Curiously, Justus von Liebig, the nineteenth-century German chemist with the spectacularly ironic surname, bears responsibility for science’s overly reductive understanding of both ends of the food chain. It was Liebig, you’ll recall, who thought he had found the chemical key to soil fertility with the discovery of NPK, and it was the same Liebig who thought he had found the key to human nutrition when he identified the macronutrients in food. Liebig wasn’t wrong on either count, yet in both instances he made the fatal mistake of thinking that what we knew about nourishing plants and people
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