“In Nourishment a wise observer of the land and the animals becomes transformed to learn the meaning of life.”—Temple Grandin

**Reflections on feeding body and spirit in a world of change, adapted from the book Nourishment, read by author Fred Provenza**

Animal scientists have long considered domestic livestock to be too dumb to know how to eat right, but the lifetime research of animal behaviorist Fred Provenza and his colleagues has debunked this myth. Their work shows that when given a choice of natural foods, livestock have an astoundingly refined palate, nibbling through the day on as many as fifty kinds of grasses, forbs, and shrubs to meet their nutritional needs with remarkable precision.

In his book Nourishment, Provenza presents his thesis of the wisdom body, a wisdom that links flavor-feedback relationships at a cellular level with biochemically rich foods to meet the body’s nutritional and medicinal needs. Provenza explores the fascinating complexity of these relationships as he raises and answers thought-provoking questions about what we can learn from animals about nutritional wisdom.

On a broader scale, Provenza explores the relationships among facets of complex, poorly understood, ever-changing ecological, social, and economic systems in light of an unpredictable future.

This original audiobook program has been adapted from this groundbreaking research and book.

Praise for Fred Provenza’s Nourishment:

“Nourishment is a conversation between science, culture, and a greater spiritual or cosmological umbrella.”—Montana Public Radio

“Nourishment will change the way you eat and the way you think.”—Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect

“An absolutely fascinating topic, engagingly written. Fred Provenza will wholly up-end everything you think you know about what you are supposed to eat and why. Nourishment should be the first book read by every student of nutrition.”—Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Defending Beef

“Once again, Fred Provenza shows he is one of the freshest and most insightful thinkers about the role of herbivores (and omnivorous humans!) in our food and land management systems. His clear evolutionary thinking is matched by his keen powers of observation of ecological interactions. This book is a landmark contribution.”—Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Mesquite and Food from the Radical Center