The food you are eating is only as good as the dirt it growed in

(http://www.newstarget.com/020072.html)
You are trying to eat healthy, making sure to buy plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. After all, if you are eating your fruits and vegetables, you are getting most of your vitamins and minerals, right? Well, maybe not. Here is something that I just learned: plants can make vitamins, but not minerals. The only way that plants get minerals in them is to absorb them from the soil they grow in. So, if you buy some kale thinking that you are getting a good supply of calcium (since that what we are told), you really are only getting as much calcium as the kale could absorb from the soil. Maybe you aren’t getting any calcium from it. With modern “factory-farming” practices, chances are that most of the commercially grown produce contains very little of the minerals that they are claimed to have. It is not the plants’ fault; they cannot pass along those vital minerals if they are already depleted from the soil. How do those minerals get there, anyway? Oddly enough, it is the natural disasters like rivers flooding, tsunamis and volcanoes erupting that replenish the soil with these life giving minerals. Even though these natural occurrences cause great devastation to land, property, humans and animals, they result in replenished fertile soil for many years. When humans had to live with nature, they learned to accept this. Before our development of modern technology and ingenuity, humans knew to not build their houses on riverbanks and coastal beaches. They knew that ever few years they would get flooded. We now think that we can build where ever we want and can control nature. We think we can keep her rivers and oceans at bay. Well, we have learned time and time again that we cannot. There is a natural order and cycle to this world. We can try to circumvent this natural order with modern synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to yield plentiful crops year after year, but they come with a price. A part of this price is food that looks great, but is devoid of vital life-giving nutrients.