I am just finishing this book, "Eating on the Wild Side". It was written by Jo Robinson, who visited Powell's in downtown Portland, and I bought the book personally from her. The main idea is that we have bred our nutrition out of our food in seeking bland, sweet, transportable, reliably productive and identical foods. It is in two main sections, fruits and vegetables. It is absolutely packed with ideas about varieties, history, methods of preparation, storage and serving, and options for improving the nutrition of our foods. It is available at libraries for those patient and cheap souls who don't want to buy the book. I want to hold onto it as a resource. She is from Vashon Island, WA and actually grows the varieties she talks about in her book. She has lists of what types of each species to grow and how. I highly recommend it to anyone who eats lots of fruits and vegetables, which tragically is not most Americans.
John S
PDX OR
I'm interested to get an idea of which of the generally available vegetables and greens are more nutrient dense than others. But I'm also a bit cautious regarding our ever changing idea of which nutrients are important.
The funny thing is that our prehistoric ancestors would have done much better on our diet than the one they had, and we could benefit from elements of theirs.
I certainly wouldn't trade.
Also, I'm sure there is some nuance that wasn't apparent in the excerpts but there seems to be a contradiction of the anecdote about lettuce. She says if you tear it into pieces, then several days later it will have a bunch more antioxidants implying that's the way one should eat it. But later on she lists lettuce as one of the things that should be eaten right away after taking home.
Hey Jafar,
I agree with your sentiments. She's very specific in the book about details in an almost nerdy way that I like. She says to take them home, tear them up the first day and wait from 24 to 48 hours for the plant to "fight back" (the antioxidants are because the head of lettuce still believes it's alive and is fighting bugs that are eating it). She is very clear about how quickly plants lose their nutrition in storage, so yeah, just leaving it in the frig for a week makes you lose a lot of nutrition.
She talks about how the prehistoric ancestors didn't have it better, but with our knowledge about them (which they didn't have about us) and our modern science, we can live way better than how they lived or how most of us are actually living now.
I agree about moderating every inch of our lives based on one study. I think we have to look at a general pattern. Exercise, sleep, vegetables, close to wild plants/animals=good. Stress, isolation, lots of alcohol/drugs, smoking, sedentary lifestyles, alienation from nature=bad. I do think it's fun to realize that each one of us is creating culture every day by what we do. For most Americans, watching 5 hours of TV is their culture. Taking 7 medications a day because you don't exercise or eat vegetables or fruit is their culture. I don't want that culture.
John S
PDX OR
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