What happened? Many books have been written about the changes that led to the world we occupy today where our food contains chemicals and other additives that either make us sick or keep us from being as healthy as we can be–a world where the food we eat is limited not only in the amount of nutrition it provides but also in the range of nutrients required to live fully and healthfully. This article cannot address all the factors that led us from the agricultural society of our forbearers to the highly mechanized one we inhabit today; however, it's worthwhile to think about the changes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and how they figured in those transitions and in the speed with which they occurred.

This revolution in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation brought about profound socioeconomic and cultural changes. It can safely be said that it was the most drastic turning point in the history of mankind. Just about everything in the daily lives of people was changed. For example, suddenly there were factory jobs that enabled men (and women) to buy the goods they had previously grown on their own land. For many people, this promised a better life; it certainly provided more “things.” However, as we know now, the life of the factory worker was not easier than that of the farmer even as labor-intensive as farming was in a pre-industrial period. Certainly, on the family farm, everyone worked including the children; but once factories became a way of life, children were also expected to join the work force. The stories of the exploitation of adult factory workers and most particularly the very young ones paint a dark picture of life in those days. The homes the factory workers lived in were deplorable. At least on the farm they were not forced to live in congested, filthy, disease-ridden neighborhoods–the best the factory workers could afford.

We've come a long way, of course, since those days, but the way of life that preceded the Revolution is all but lost forever. Today, we depend on corporations to produce and process our food. While there are regulations, we hear frequently how poorly followed or enforced they are. We know for certain that most of the food we eat leaves a lot to be desired compared to the food our ancestors produced in their own vegetable gardens and on their own farms. Even in the early days, it seemed to many people that “the sky was falling” and they tried to keep the world they had known from disappearing from the face of the earth. Some farm families held on; however, even many of those families were forced to give up because it became impossible to survive, let alone prosper. While many of those previously productive farms fell fallow and were not resurrected for a long time, the shift to corporate farming began at about that time. It made more sense in a struggling economy for farms to focus on volume rather than quality. As time went on, the only way the exhausted land could continue to produce anything at all was to take the disastrous chemical route. Chemical inputs and insecticides took the place of wise farming.

So here we are today with substandard foods that are as likely to make us sick as they are to nourish us. The taste is so unsatisfying that we eat a lot more just to have our hunger abated. No one seems able to explain why there is an obesity epidemic in America although the cause seems to stare us in the face–the food we eat is not appropriate for healthy human beings. Through the years, there have been many efforts to take us back to healthier foods and lifestyles and today many people participate in those efforts. In the United States, the organic farming/gardening movement began with a man named J. I. Rodale, who had been ill a lot as a child living in a tenement in New York City. The first issue of Organic Farming and Gardening was published in 1942 by Rodale Press, which had been founded by J. I. to get his message out. There is an army of organic growers today and many people are practicing growing healthful foods either in their own gardens or on their windowsills.

And then nutritionists began to discover that the preparation of the food we eat, even if it's organic, robbed it of many of its natural benefits. Cooking destroys vital enzymes and vitamins. Most of the processing that foods go through takes away the nutritional elements that are so important to overall health. In order to have the glow of health, shift your diet to a well-planned raw-foods diet and you will be surprised at the difference in your appearance and your over all aura.

Does eating wisely affect how we look? We know the answer to that question. The glow that comes from good health can't be duplicated by any kind of cosmetic. Beautiful skin cannot be applied. No shampoo or conditioner will give us a full, shining head of hair. It's not that applying substances is necessarily harmful in itself, but what we apply should be carefully chosen to augment our healthy good looks and not damage them and to correspond to an organic and raw-foods lifestyle. There are many natural, organic products that can enhance our natural, organic lifestyles and naturally healthy appearance.

By TTS Cofounder Botanical Chef Omid Jaffari