Think about the last time you bought tomatoes. They looked fine, red, round, the right size. But if you've noticed that vegetables today seem to taste like less than they used to, you're not imagining it. Something has changed. And it started long before the tomato reached your kitchen.
It started in the soil.
For the past fifty years, Indian farmers have grown more food than ever before. This was necessary. At a time when millions in our country did not have enough to eat, growing more was not a choice but a responsibility. But the way we grew more was by feeding crops with chemical fertilizers, mostly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. These three nutrients make plants grow fast and look good. What they don't do is replace the dozens of other minerals like zinc, iron, and magnesium that plants used to pull from healthy soil, and that our bodies need to function.
Soil is a living system, full of bacteria, fungi, and tiny organisms that break down organic matter and release nutrients in a form that plant roots can absorb. When we farm the same land with chemicals year after year, that living system slowly collapses. The soil becomes dependent on inputs the way a body becomes dependent on supplements when its gut stops working properly.
The result? We are growing more food, but the food carries less nutrition than it did a generation ago. Studies show that the iron, zinc, and vitamin content of staple crops has dropped measurably over the past few decades. This is what researchers call "hidden hunger." You eat enough to feel full, but your body is still starved of what it needs. In India, this shows up as anaemia in women, stunted growth in children, and weakened immunity across the board. We are one of the most nutrition-deficient populations in the world, even as our farms produce record quantities of food.
Now think about the farmer on the other end of this.
He is buying more fertilizer every year just to get the same yield from land that is getting more tired. Input costs have gone up. Soil that has lost its natural health also loses its ability to hold water, which means more irrigation. More debt, more dependency, shrinking margins. The farm is not paying for itself the way it once did, not because the farmer is doing something wrong, but because the soil underneath him has been depleted by decades of a system that optimized for output and ignored everything else.
This is the connection people rarely make: the farmer's financial crisis and the consumer's nutrition crisis come from the same place. Degraded soil.
There are farmers across India who are beginning to farm in ways that give back to the soil rather than just take from it. This means not tilling the land after every harvest, so that the soil structure and the organisms living in it are not constantly disrupted. It means planting cover crops between seasons so the soil is never left bare and exposed to erosion. It means growing multiple crops together on the same land, the way farmers did for centuries, so that different plants support each other's nutrient needs. And it means reducing chemical inputs gradually, allowing the soil's own systems to slowly come back to life.
These are not new ideas. Many of them are rooted in how Indian farmers farmed before the era of chemical agriculture. But doing this today takes time, patience, and a willingness to accept uncertain yields for a few years while the land recovers. And right now, almost nothing in our system supports a farmer who makes that choice. No bank accounts for the time soil recovery takes. No government programme rewards a farmer for rebuilding land health. The market pays for size and appearance, not nutrition.
So the farmer stays on the treadmill. The soil stays depleted. And we keep eating food that looks fine but gives us less than we think.
This is not a problem that better shopping choices alone will fix. It requires rethinking how we finance farming, what our food programmes measure, and what we as a society decide to reward. The soil is not just a farming problem. It is our problem, because what goes missing from the soil eventually goes missing from us.
So here is a question worth sitting with: if the food we are eating is making us less healthy, and the farming that produces it is slowly making our farmers poorer, what exactly are we optimising for?
