Exploring Vitality with Dan Kittredge: a day rooted in soil, story, and Food Beyond the Plate

Last Sunday was a hugely hopeful day at our Living Food Campus. A group of people gathered to the rhythmic sounds of Mak Adem, not as their titles or roles, but simply as people – their job labels left behind in favour of curious open minds. The Campus was blanketed in intentionality and care to enable the exploration of our vitailty equation to emerge deeply.

Vitality = nutrient density + nutrient diversity + nutrient availability x by presence

At the centre of the day's curation was a long community table carved directly from the earth. Its surface cool and earthen to the touch. The vision was to bring to life the elements of the equation through a soil-immersed meal, a dining experience where the concepts could be understood through the senses...joy, flavour, texture, colour...vitality. It was at this table where chefs, farmers, health practitioners and food activists and many more all gathered side by side, breathing in unison and well-nourished to enable a sense of possibility to be digested.

Practically exploring diversity, bioavailability and the life beneath our feet

Exploring Vitality unfolded into interactive learning, blurring the line between kitchen and classroom. In one workshop, aproned guests crowded around jars of chopped vegetables, discovering the alchemy of fermentation. Under Delia's guidance, we massaged salt into foraged sukuma and wild greens, packing them into jars to ferment into vibrant chimichurri. Along the way, the discussion turned to bioavailability – how these ancient fermentation practices amplify nutrients and friendly microbes in our food, making vitamins more absorbable and our guts more resilient.

Across the Campus in our artisan sourdough bakery and stone-grinding mill, others delved into nutrient diversity through sourdough. Participants of all ages plunged their hands into a spectrum of herbs, local nuts and seeds and soaked and sprouted heirloom ancient grains - millets, sorghums, amaranth - folding them into their sourdough loaf crafted in advance from fresh stone-ground flour. This wasn’t just a bread-baking session; Tash revealed a lesson in biodiversity and nutrition. Each person crafted their own loaf, blending different plants into the dough to create a living bread that celebrated diversity in flavour and micro-nutrients.

Through these two hands-on workshops, the event highlighted how nutrient density, dietary diversity, and traditional techniques intertwine to boost the health hidden in our meals. Lively conversations sprouted around the tables as people compared textures and flavours, realising that the more life and variety we invite into our food, the more vitality we invite into ourselves.

Some journies of the day didn’t require traveling anywhere – it was simply a safari into the soil. In our on-site Soil Lab, visitors explored the teeming universe beneath our feet. Petri dishes of compost and soil samples were passed around, through microscopes, we watched in awe as microbial life swamed and danced in a single drop of soil – nematodes, fungi, bacteria forming an invisible web of life that sustains everything above. Joyce played the sounds of living soil versus dead using our Soil Accoustics device, helping people to sense the aliveness of what we often pay little attention to. As clods of earth were crumbled in our own hands, we even learnt how a healthy soil’s smell, texture, and taste can hint at its vitality. This was science made visceral and personal. By the end of the soil safari, many of us had the startling realisation that soil is a sensory-rich entity – damp, gritty, musky, alive – and that our own vitality is inseparable from this underfoot.

A conversation that held consciousness and nutrient density in tandem

We were privileged to have Dan Kittredge, a globally renowned expert on regenerative farming and nutrient density, with us for the event (in fact the impulse for the day was his presence in Kenya!). Eloquently Dan further honed this guidance to view soil not as dirt, but as a living community of organisms – the origin of nourishment. In a curious, daring conversation, he shared how the nutritional quality of food begins in the soil, echoing a principle he champions worldwide: nutrient-rich food starts with nutrient-rich soil, and when soil health thrives, so do plant and human health.

But he didn't stop there. His words challenged us that in a world led by people who lack vitality, what hope is there for operating from a state of higher consciousness and coherance? Eating nutritional dense food is the key to unlocking the systems change that this we desperately need - it gives us belief , it enable us to be more resilient, more tolerant, more loving. From this starting point (!) in the conversational journey, Dan then dived deep into the physical affect of poor quality food on our epigenetics, it is quite terrifying to realise that as generations go we are quite literally becoming less resilient. We were encouraged to learn about what nutrient density actually is, by both playing around and measuring it scientifically at home by taking our own BRIX readings and learning to sense into it through awareness - as Natoora has long championed - FLAVOUR is our our guide! Tomato off the vine on a warm summer's day versus a shop bought one in winter, it doesn't take a chef to tell you which tastes and FEELS better!

His Treaty on the Definition of Nutrient Density, is a groundbreaking initiative to scientifically define what truly nutritious food is. This treaty isn’t just academic; it’s a rallying call that brings together farmers, scientists, and food citizens around the world to agree that nutrient-dense foods reflect the health of the ecosystems they are grown in. The treaty’s ethos resonated on our Campus in every bite we ate and every soil sample we observed. It’s about aligning our food system with the wisdom that human health and ecological health are one and the same. If we want food full of life, we must start with living soil and diverse, thriving landscapes. This idea - that food is medicine not just for us but for the land - pulsed through the event, and continues to pulsate through every product in the Grove and Meadow portfolio, with the aim of leaving us inspired, hopeful and engaged.

(Full recording of the conversation will be uploaded into this blog soon!)

When farm becomes table, what shifts inside us?

We took our seats on giant banana leaves and hessian, feet grounded in the soil. Tash guided us through a grounding meditation reconnecting us with the food that slowly started coming out dish by dish. Each one crafted from the abundance of the Campus' produce - foraged greens, herbs plucked from a polyculture farming system and vegetables grown just meters away were transformed by in-house chefs into rustic, nourishing dishes. As we broke bread (baked that morning from stone-ground, campus-milled diversity flour), we let the words we had just heard sink in. We slowed down and truly tasted our food. With that presence, it became clear that our vitality also deeply depends on whether we are paying attention, chewing our food, being grateful of our plates as we eat. There is the potential for each bite we take to become both a revelation and a revolution - connecting us to the soil and the wider web of life. We could sense that this third generation family farm itself was offering us nourishment that we enjoyed together, participating in an intimacy as old as time - a shared communmity meal.

Table inspired by

Food Beyond the Plate: a movement in Kenya takes root

Beyond being a memorable gathering, Exploring Vitality carried a deeper mission: to spark a movement of Food Beyond the Plate. Throughout the day, it became clear that the true significance of food isn’t confined to what’s on our plates. Food is a story of soil and season, of hands that cultivate and traditions that shape cooking, of health and ecology interwoven. Grove & Meadow co-created this event with that philosophy at its core – to encourage everyone to look beyond the plate and consider how our food is grown, processed, and connected to the wider environment.

Our Exploring Vitality event was a seed planted in each of us. And like any good seed, its real growth happens after it’s in the ground. Our work in Kenya is all about planting these seeds of change. Through the movement we’re cultivating spaces where chefs, farmers, healers, and eaters come together to reimagine what food can be: a source of vitality that nourishes our bodies while healing our planet.

We invite you to follow our work, visit the Living Food Campus, and become part of this unfolding story. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a student, or simply a curious eater, there’s a place for you in this movement. Come hang out in our shamba and sense into wider nature, mervel at soil, play, be curious! Workshops happen almost every weekend and tours weekly.

Together, we can nurture this seedling of vitality into a thriving grove, a meadow of abundance, and a legacy of wellness for future generations. Good food should feed more than just our stomachs - it should nourish the soil and the soul too.

Co-creation by

Photos by Peter Irungu