Salted

Lower your salt intake to lower your blood pressure? Nah. I use salt whenever I want to (good sea salt, not refined iodized type) - not all that much, but somewhat more than the average daily intake - and have always done so. I like salt on a lot of my stuff, and worship at the savory altars of akadashi, tsukemono and umeboshi. Last week at age 72, my annual checkup showed my blood pressure to be 96 over 67. The lower the better, said the doc.

GOYA

No, not that Goya, the big-G Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, the renowned Spaniard who painted such works as The Third of May 1808 or Saturn Devouring His Son and who sadly never in life tasted the small-g goya that is this ramble's subject, also called the bitter melon, which originated somewhere in the tropics, has long been enjoyed throughout Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and could, I don't see why not, also be grown and enjoyed in the USA but isn't yet, as far as I know.

Now that we're past that bizarre but subjectively necessary opening sentence I can get right to the topic at hand, the wondrous goya. I first tasted that crisp and uniquely astringent fruit (the bitterest on the planet, Wiki says) on Okinawa in the early 1960s. After leaving Okinawa I didn't have goya again for decades, since it was then unknown and ungrown in the USA. Even when I came back to Japan, the wonderful veg was unavailable in central Japanese supermarkets until a few years ago, but by then I was growing my own. It's one of those produce items that has to grow from low-class food to high cuisine.

The reason I'm rambling about this now is because on Saturday, after two non-gardening days spent in the big city where little grows, I found that those many little tiny baby cucumber-sized goya had, in the two rainless days since, grown to include 4 full-sized gourds hanging there in hefty beauty. Goya don't fool around when it comes to growth and prolificity, they don't sometimes curl up to hide behind leaves and try to avoid being seen, like cucumbers do, they just hang there on their strong vines, heavy and straight down, saying Here! Here I am! I'm ready, pick me! Went out again this morning and among the 2 dozen or so small to midsizers yet on their way to maturity, 4 more had grown to size overnight! For just a few seeds and a high vine-climbable surface with southern exposure, you can have them all! Fresh! And tasty! And property/action rich!

Because I put up the high net fence (ca 3 meters) (and thereby tripled my growing area!) I began to grow climbers there-- cucumbers, pumpkins, climbing squashes, runner beans -- cukes love getting up so high, waving their tendrils around to bring their bright yellow blossoms even higher, but the goya has a special wild viney quality about it, it grows left and right and up and down, covering the whole surface. This year I planted just two plants, about two meters apart, at the foot of the northern wall, and those two alone cover the entire wall and beyond (one vine reached out and got into the chestnut tree!) with palm-sized translucent jade green leaves, here and there a butter-yellow blossom that more often than not turns into a tiny greening gourd that grows like blazes; this morning I harvested four of the biggest ones (well over a foot long; they biggen fast, the biggerer the bitterer). Now there are about two dozen of all sizes remaining, with about 6 weeks of growing time left to go!

The bitter melon is also a beautiful plant. Hardy as well, once it gets going. And the gourds. Crunchy, nice bitterness, they don't dissolve into a mush, great in salads, stir fries, tempura etc. I bet Western chefs are about to come out with some great new goya discoveries. As for the health aspects, the bitter melon is pretty miraculous; Dr. Wiel praises goya too, it is a wondrous health veg full of salubrious goodies yet to be detailed, or even discovered!

Here's some recipes from Todd, an organic farmer in Wakayama.

Todd also provides a link to lots of good-looking recipes

at the National Bitter Melon Council's (who knew?) website

And some goya recipes from Okinawa (Beware sudden music)

YEAH, I KNOW.

Yeah I know. The old margarine/butter controversy... Though there seem to be fewer clear arteries on the margarine side these days... Still, here's an excerpt from a great take on the oleaginopolemic:

Effects of Margarine on Health

• Margarine triples the risk of coronary heart disease.
• Margarine increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol).
• Margarine Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.
• Lowers quality of breast milk.
• Decreases immune response.
• Decreases insulin response.
• Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC.

I like that last one.

From: Making Love in the Kitchen: The Butter Battle

GARDENS TELL THE TRUTH

Way back when I first started looking more closely at food and nutrition, investigating vegetarianism and discovering terms like 'organic,' I read and heard that organic food was more nutritious and safer to eat than agrobiz produce.

