If You Want to MAHA, Plant a Garden
Everyone wants to Make America Healthy Again, but we’re looking in the wrong places
Everyone wants to Make America Healthy Again, but we’re overlooking where health begins: the soil beneath our feet.
We debate health-care policy, argue about insurance systems, and spend billions on supplements, medications, and biohacking trends; meanwhile, we ignore one of the most powerful and accessible tools for restoring human health: we’ve stopped growing our own food.
Less than a century ago, our food wasn’t in grocery stores. It was in homes, in larders, and in gardens. Today, many Americans don’t even know how to cook for themselves, let alone grow or preserve; we rely instead on premade, ultra-processed options or takeout.
Meanwhile, industrial agriculture is jeopardizing our ability to grow anything at all with its reliance on pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers that degrade our once-fertile land. Worldwide, synthetic fertilizers and other agricultural runoff have contributed to over 700 “dead zones” where once-thriving marine ecosystems can no longer support life. Our pollinators are disappearing. By some estimates, the United States has just decades of topsoil left if industrial agriculture goes left unchecked.
But beyond the environmental impact, this has led to a full-scale human health crisis.
The same system that has depleted our soil has also depleted our food. The same practices that maximize yield have stripped nutrients, increased our exposure to toxins, and contributed to the rise of chronic disease, metabolic dysfunction, neurodegeneration, and cancer. We cannot separate the health of our bodies from the health of the land. A tomato pulled warm from the vine contains more than nutrients—it restores a relationship modern life has nearly severed.
If we want to make America healthy again, we have to start at the root—literally.
The more I grow in my own backyard, the more convinced I become that gardening is not a luxury—it is a practical way families can reclaim both health and independence.
Are you growing any of your own food this year—or hoping to start? I’d love to hear what you’re planting (or what’s holding you back) in the comments.
AMDG,
Samantha
PS If you’d like help getting started, I wrote Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaiming Eden in Your Own Backyard to help families cultivate food, restore their health, and steward soil and soul alike.