Of course it matters.
The stranger question is why modern people became willing to pretend it wouldn’t.
You are made out of the world. The food is made out of the world. How the world touches the food eventually becomes how the world touches you.
This is not mystical. It is embarrassingly obvious.
A tomato grown in living soil by someone paying attention is not the same thing as a tomato engineered to survive shipping, fluorescent lighting, refrigeration, and six days in the back of a truck while still looking emotionally available in a supermarket pyramid.
The modern industrial spell is not merely that food became processed.
It is that food became abstract.
Calories. Protein grams. Fiber count. Shelf life. Yield per acre. Quarterly efficiency. Bright packaging with little leaves on it pretending to be nature.
Meanwhile the organism eating the food keeps whispering:
“I am full, but something is missing.”
And then the system says: “Interesting. Have you tried our fortified yogurt tube with added wellness dust?”
Look carefully at the pattern.
The soil gets depleted. The plants get weaker. The animals get sicker. The humans get inflamed, exhausted, anxious, overfed, undernourished, and spiritually strange. Then a trillion-dollar optimization industry appears to sell fragments of what the original ecology once provided automatically.
That does not mean you need to become a frightened food priest.
You do not need to spend your remaining years screaming at seed oils in the parking lot of an organic grocery store.
Purity is another trap. Status is another trap. Fear is another trap.
The question is not: “Can I achieve perfect eating?”
The question is: “Am I restoring contact with nourishment, or drifting deeper into counterfeit food reality?”
Sometimes the answer is a farmer’s market. Sometimes it is cooking instead of unwrapping. Sometimes it is eating with other humans. Sometimes it is growing basil in a stupid little pot near your window so your nervous system remembers food was once alive before it became branding.
The important thing is this:
Food is not merely fuel. Food is relationship.
And relationship changes the thing.
What Sun is pointing at is that food quality is shaped by ecological context, not merely calorie composition.
Modern nutrition culture often treats food as interchangeable units of macronutrients: calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat. That framework is useful but incomplete. The biological reality is that the nutrient profile and physiological effects of food are influenced by soil composition, farming practices, biodiversity, atmospheric conditions, harvest timing, storage duration, processing intensity, transport systems, animal feed quality, and cultivar selection.
This is why two foods with superficially identical calorie and macronutrient profiles can produce different experiences of satiety, digestion, energy stability, flavor, and long-term health outcomes.
The emerging research on elevated atmospheric CO₂ reducing mineral concentrations in staple crops is an example of this larger principle, not an isolated anomaly. Industrial systems frequently optimize for yield, shelf stability, transport durability, visual consistency, and economic efficiency. Those are not irrational goals. They helped feed billions of people. But they are not identical to optimizing for nutrient density, ecological resilience, or human flourishing.
The important correction is avoiding purity ideology.
There is no clean binary between “good natural food” and “bad industrial food.” Human beings live within constraints of cost, geography, time, culture, family structure, and access. The goal is not moral superiority through consumption.
The more durable practice is perceptual and progressive: - learning to notice differences in food quality, - increasing contact with minimally industrialized foods when realistically possible, - cooking more often, - eating more whole foods, - paying attention to satiety and energy rather than only stimulation and convenience, - and recognizing that nourishment includes relational and behavioral context, not merely nutrient chemistry.
The deeper principle is that organisms regulate within environments. How food is grown is part of the environment entering the body.