What I’ve learned from Masanobu Fukuoka

“ Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.”
—Masanobu Fukuoka

When Masanobu Fukuoka was 24 years old, he had an epiphany that would set his life on a completely new track and ultimately change the world. This was in 1937, and Masanobu, who had trained as an agricultural scientist, was working as an agricultural customs inspector when he was struck down by pneumonia. Lying in his hospital bed, unable to escape thoughts of his own death, an existential crisis took hold of him which would not abate even after the illness had passed. He could barely work and spent, he wrote: “I could see that all the concepts to which I had been clinging, the very notion of existence itself, were empty fabrications. My spirit became light and clear. I was dancing wildly for joy.”