Verified by 
Key points
- Trees communicate not only with other trees or plants but in fact with entirely different species.
- This makes the soil in which we grow our food nothing short of magic muck; soil greatly impacts what we eat.
- Yet junk food and many convenience items cancel out this premise.
Continued from Just Rub Some Dirt On It: A Mother's Love and Wisdom Part I
Drug-eluting stents, DES for short, are the sliced bread of interventional cardiology. They are among the most important tools to treat acute heart attacks and prevent the recurrence of those pesky blockages. Some would argue that they are the single most important innovation since the creation of angioplasty itself. And one of the biggest advances in the technology of stents was the addition of the drug-eluting polymer.
But where did this revolutionary drug come from? What is this silver bullet? The drugs we use today when we perform coronary angioplasty and stenting to treat heart attacks and coronary artery blockages are analogs and derivatives of sirolimus. Sirolimus is the generic term for rapamycin. Rapamycin is a compound produced by the bacterium Streptomyces hygroscopicus. But this is not just any run-of-the-mill bacteria. This bacteria was discovered in the 1970s from soil samples unique to Rapa Nui, or as it is commonly called, Easter Island. It is magic muck.
As I left the hospital one morning, I reflected back on the unassailable wisdom of mothers. In a very real sense, using the latest technology and science, I had treated a heart attack by rubbing dirt on the inside of a coronary artery; albeit very special dirt. Yet once again, it’d taken me decades to learn that my mother was right all along.
The French Expression of Terroir and the Cost of a Bottle of Wine
And that got me to thinking, always a dangerous enterprise, about the interactions of soil and the food we grow? Does that make a difference?
The answer: In Vino, Veritas
The concept of the local environment (the weather, the local microclimate, and of course the soil itself) is wrapped up in the French expression of Terroir. This, along with the handling of the raw ingredients by the winemaker, is the primary reason that a bottle of red wine from one part of Napa Valley costs $12 and another bottle of the same variety of grapes costs $1200.
If we accept the premise (and obviously we do) that the soil in which we grow our grapes dramatically impacts the final product, why do we not recognize and apply this in our daily selection of the edibles we pop into our gob? The answer is we do, sort of. Chefs and very often foodies of all descriptions are meticulous about selecting their raw ingredients from certain regions and/or specific producers precisely because they recognize that real food embraces the character of terroir.
However, the main premise of fast food, junk food, and many convenience foods is precisely the opposite. The idea is that for someone who frequents a fast-food establishment in California where they live, going through the drive-through whilst they are visiting someone in Florida provides a level of safety and comfort in knowing that the burger in the bag will taste exactly the same. It is not only convenient food, but it is safe food in the sense that it is reproducible food. And here’s the catch, reproducible food requires reproducible ingredients. This is completely at odds with the natural order. It is why a mass-produced ultra-processed chicken-like nugget requires thousands of pounds of 47 different ingredients and a nugget made from a chicken requires a piece of chicken and breading.
When we embrace this philosophy of ‘McDonaldization’ (as defined by the famous sociologist George Ritzer) to produce even the raw ingredients; as exemplified in modern extractive industrial mono-crop approaches, are we potentially negatively impacting their effect on us? We have only recently, within the last decade, begun to explore and understand the complex ecosystem implications of our relationship to the food we eat. When we eat we never dine alone. Everything that we consume is co-metabolized by the over 100 trillion bacteria that inhabit our gastrointestinal system. And it turns out that what we feed them has a direct and mighty impact on our own health and wellness.
And if we have developed such an intimate and complex relationship to the earth through the food we choose to eat, should we expect any less from the inhabitants of the plant kingdom? After all, plants have been terraforming the surface of the earth for more than 100 million years before the first animals arrived on the scene. To put that in context, that is 100 percent more time than renowned physicist Michio Kaku estimates it would take humanity to evolve into a type III civilization. This is a civilization that can harness the energy output of the galaxy and he likens it to the size and scope of the Galactic Empire featured in the Star Wars saga. To appreciate the scope of what can occur in that time span, we are currently considered a type 0 civilization.
On many different fronts, long-held conventional wisdom about the plant world is being uprooted. Professor Itzhak Khait of Tel Aviv University has documented that plants emit ultrasonic sounds when harmed or in need of water. In human parlance, plants can scream. And they do exactly that when injured or under stress. It also turns out that plants are constantly talking to each other through various communication methods besides sounds, like airborne chemical messengers such as pheromones.
Plants and Trees Communicate in Their Underground Environment
However, perhaps the most amazing observation is that the plant kingdom had access to a natural World Wide Web, or more precisely the Wood Wide Web, long before people ever dreamt of the notion. It turns out that the root systems of various plants, and especially trees in a forest, communicate extensively with their underground environment. Even more incredibly, the roots of trees have been shown to interact with the fungal, or mycelial, network that exists just below the surface. Trees communicate not only with other trees or plants but in fact with an entirely different species. Research has shown that trees will send the valuable energy source glucose into their roots where it can be exchanged with fungi for needed minerals and other nutrients. Through such networks, younger trees provide sustenance to keep old stumps of their ancient forebears alive. In a sense, preserving the cellular memory, the ancient wisdom, of their ancestors. There are ‘mother trees’ that encourage and help support and nurture seedlings in their immediate vicinity. Where we once considered the forest a place of random, unintelligent, and chaotic competition between various species of plants and fungi; it much more closely resembles Fangorn Forest from The Lord Of The Rings; “It’s talking, Merry, the tree is talking.”
(The series concludes in Part III)
