I’m enjoying a fascinating book by Bill Bryson called “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.” The home in question is a Victorian vicarage in southern England, which serves as Bryson’s springboard to explore the evolution of ideas, customs and technologies that affect daily life right down to our own time. For example, the chapter on the dining room explains the origins of the word “luncheon,”

literally a “lump of something” to tide us over at midday. More seriously, Bryson offers some startling revelations about our slow and still imperfect progress in understanding the science of nutrition.

“Until well into the 19th century,” says Bryson, “the notion of a well-balanced diet had occurred to no one. All food was believed to contain a single vague but sustaining substance—the universal aliment.” The prevailing idea was that the quality and variety of what people ate didn’t matter as long as they ate a sufficient quantity. Mass deaths from scurvy onboard British ships prompted the first research into the health effects of different foods in the 18th century; but even as evidence grew that proper diet could prevent scurvy, the British Navy balked at the expense and refused for decades to provide citrus juices to sailors. The relationship between vitamin deficiencies and illness was finally settled in 1939, when an American surgeon nearly killed himself to demonstrate the principle.

I can’t escape the parallels to our present day “quantity over quality” food culture. Modern methods of food processing severely reduce the flavor and mineral content of our foods, but we stubbornly value speed and convenience over nutrition. Despite steadily increasing rates of obesity, we balk at the expense of providing fresh fruits and vegetables to schoolchildren, and ignore the mounting evidence that GMO foods are harmful to the environment and to our health.

Most of that evidence focuses on glyphosate, the active chemical ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup® and other weed-killers that are the foundational element of herbicide-tolerant GMO crops. Numerous independent studies have suggested links between glyphosate and a host of problems including autism, allergies, immune disorders, male infertility and chronic fatal kidney disease. Glyphosate binds with minerals such as calcium, magnesium and copper; its original 1962 patent was for use as a metal chelator to clean commercial boilers and pipes. But in humans this chelation may prevent our bodies from absorbing essential mineral nutrients, and a recent study also suggests that glyphosate inhibits key enzymes that help our bodies dispel other environmental toxins.

The Union of Concerned Scientists points out that GMOs have been sold to us on unfulfilled promises of higher crop yields and decreased herbicide use when, in fact, the main achievement of GMOs has been an ever-increasing chemical footprint for food production and the development of glyphosate-resistant superweeds that require new super herbicides. According to The Organic Center, U.S. farmers used 383 million more pounds of herbicides between 1996—when Roundup Ready® seeds were introduced—and 2008, than would have been used without the introduction of GMO crops.

It’s hard to imagine a time when the whole notion of nutrition was unknown. I’m hoping that sometime in the near future it will be equally hard to believe that we ever tolerated the idea that we had to poison ourselves to grow food.