When Nicole Cormier considered the soil, its makeup and purpose, observing and appraising it through the eyes of the nutritionist and dietician that she is, Cormier realized what she was seeing is the same sort of microbiome that inhabits the digestive system of the human body. She deduced that the collection of microbes that colonizes our colon and teems in our intestines, breaking down food, extracting nutrients and passing them along to the bloodstream, is almost identical in process and importance to the living soil that makes nutrients available to a plant’s root system.