester and fix atmospheric carbon and nitrogen.

“Livestock raised on diverse pasture is rich in bioavailable protein, conjugated linoleic acid, and crucially omega-3 fats, which reduce inflammation. This is dense, natural nutrition that our bodies truly understand.”

Cooking is one of the last acts of agency we have over our own well-being — and it’s time we reclaimed it. Stepping away from ultra-processed convenience is not about nostalgia or guilt, but about sovereignty: knowing what we’re eating, where it comes from, and how it makes us feel. When we buy from local farmers, cook with real ingredients, and eat seasonally, we build a deeper relationship with both nature and nourishment. Each meal becomes an act of quiet resistance — a way of saying no to the faceless corporations that have turned food into a commodity, and yes to flavour, diversity, and life.

Reconnecting with real food is how we restore our health, our soils, and our communities. It begins not with another diet, but with the simple act of cooking again.

Darts Farm

The Return to Real Food

Posted in The Farm, News on 10 Jan 2026

by George Dart

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