The Food Chain, Revisited

Minerals in the Food Chain

Let's start in the soil, at the beginning of a land-based food chain. Let's see if we can extend the food chain a little further beyond where we usually think it ends.

Living soil supports abundant ecosystems of microbes! The microbes metabolize and utilize nutrients. They recycle wastes back into nutrients. They slowly break down rock below into more soil. They communicate, make tunnels, and channels. Microbes make minerals available for other lifeforms.

Plants take up water, soil minerals, and sun. They photosynthesize to make organic matter.

Animals eat the plants and/or other animals. Animals gain minerals and other nourishment from the plants that grew in the soil, or from the animals that ate the plants that grew in the soil.

Humans are among the animals. We obtain our minerals from the plants and animals we eat, and sometimes also from water we drink and air we breathe.

Does the food chain end here?

Are we individual beings? Or are we biomes?

Our insides are fertile ground for life to grow, with food, water, and shelter. The same is true for the insides of other animals! The animal gut is especially fertile for life because so many resources pass through the gut.

Like in other biomes, different terrain suits different species. In the case of our insides, the inhabitants include bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites. Some inhabitants help us, some leave us alone, and others may steal from us and even coopt our bodies and minds for their own purposes.

The terrain changes in different parts of us (in different organelles, cells, and organs); so do the inhabitants change. A walk through the intestine or the bloodstream or the kidney might look like a hike into a desert canyon or ascending a mountain alpine zone: you will notice changes in the lifeforms along the way.

By "nutritional immunity", we try to protect our nutrient resources from invaders and thieves inside us. Whoever best controls the valuable nutrient resources, will do better. Stronger host biomes retain resources better, and share those resources with friendly lifeforms instead of with enemies. Also, whoever defends best against toxins made by enemies, will do better.

When minerals and other nutrients enter us, they are entering a network of internal biomes, not necessarily going to us as beings. Our own absorption and transport systems will actively or passively absorb some nutrients. Others among the trillions of lifeforms inside us will snatch resources too.

The minerals entering our internal biomes will pass through additional networks and cycles and food chains inside us! Some minerals will emerge with microbes in our wastes, which traditionally returned to the soils, along with the wastes of plants (compost) and of other animals (manure). There, the microbial life inside us connects full circle with the food chain above.

Pollution and Interference in the Food Chain Inside Us

What happens if we spray anti-life chemicals on a field or on a rainforest? Many species die; other resistant species remain, take over, and invade. We have changed the natural balance of the ecosystem.

The same often happens inside us. In the modern world, internal pollution may relate to many of the changes inside our bodies and minds and spirits, which we may call health concerns. When we kill off some life inside us, other less favorable life invades. We have made less friendly biomes inside us, manmade ones instead of natural.

The biomes inside us affect what minerals/resources we actually receive and lose. The biomes inside us also may include toxins made by unfriendly new residents, or may remove toxins with help from friendly residents.

There are chemical signals in all our food about the state of the soil, the water, the plants, the animals. When we eat strange combinations of foods from environments we haven't seen, touched, or smelled, and from manmade altered, polluted, and depleted soils and the plants and animals that grow in them, what confusing information we must be sending into ourselves!

Did we think we were sterile inside? Or inside the rest of us, after the intestines? Why would Nature's intelligence sterilize our insides, while making such abundant life competition elsewhere? Would we want to be sterile inside, with an immune system that were already so perfect that it left itself sleeping without ongoing practice for future invasions?

What happens when we ingest anti-life substances? The mother passes some of her biome's lifeforms to her offspring. If her offspring then kills off many of the natural internal lifeforms, say with chemical antibiotics for a childhood mild ear infection... has the child's bond with the mother been damaged? Their biomes inside no longer match as closely? Have the internal ecosystems that passed through generations come unraveled? Have traumas of separation been made, traumas of biome die-off, of a new substitute set of biomes inside, biomes more altered by humankind? Are these internal eco-traumas remaining and passing from parents to offspring intergenerationally? What of the biomes inside us remain seven generations or more after the Industrial Revolution? What will they look like seven generations after recent changes to the food supply?

Our revolutionary opportunity is that we can love our internal biomes. We are each a nature preserve! Or many nature preserves! Health is ecology! We can start now, gently from where we are, to love and nurture and steward our internal biomes. The cleanup of the earth starts with each of us, and makes us happier and healthier too.

There is far more to the food chain than just a series of beings. Nature's food chain continues on our insides, not just the outside. We think, feel, and live the health of the biomes inside us!