Nutrition and food as medicine
This page does not prescribe a diet; the internet has enough of those. It offers a frame: treat food as health infrastructure, something a household designs deliberately the way you'd design a water or energy system. Nutrition research is famously messy in its specifics, but a handful of principles are robust enough to build on, and they happen to point the same direction as everything else in this curriculum.
What you grow is what you eat
A household that grows a meaningful share of its own food controls what that food is, how it was raised, and when it was picked. Vegetables eaten the day they're harvested keep more of their nutritional value than produce that spent a week in refrigerated transit. A diverse garden produces a diverse diet, which feeds a broader range of micronutrients and gut bacteria. None of these effects is dramatic on its own. All of them compound, which is the story of this whole curriculum in miniature.
Anti-inflammatory eating
Chronic low-grade inflammation is implicated in a wide range of long-term conditions, and the dietary patterns associated with lower inflammatory markers are remarkably consistent: lots of vegetables and fruit, whole grains over refined, legumes, olive oil as the main fat, fish over processed meat, minimal sugar and ultra-processed food. These also happen to be the eating traditions of the longest-lived populations on record. The specifics vary by study; the direction doesn't.
Fermented foods
Yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, sourdough: traditionally fermented foods deliver live cultures to a gut microbiome that research keeps tying to immune function, mental health, and metabolism. They're also among the oldest preservation methods humans have, trivially cheap to make at home, and a natural extension of any food preservation practice you build in the skills track. Low cost, low risk, well supported. There aren't many interventions you can say all three about.
Food diversity as health infrastructure
Dietary diversity, the count of different plant foods you actually eat, tracks with gut microbiome diversity, which tracks with a long list of health outcomes. A garden growing fifty varieties feeds you in a way a garden growing five can't. Conveniently, the health argument for diversity is the same as the agricultural one: resilience, redundancy, no single point of failure. Design the garden once and both arguments are satisfied.
Community Experiences
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