A book about how to grow, eat and heal

Flat Earth Food

A Copernican Shift in How We Grow, Eat and Heal

The living world is not a machine. A convergence of sciences is now proving it — and the consequences for how we understand health, food, ecology and economic value are as paradigm-shifting as when Copernicus showed that the Earth moves around the Sun. The economic value of the opportunity this reveals runs not into the trillions but the quadrillions. This is that argument.

About the Book

Flat Earth Food is a philosophical provocation about worldviews, not a food book. The central argument is that Western civilisation is operating on a fundamentally mistaken worldview — one that treats living systems as machines, complexity as a problem to be eliminated, and ecological relationships as externalities. The converging crises of chronic disease, biodiversity loss, and ecological collapse are not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are symptoms of the same upstream cause: a worldview that has been systematically wrong about what living systems are and how they work.

Drawing on immunology, soil biology, microbiome science, metabolomics and complexity economics, the book traces a single chain: from ecological complexity through food to human health — and argues that breaking any link in that chain generates costs that the existing economic system has never been asked to account for.

Including those costs changes everything. The book introduces the concept of complexity services — the vast, systemic value generated by healthy soils, diverse ecosystems, functioning microbiomes and ecologically rich food systems that current accounting frameworks simply cannot see. When you do the accounting properly, the number is not in the trillions. It is in the quadrillions. It is what becomes visible when you stop treating biological complexity as a free external input and start recognising it as the most productive and most underleveraged asset class on Earth.

Flat Earth Food is for anyone who suspects that the problem of our time is not technological but conceptual — and who wants a rigorous, honest, and occasionally uncomfortable account of what a different worldview would actually mean. The author has made extensive use of AI, especially Claude developed by Anthropic, to navigate and synthesise the extraordinary breadth of science this argument requires — a task that exceeds what any single human mind can hold simultaneously, and a process that is itself a small demonstration of the relational intelligence this book argues for.

For the Press

Said about the book:

“This book explains that by destroying the ecosystems that surround us and reducing biological complexity, we are compromising our health, our food sources, our economies and our futures.”

Graham Rook, Emeritus Professor of Medical Microbiology at University College London, and founder of the Old Friends hypothesis

“Much of our current food system still rests on a ‘Flat Earth’ worldview, one that simplifies and separates what is, in reality, deeply interconnected. What we have begun to recognise, however, is that the world of food is not flat but round: a system in which soils, ecosystems, economies and human health are continuously linked, and where nothing truly disappears but returns in altered form.”

Dr. Masatoshi Funabashi, Research Director, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo

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Flat Earth Food is published by Pedon Press