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The Best Nutrition is Natural
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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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Healthier Halloween
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Halloween is truly a kid’s
holiday –- good friends, creative costumes, event-filled parties –- all with a
cool spooky theme -- who...
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June 2007 Newsletter
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To read the full newsletter online, please see: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletterjune07.html
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
You are cordially invited to my house on August 26th to celebrate
Kitchen Garden Day. We'll be organizing a walking tour of some
home gardens in my neighborhood, making a stop at the newly-planted
kitchen garden at our local elementary school, and munching on some
delicious food along the way.
Since I'm assuming that some
of you will not be able to make it (for example, those of you from
Argentina, South Africa and Australia!), I thought I'd give you a quick
virtual tour of my June garden through the picture above. I've
left out a few identifying labels (e.g. garden hose, kale, onions,
misplaced toys, etc.) for lack of space , but it gives you a feel for
what's planted. For those of you who are curious, that's not grass
growing in between my beds, but fresh untreated grass clippings that I
put down as a mulch...very soft under summer's bare feet. I've posted a
high resolution picture of my garden
here without the labels if you want to see it in its natural state.
As you can see, it's been a
busy month getting plants and seeds in the ground and quite a few greens
out and into the family salad bowl. It's also been a busy month at
KGI "headquarters". We harvested a bumper crop of public awareness
raising this past month due to an
Associated Press article that featured our efforts to bring about a
kitchen garden revival. The article appeared in over 30 papers
across the US and has attracted a number of energized people to our
effort. Welcome newcomers!
Speaking about reaching out
to new folks, I continue to brainstorm ideas for reaching out to people,
some old, some new. In the new category, I've recently posted a
new short video to youtube,com which hopefully will get people
thinking and, ultimately, eating in a different way. If nothing
else, it's good for a chuckle. Please pass on the link if you find
it worthwhile. We're also adding prizes to our "Grow-Off
Show-Off" competition, too, so be sure to check that out.
Grand prize is $500 and all the international celebrity one gardener can
handle.
For those of you who can't
make it to Scarborough, Maine for our celebration of Kitchen Garden Day,
why not throw a little garden party of your own? That's the best
way I know to grow the number of home-growers: by bringing new people
into kitchen gardens - whether big, small, urban or rural - to
show them the quantity, quality, and diversity of crops a small plot can
produce.
I know this works because I
just recently helped some neighbors who attended our Kitchen Garden Day
party last year plant their first garden. They're delighted
to be eating their first home-grown foods ever. If that's not
cause for celebration, I don't know what is.
Happy summer,
PS: Next month, I'll report
from southern France: ooh la la, good things ahead!
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