The Best Nutrition is Natural
By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, February 14, 2007 in The Washington Post
Nature's gifts come in fancy wrapping. "Look at me!" the tomato shouts. "I'm red, I'm sweet, I'm juicy." The banana makes no less flashy a pitch: "Check out my E-Z-Peel skin!" It's a marketing strategy designed to lure creatures to eat fruits and thereby disperse their seeds.
You wouldn't think these goodies needed help selling themselves to us, but advertising by the ultra-processed food industry is a big distraction. Even recent boosts from science, trumpeting the nutritional value of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, seem to derail nature's mission. No sooner do we learn that a plant food is a package rich in disease-fighting antioxidants than somebody tries to take that complex package apart. Witness the beta carotene debacle of the '90s. On the strength that beta carotene, found especially in bright orange foods, might protect us from diseases such as cancer, suddenly beta carotene supplements were hot-selling items. Then studies found that the supplements might cause cancer instead. The conclusion: Get your beta carotene from carrots.
That's the central message of Michael Pollan's latest book, "In Defense of Food." In his usual clear, hit-the-nail-on-the-head style, Pollan traces our country's sorry journey to a less healthful diet, and he offers good, simple solutions -- the most noteworthy of which is to "eat food." Real food, that is, not a collection of cheap, dubious makeshifts assembled in a lab. Basic to his argument is the idea of food synergy, that a food "is more than the sum of its nutrient parts."
The trend toward medicalizing vegetables (breeding them to be higher in the flavonoid of the month) is perhaps better intentioned than turning food into pills, but to my mind it still smacks of what Pollan calls "nutritionism." Is it necessary to pack extra lycopene into a tomato and more carotene into a carrot, or vice versa? If you eat a diet rich in lots of different fruits and vegetables, grown organically and picked fresh, you will get all the nutrients you need.
One of Pollan's maxims is to choose food at the edges of the supermarket if you must shop there at all. The center aisles are a swirling nucleus of ever-changing fake foods with unpronounceable ingredients. Pick up something from the outer walls instead: an honest red cabbage or a fat beet. Then break through those walls to the fields and gardens beyond.
Granted, February is not the garden's best season, but in my pantry there are red paste tomatoes that I put up in summer, pink applesauce I made in fall, and even, in the cold greenhouse, a few last sweet winter carrots. And that's what I'll serve my valentine.
Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
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Urban fruit gleaning
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Here's a neat idea and yet another neat video from "Cooking Up A Story": urban fruit gleaning. And it features the work of a neat volunteer-led initiative in Portland, Oregon called "The Portland Fruit Tree Project." Check it out and start bringing together a gleaning corp in your area...the fresh fruits, jams, jellies and ciders are waiting for you.
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Food fight (of the red and juicy sort)
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You won't catch kitchen gardeners doing this with their hard-won tomatoes! The footage comes from "La Tomatina", an annual tomato-throwing festival in the town of Bunoi, Spain where residents and visitors turn five truckloads of tomatoes into puree in the span of one juicy hour.
For more info on the festival,see http://www.latomatina.es/
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Lebanese okra and tomato stew
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A whole range of simple Lebanese vegetarian dishes, referred to as bi zeit in Arabic, are cooked in and primarily flavored by olive oil. This vegetarian dish combines the flavors of okra and tomato with garlic and cilantro. If you have fresh tomatoes from your garden, by all means, use them in place of the canned.
Ingredients
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 pounds fresh or thawed frozen okra, patted dry
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
5 large garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro leaves
One 28-ounce can peeled Italian tomatoes, chopped, juices reserved
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Procedure
1. In a large skillet, heat the vegetable oil until shimmering. Add the okra and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until bright green and crisp-tender, about 4 minutes. Transfer the okra to a plate with a slotted spoon; discard the oil.
2. Add the olive oil to the skillet and heat until shimmering. Add the onion and cook over moderate heat until softened and golden, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and cilantro and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and their juices and bring to a simmer, then cook until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes.
3. Return the okra to the skillet and season with salt and pepper. Cover and simmer over low heat until the okra is tender and the sauce is thickened, about 20 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Serves 6
Recipe source: Food and Wine magazine
Photo credit: Arobotar
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