Diets were always local by necessity until fossil fuels gave us the ability to move seeds and food around. These indigenous diets were honed and perfected over thousands of years of trial and error, using our instincts to decide what was edible and what wasn’t, and what keep us feeling good and what had the opposite effect.

As it turns out, we have perverted this idea, by trying to create a profitable and scientific diet in laboratories, one which has spread all over the world because it seems to save time and money (and carries with it a certain je ne sais quoi from the west). Instead it encourages us to forget the way our ancestors ate, and then wonder why we are obese, with high rates of diabetes and heart disease.

Dr. Daphne Miller set out to analyze places where indigenous diets still thrive, and where western disease rates are their lowest. Her book, The Jungle Effect, writes in great detail about how we can change the tide of fast food, and make indigenous food from good, clean and fair sources at home. I had the privilege of interviewing Daphne for the Slow Food Nation blog. I encourage everyone to check out her highly readable book, which fuses travel narrative, science, food writing and her medical and nutrition knowledge into a book even someone new to the dirty little secrets of food policy in America can understand and be inspired to take up the cause.