Envoi — The Well-Fed Fire

Envoi — The Well-Fed Fire

We began this volume by calling the body a slow fire, and we end it there. Having learned what the fire is made to burn — the macronutrients that feed it, the micronutrients that keep its machinery from seizing, the microbes that turn its leavings to profit, the rhythms by which it prefers to be fed — the reader may feel armed at last with an answer to the oldest question at any table: what ought I to eat?

The honest answer, arrived at after nine chapters of the best evidence the science can presently offer, turns out to be gratifyingly modest, and very close to what a thoughtful grandparent might have said without a laboratory to help her. Eat mostly plants. Eat food, not too much, and in good company. Favour the whole over the fractured, the pattern over the pill, the pot of beans over the powder that promises to replace it. The rest — the endless churn of headlines, the miracle nutrient of the month, the diet that will change everything — is mostly noise, and the naturalist's chief defence against noise is the same in the kitchen as in the field: to look at the whole organism, in its whole habitat, and distrust any story simple enough to fit on a label.

But nourishment is only half a kitchen. Knowing what to eat is a poor thing beside knowing how to make it worth eating — and it is to that transformation, the alchemy by which fire and ferment turn the raw into the sublime, that the next volume turns. Volume III, Fire, Ferment & Transformation, awaits.