How would it be if you could detect nutrient dense foods at the farmers market – just point a smart phone at a carrot and instantly know if it was high in nutrition… or otherwise?

Announcement: the Bio-nutrient Food Meter is coming soon!

I’ve been watching this project for a couple of years with interest. In this age of industrial farming practices that degrade soils, we really need to know (1.) how to tell the nutrient content in a given food, and (2.) how to grow nutrient dense foods.

The bio-nutrient food meter will help consumers like you to identify which foods are going to nourish your family. You can’t just know from a label such as “organic” or “natural” if the product actually contains all the building blocks for cells.

This new tool will also enable us who are farmers to understand how to grow nutrient-dense vegetables and fruits. Of course, this also means we’ll know whether we are growing nutritious crops to feed our animals. We will be able to check certain practices such as tillage versus mulching, or a certain soil amendment versus another, and find out which will grow the most nutrient dense foods.

What is this device?

The Bionutrient meter itself is really quite simple. It is basically a spectrometer that flashes a light at a product, such as a carrot or a pear at the market, and measures the rays that bounce back. These rays are different for every nutrient in the food, and they allow the program to assess the total nutrients. The meter can not yet give a readout of all nutrient levels, however. In the beginning, it will simply give a relative nutrient score, such as 67 out of 100 for this carrot, and 44 for the other.

The data that the meter collects will have to be analyzed to determine what exactly the results are saying. Throughout 2019, scientists, farmers and consumers are working together to compile a database of information to program the first meters for public use. They hope to have this done possibly as early as the end of this year.

Oh, by the way, the Bionutrient Food Association is a non-profit organization, and is committed to keeping the meter open source, so that it will be available to those people who really care about what goes into their bodies.

What are nutrient dense foods?

Food grown biologically should – and usually does – taste better. This may be because it has more minerals and vitamins, and also natural sugars from higher rates of photosynthesis.

The term ‘nutrient dense’ refers to the amount of nutrients in relation to calories. You can eat a sweet or starchy food and get a lot of calories, but not much in the way of lasting nutrition to sustain, grow and heal. This has been called “empty calories”. Plants grown with excessive irrigation and artificial fertilizers can be similarly low in nutrition. A plant that is grown in healthy soil should be much higher in minerals while containing no more calories.

Sometimes biologically grown food is sweeter, but not always. For example, wild vegetables can taste quite bitter or pungent but still be high in nutrition, while modern hybrids are usually simply bred for higher sugars. I believe the kind of sweetness we are after is the satisfying flavor that develops from sunshine and nutrients, not the bland sugary taste of the more modern hybrid fruits and vegetables. However, we will know much more about this in a couple of years, I hope.

The meter would be able to tell us the difference in nutrients between, say, a hybrid, an old heritage variety, and even a wild plant; for example a hybrid carrot, an heirloom carrot and wild carrot (Queen Anne’s Lace).

Bio-nutrient farming practices

At this point, we don’t yet fully understand all the ways that can help to make sure our foods are nutritious. However, we do know some basic things that have an impact.

1. Minerals: Be sure all the important elements are present in the soil. This is especially important for photosynthesis to work efficiently.
2. Living soil organisms: We need to provide a good home for fungi and bacteria, protozoa and beneficial nematodes, and other soil life. These tiny organisms are needed to make the minerals available to plants.
3. Carbon: Good amounts of soil organic matter (humus). This helps hold the nutrients and water in storage until they are needed.
4. Sunlight: Plants need enough sunlight exposure to enable photosynthesis. However, plants don’t all need the same amount of sunshine, of course.
5. Air: To make sure there is enough air in the soil for the microbes, we need to avoid irrigating too much, and we must provide drainage for water-logged soil. Too much water makes soil anaerobic and it also can also leach away nutrients. Anaerobic soils are so saturated with water that there are not enough air spaces for good bacteria to thrive, so the undesirable bacteria take over and create a sour condition that roots don’t like to penetrate.
6. Water: Although too much water is not good, there must of course be enough water for plants to grow, and for the nutrient exchanges to happen. Soil organic matter helps the soil to hold water instead of allowing it to run off.
7. Minimal Tillage: Tilling can destroy soil life, especially fungi. Therefore, the deeper and more often we till, the more we damage the network of fungal mycelium. This also breaks up soil aggregates, which are clumps of soil that have been “glued” together by beneficial bacteria. This clumping is necessary to ensure proper air and water movement in the soil. (See this previous post on our minimum tillage experiments.)

We’re looking forward to being able to use the Bionutrient Meter soon to further learn how we can grow the tastiest, most nutrient dense foods possible.

How we are getting involved

As a “farm partner” with the Bionutrient Food Association, we plan to collect samples of soil and crops through the summer, which will be tested in their lab. I’m excited to see what our management practices are actually doing, and what we still need to improve on.

We figured we can do more by providing this data than we can by playing around with the meter at this stage. So I’ll leave that to folks who are trained in science, or to those who have the money to invest in this beta-stage project. However, we’ll be ready to jump in and buy the programmed unit as soon as it’s available!

You can find out more about the Bionutrient Meter here. http://bionutrient.org/site/bionutrient-meter

If you want to get involved in the BFA and support their work, here’s the membership page. https://bionutrient.org/site/membership

If you believe this project is important, you can share this post and spread the news.