B-Side

Soil To Gut

The Health of the Dirt Decides the Health of the Food. And You.

When I was a kid, we played in the dirt. Not on it — in it. Hands buried. Knees stained. Digging, building, throwing, rolling. Nobody handed us antibacterial wipes when we came inside. Nobody sprayed our hands with sanitizer before lunch. We washed up at the sink — maybe — and sat down to eat.

And we were fine. More than fine. We got sick sometimes, sure. But our bodies fought back because our bodies had been trained by exposure. The bacteria on our skin, in our gut, in the soil we played in every day — it was all part of the same system. We just didn’t know it had a name.

Now we live in a world of antibacterial everything. Soaps. Wipes. Sprays. Surfaces that promise to kill 99.9% of germs. And somewhere along the way, we started treating all bacteria like the enemy — when most of it was the thing keeping us well.

The Loop

Here’s what scientists are starting to understand more clearly: the dirt your food grows in and the gut inside your body are part of the same conversation.

Soil has its own microbiome — billions of bacteria, fungi, and organisms that break down organic matter, cycle nutrients, and feed the roots of whatever’s growing in it. Healthy soil produces nutrient-dense food. Depleted soil — the kind that’s been stripped by chemicals, over-farmed, and treated like a production floor instead of a living system — produces food that looks the same but carries less of what your body actually needs.

When you eat food grown in healthy soil, you’re not just getting vitamins and minerals. You’re getting the biological information that came from the ground. The microbes. The compounds. The things that talk to your gut bacteria and tell your immune system how to respond.

It’s one loop. Soil microbiome to food to gut microbiome. What happens in the dirt doesn’t stay in the dirt — it travels through the root, into the plant, onto your plate, and into you.

The Celery in the Car

I eat a lot of celery. Two stalks a day sometimes. And I’m usually buying it on the way home, which means I’m eating it in the car before I’ve had a chance to properly wash it. I brush off what I can. I trust that the little jungle mist at the grocery store did its job. And I eat it anyway.

Every time, there’s this small voice that says, “You should probably wait and wash that.” And every time, there’s a louder voice that says, “It’s celery. It grew in the ground. You’ll be fine.”

And I think that louder voice is right — not because I’m careless, but because I’ve started to think differently about what’s on my food versus what’s in my food. The residue from healthy soil isn’t contamination. It’s context. It’s the biological fingerprint of where that celery came from and what fed it.

I’m not saying eat dirt. I’m saying don’t be afraid of where your food lived before it got to you.

What We Sanitized Away

There’s a growing body of research connecting the rise in autoimmune conditions, allergies, and gut disorders to our increasingly sterile environment. The hygiene hypothesis — the idea that too little exposure to microbes in childhood leads to an overreactive immune system later — has been discussed for decades. But it’s evolving now into something broader: the understanding that our disconnection from soil, from the outdoors, from the microbial world we evolved alongside, has consequences we’re only beginning to measure.

Kids who grow up on farms have lower rates of asthma and allergies. People who eat organic, regeneratively farmed food show different gut bacteria profiles than those who eat conventionally grown produce. The connection between the health of the soil and the health of the person isn’t a metaphor. It’s biology.

And it ties directly into how we think about food at Remixology. The GAP framework — gut, anti-inflammatory, polyphenols — starts with the gut for a reason. Because the gut is where everything begins. And what feeds the gut starts long before the grocery store. It starts in the dirt.

Trust the Ground

We’ve spent a generation trying to separate ourselves from the earth. Sealed homes. Sanitized surfaces. Produce that’s been washed, waxed, and wrapped in plastic before it ever reaches your hand.

But the body remembers. It was built by the same system that built the soil. And the closer your food stays to that system — the less processed, the less stripped, the less removed from the ground it grew in — the more your body recognizes it as something it knows how to use.

Trust the ground your food came from. And maybe, every once in a while, eat the celery before you wash it.

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