The Market Is Open

ALFN Members,

The market is open on another beautiful morning. Groundhog day arrived with our furry rodent having a press conference and declaring he hadn’t seen his shadow. However, in a peculiar variation from the norm, Mr. Hedgehog admitted he had realized Spring would come early because Winter never really came. A critic raised the recent snow, but Mr. Hedgehog shrugged and paraphrasing Mark Twain argued, “When a wood chuck is accustomed to 78 in January, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.” Mr. Hedgehog’s press conference sent off a firestorm of political debate, but climatologist remained firmly footed with the venerable rodent.

Updates/Reflection

Recently, a friend loaned a good read to me: Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson. The author claims many of our fruits and veggies found in the supermarket have been neutered of original nutrients. Our penchant for the sweet and efficient has selected, over time, for less nutritious food. However, Robinson is a pragmatist and provides suggestions for finding the most nutritious strains of fruits and vegetables. Here are a couple of helpful suggestions with a few weird facts thrown into the list:

• The original kernels of corn from Mexico were 30% protein and 2% sugar. Modern sweet corn varieties are 40% sugar and 4% protein.

• All modern sweet corn comes from mutated kernels that were subjected to a nuclear bomb test in the Marshall Islands.

• The most nutritious greens are red, purple, and dark green. Spinach, endive, arugula and radicchio are the top performers…dandelions still hold the throne. These colors signify the presence of “botanical sunscreen” that blocks some harmful UV rays on the leaves. These antioxidants can have analogous effects in our own bodies.

• Tearing your lettuce or romaine into bit size pieces and storing for one day, increases the antioxidant levels in the greens. Pin prick ziploc bags that store your lettuce, but keep the bag sealed. This will allow the lettuce to breath as it lets off carbon dioxide and takes oxygen keeping the lettuce fresher for longer.

• Press or chop your garlic and allow it to sit for ten minutes before cooking with it. Chopping garlic and allowing it to sit for ten minutes sets off a natural chain reaction to create allicin (one of the most active and medicinal compounds in garlic). If garlic is thrown on the heat immediately, the heat-sensitive enzyme for building allicin is destroyed.

• Salad dressing with a fat such as olive oil helps your digestion extract more nutrients from salad.

• Red and yellow onions have the most phytonutrients. The outer layer of these onions is chalked full of these nutrients and can be captured if they are thrown into soups or stocks.

The book is full of fun suggestions for surviving and eating well. There are surprising facts about some canned foods and nutrient loss based on freshness. Nevertheless, the author confirms cutting out the supermarket network and eating local food has many nutritious benefits.

Cheers,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager