We Want Real Food: Why Our Food is Deficient in Minerals and Nutrients - and What We Can Do About It
by Graham Harvey
Constable & Robinson ₤9.99, 256 pages

21st Century Smallholder: From Windowboxes to Allotments - How to Go Back to the Land Without Leaving Home
by Paul Waddington
Eden Project Books ₤12.99, 224 pages

The Not So Little Book of Dung
by Caroline Homes
Sutton Publishing ₤14.99, 208 pages

The strength of Graham Harvey’s polemic We Want Real Food is the passion with which he argues that modern farming methods are not only having a devastating effect on the countryside, but that they are slowly killing us as well.

At times, this makes it a depressing read. Harvey’s book isn’t, as one might think, a plea to stop eating fast food. That would be easy. Instead, it’s an argument for changing how farming - from the granting of subsidies to the use of fertilisers - is done in this country. And you don’t have to get very far into it to realise that it is a mighty big combine harvester to change direction in a hurry.

For those of us who think we are making the right choices in supermarkets, Harvey, an agricultural journalist and story editor of the long-running farming radio soap The Archers, argues that even by choosing fresh fruit and vegetables, we aren’t necessarily doing our bodies as much good as we think. He cites a report by geologist turned nutritionist David Thomas that claims that between 1940 and 1991 vegetables had lost 24 per cent of their magnesium, 46 per cent of their calcium, 27 per cent of their iron and a whopping 76 per cent of their copper. Accordingly, you’d need to eat 10 tomatoes of the 1991 variety to get the same amount of copper that was available in a single 1940 tomato.

A United Nations report estimates that two billion people worldwide suffer from “hidden hunger” - vitamin and mineral deficiencies including iron, zinc, iodine, vitamin A and folic acid - which undermines physical and mental health. Harvey lists modern ailments from dyslexia to heart disease that, he argues, can be linked to the poor quality of our food.

Modern farming methods, where cattle are taken off pasture and fed in sheds on cereals and high-energy foods such as soya meal, has not only damaged the cattle (high-protein soya meal is toxic to their livers), it has depleted the essential fats, namely omega-3 fatty acids, in our diets. People whose diets lack omega-3s are more likely to suffer from depression, schizophrenia, hyperactivity, Alzheimer’s and are more at risk from cancer.

Harvey travels the country to find farmers and soil experts who argue convincingly that the reliance on phosphates for fertiliser is destroying the natural system for growing healthy, nutrient-filled crops. And the irony is that chemical fertilisers are also likely to be killing the very soil fungi that could prevent their crops becoming diseased in the first place. My one quibble with the book is that it is punctuated with these case studies which, at times, are so skimpy that they become annoying - it’s arranged like an A-level primer.

Good healthy soil produces good mineral-rich produce, and it is at this point in his book that Harvey’s polemic becomes a call to action. Consumers, he thinks, have a role in this. We should demand to know how our food is produced and opt for real food - pasture-fed beef and dairy cattle, chickens that see the light of day and vegetables grown on good soil. He suggests, as far as possible that we forgo supermarkets in favour of farm shops, farmers’ markets and the internet. And he believes by doing so, we will transform the health of the nation.

There is another alternative, which is to grow your own. This is not much examined by Harvey, who is really targeting the majority of us who try to shop well at supermarkets. And if you have space for just a window-box, 21st Century Smallholder is for you. Subtitled “How to Go Back to the Land Without Leaving Home”, it offers exactly what it says on the cover - a straightforward guide to planting your own food whether you have just a balcony or a few acres on which to raise pigs, bees and chickens. You can’t help but buy a packet of lettuce seeds and get planting.

Unlike many how-to books which assume much more knowledge than they should, 21st Century Smallholder, whose author keeps bees and grows vegetables on an allotment in south London, offers gentle advice on choosing composting methods, finding fruits and vegetables that work for you and planting and harvesting your crops.

Alarmingly, and much in-step with Harvey’s book, Waddington points out that if you are trying to grow food “conventionally” - the ironic term for cultivating with the use of fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides - this book isn’t for you. He recommends varying between using permaculture - carefully planning and maximising the relationships between plants and animals (chickens are particularly good for the soil) - and organic methods.

Waddington’s book ends with a chapter on making your home self-reliant, which includes advice on energy-efficient savings and recycling water.

He is not, however, an enthusiastic believer in composting toilets (apparently you need the space - a big cellar or basement and, one assumes, understanding neighbours). But if he were, he would find The Not so Little Book of Dung, a great resource. There is an entire chapter devoted to “Human Motions”, though it covers animal, fish and fowl excrement in equal detail. This is a serious read for anyone interested in soil, because all too often, as both Harvey and Waddington point out, we ignore its replenishment at our peril.

Gardening historian Caroline Homes covers all aspects of ordure - from the efficacy of using lion dung on gardens to ward off deer to how beneficial “nightsoil” was to Victorian gardens. She has unearthed (pardon the pun) reams of interesting stories, for example, how MPs discussed moving Parliament because the Great Stink of 1858 was so bad - this was the crisis that led to Joseph Bazalgette’s ingenious system of sewers.

The role of manure, so beloved by gardeners, is much discussed. Homes quotes the traveller and chronicler the Reverend Arthur Young who, after a six-week tour through the southern counties, praised the farmers of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk: “I have never met with any place around which the farmers had such a spirit of purchasing manures.” A Carthusian monk writing in the early 18th-century recommended dung of wheat-straw, being careful to mix the “excrementitious balls with the straw”. Pliny described a vineyard owner made wealthy through thoroughly “dunging” his vines over an eight-year period.

All three of these books are essentially treatises on how we live. And how we might live better. Something to ponder over the sweetpeas.