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Make Yourself a Rain Garden
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By Charlie Nardozzi
Summertime is thunderstorm time across the country. All that water rushing
off roofs, driveways and walkways is loaded with...
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November 2007 Newsletter
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To read the full newsletter online, please see: www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletternovember07.html
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
Here’s a question for you: when a gardener in Geneva or Zurich grows chard is it called "Swiss Swiss chard", “Our chard”, “Swiss© chard ”, or something completely different?
I’ve always wondered about the origins of the name “Swiss chard”. Aside from Brussels sprouts, it’s rare that one region gets top billing for a whole species. What’s interesting is that North Americans seem to be the only ones calling chard Swiss these days. Like a James Bond of the vegetable world, this plant travels under many different identities in other parts of the world including silverbeet (UK and Australia), bietola (Italian), blettes (French) and acelga (Spanish).
As it turns out, Swiss chard is about as native to Switzerland as James Bond too. Botanists have traced its origins back by to Sicily. So, why don’t we call it Italian or Sicilian Chard?
There are multiple explanations depending on who you ask and how deep you are prepared to dig. I recently read a column by a chef who claimed that chard is referred to as Swiss “because of its extensive cultivation in Switzerland”. Hmmm. I’ve been to Switzerland before, a few times in fact, and cannot recall seeing it at all. Verdant valleys with dairy cows, yes. Snow-capped mountains, yes. Endless fields o’ chard, um, no.
Another interesting, though implausible, theory is that chard earned its moniker after a “great flee beetle epidemic” which made it resemble Swiss cheese. If that’s the case, I grow many varieties of Swiss spinach, Swiss radishes and Swiss arugula in my own garden each year. Swiss cabbage is one of my specialties.
The explanation that gets the most attention on the internet attributes the Swissness of chard to a Swiss botanist named Koch who is said to have named the plant first. But try finding information on this famed botanist and you’re almost back where you started. Some sources have Koch living in the 19th century whereas others say the 16th. And you thought Austin Powers was a man of mystery!
So, several inquiries and sentences later, the confusion surrounding chard’s name continues and maybe that’s not a bad thing. It’s often when we think we really know something, or someone for that matter, that we start losing interest.
If you’re lucky to have some chard still growing in your garden (mine got wiped out this past week by two consequentive nights of 20°F temperatures ), give it a fresh look and try preparing it in a new way. Similarly, if you’ve got an alternative theory on its name or some better information on our Mystery Man Koch, send it my way. Inquiring minds want to know.
Happy harvests and harvest feasts,
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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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Interview with Michael Pollan
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For those of you who are fans of Michael Pollan and his latest book, "In Defense of Food, this online interview is the next best thing to sitting down with him yourself. It comes courtesy of our filmmaking friends at Cooking Up A Story. Enjoy and be thinking about how you can "defend food" in your own family and community.
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