THE VILLAGE FOOD MYTH: NATURAL DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN HEALTHIER
It is an illusion to believe that people who live in villages automatically eat healthier food than people who live in cities or what we call “civilized societies.”
The assumption sounds comforting: village people eat what they grow, their food is natural, city people eat processed food, therefore village people must be healthier. But agriculture does not work that simply. Growing your own food does not mean that the food is genetically unchanged, nutritionally superior, free from chemicals, or automatically safer.
Human beings have been changing the plants they eat for thousands of years. Long before laboratories, genetically modified organisms, commercial fertilizers, or modern agricultural companies existed, farmers were already selecting seeds from plants they considered desirable. They selected plants with larger fruits, bigger grains, sweeter taste, better storage qualities, stronger stems, faster growth, resistance to pests, and better cooking characteristics. They replanted those seeds generation after generation, gradually changing the genetics of their crops.
Take maize, for example. Modern maize did not simply appear in nature in its present form. Maize was domesticated from the wild grass teosinte in what is now Mexico approximately 9,000 years ago. Through thousands of years of human selection, the plant was transformed into the maize we know today. So when someone says, “I don't eat modified food; I grow my own maize,” the obvious question is: which maize? Almost no cultivated maize is an untouched wild plant.
Cassava gives us another fascinating example. Cassava is now deeply embedded in African food culture, but it did not originate in Africa. It was domesticated in the Americas and later introduced to Africa. Nigerian farmers subsequently selected and propagated different varieties suited to their environments and preferences. Traditional farming itself was therefore participating in genetic selection.
Cowpea has an even deeper African history. It was domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa thousands of years ago. Ancient farmers selected plants with desirable characteristics such as larger seeds, reduced pod shattering, and more useful growth patterns. Modern cowpea breeding later built upon this agricultural inheritance.
Rice has also undergone thousands of years of human selection. Wild rice was cultivated and gradually domesticated in Asia over a very long period. The rice we eat today is not simply a wild plant collected from nature. Human beings selected particular plants repeatedly until cultivated rice developed characteristics that made it useful for agriculture and human consumption.
Wheat is another remarkable example. Modern bread wheat has a complicated genetic history involving ancient hybridization and polyploidization. Different ancestral grasses contributed genetic material to the wheat that eventually became one of humanity's major staple crops. Again, this happened long before modern genetic engineering.
But we need to make an important distinction: traditional selection, domestication, cross-breeding, hybrid breeding, mutation breeding, and modern genetic engineering are not the same thing. Calling all of them “GMO” would be scientifically inaccurate. GMO, in the modern regulatory and biotechnology sense, refers to organisms whose genetic material has been deliberately altered using modern genetic engineering techniques.
Modern GMO technology is relatively recent compared with agriculture itself. The first genetically engineered plants appeared in the 1980s, and genetically modified crops became commercially important during the 1990s. Humanity had already been altering the genetics of its food crops for thousands of years before modern biotechnology arrived.
And Nigeria is now part of that modern biotechnology story. Nigeria has a national biosafety regulatory system, and genetically modified crops have received regulatory approval. Bt cowpea was approved for commercial cultivation, and TELA maize received approval for commercial release in 2024. This does not mean that every maize cob or every bag of cowpea in Nigeria is genetically modified. It means that approved GM varieties exist within Nigeria's regulated agricultural system.
But here is the bigger question: even if you completely avoid GMOs, does growing your own food automatically mean you are eating healthier?
No.
Health is influenced by much more than whether you personally planted the seed. What variety did you plant? Where did the seed come from? Was it a traditional landrace, an improved variety, a hybrid, or a genetically engineered variety? What is in the soil? What water was used for irrigation? Were pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or fertilizers used? How was the food harvested, stored, transported, washed, cooked, fermented, smoked, or fried?
A person living in a village may grow their own vegetables and still have exposure to contaminated water, agricultural chemicals, mould, heavy metals, or poor storage conditions. They may also have a diet lacking nutritional diversity. Meanwhile, someone living in a city may buy fresh produce from a reputable source, wash it properly, eat a diverse diet, exercise, and have access to better medical screening.
There is something beautiful about growing your own food. It can strengthen food security, preserve agricultural knowledge, provide fresh produce, and connect people with the land. But freshness and genetic purity are not the same thing. And “natural” is not a scientific synonym for “healthy.”
We sometimes romanticize the village as natural and the city as artificial. But the village farmer is also an agricultural technologist. The farmer selects seeds, crosses plants, propagates varieties, grafts, experiments, adapts crops to soil and climate, and passes knowledge from one generation to another.
Our ancestors were not passive observers of nature.
They were actively reshaping nature.
They transformed wild plants into crops capable of feeding civilizations.
So the real question should not simply be, “Is this food natural or GMO?”
Ask better questions: What exactly is the crop? Where did the seed come from? How was it bred? How was it cultivated? What chemicals were used? What is the quality of the soil and water? How was it stored? How was it prepared? What is its nutritional composition? And what does the scientific evidence tell us about it?
Because the address of the eater does not determine the quality of the food.
You can live in a village and eat poorly. You can live in a city and eat poorly. You can grow your own food and make excellent nutritional choices, or grow your own food and make terrible ones.
Human beings have been modifying the plants we eat for thousands of years. Modern genetic engineering is only the latest chapter in a much older history of domestication, selection, breeding, and human interaction with nature.
The romantic idea of the untouched village diet is not history.
It is mythology.
And if we genuinely want healthier societies, we should replace the mythology with something much more useful:
KNOWLEDGE.