Some years later in Kyoto I met an agricultural engineer who was here from the US lecturing, who assured me profoundly that crops grown organically were nutritionally indistinguishable from non-organic. He was earnest and forthright, and he was an expert, being friendly. I didn't see how I could disbelieve him.

Still, I always bought organic when I could, since that's mere money in exchange for no exposure to pesticides/herbicides etc. I just can't accept that we know more than the big system and our bodies do, that we can outfox Mama Nature. To say nothing of the possibility of big expenditures for medical bills after years of eating Roundup et al., manifesting in illness can never be directly linked to that tomato you ate 20 years ago.

Then this morning, now that the subject of organic food prices is becoming a consideration on the verge of the greatest economic depression ever, I saw this:

"The $4.99 tomatoes are a good illustration.

That's how much one pound of organic tomatoes cost during a recent visit to a supermarket near Michelle Jones' Atlanta home. The founder of the consumer site BetterBudgeting.com said 'there's no way' she would pay such a price. Instead, she searched the produce section and eventually found a non-organic variety that cost $1.69 per pound....

From a nutritional standpoint, organic vegetables have no measurable differences than (sic) those grown with conventional methods, according to Bethany Thayer, a registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association."

--Family Finance: Grocery spending a moving target

************

Right after that I synchronicitously came across this:

"Organic Foods – a Far More Nutritious Choice

The simplest way back toward health is to focus on whole, organic foods, grown or raised as nature intended. Meaning, it’s grown using sustainable farming practices, and without the use of chemical additives, pesticides and fertilizers.

Food grown in healthier soil, with natural fertilizers and no chemicals, simply has to be more nutritious. It is common knowledge -- though knowledge that is greatly suppressed in the United States.

A 2003 study in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry, for example, found that organic foods are better for fighting cancer. And in 2005, scientists found that, compared to rats that ate conventional diets, organically fed rats experienced various health benefits. Rats that ate organic or minimally fertilized diets had:

• Improved immune system status
• Better sleeping habits
• Less weight and were slimmer than rats fed other diets
• Higher vitamin E content in their blood (for organically fed rats)

But perhaps one of the best studies out there on the benefits of organic versus conventionally-grown foods is the 2007 QualityLowInputFood Project -- a $25-million study into organic food -- the largest of its kind to date.

The researchers grew fruit and vegetables, and raised cattle, on adjacent organic and non-organic sites, and discovered that:

• Organic fruit and vegetables contain up to 40 percent more antioxidants
• Organic produce had higher levels of beneficial minerals like iron and zinc
• Milk from organic herds contained up to 90 percent more antioxidants

The results were so impressive they stated that eating organic foods can even help to increase the nutrient intake of people who don’t eat the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day."

************

My garden tells me the truth. Use your compost, grow your own. Cheaper than agrobiz cheap, and gives you natural exercise. Tastes better, anyway. Like those just-dug-up organic potatoes in that quiche I had for lunch today.

10 Reasons to Consider Growing Organic Vegetables in your Backyard

THE FOUR FOOD GROUPS

When I was a teenager the four major food groups were the cheeseburger group, the french fry group, the milkshake group and the jelly donut/cheesecake group, though not necessarily in that order, and you can throw in a double sub plus a large pizza with extra cheese. And some chocolate creme pie after. Time of day didn't matter much, either. A Snickers for breakfast was good.

It was a constantly changing bunch of groups that comprised our towering food pyramid, a shifty structure-- could be some cherry coke or potato chips or a sundae in there for example, depending on what store you were in, how much cash you had in your jeans and how many broke friends you were with. When times we hard we could do 8 on a Mars bar. There were prodigality controls at work, as in any natural system.

And as reflected in the morphing menu it was a different world back then, a better-tasting, scarfier, more edible world, at least for us teens. In school we were taught at yawning length about the conventional food groups and pyramids, with their grains and vegetables and milk bottles cluttering up the foodscape, but who lives according to what school says?

Ours was a food group you could dig into with both hands and not stop till the last crumb of cheesecake; ours was a food pyramid we were willing to climb over and over to the summit, a banana split with everything. Our pyramid was built of stuff we could appreciate day in, day out and in between. Oddly though, there was no obesity among us; not a single member of our gang was overweight. Times have gotten heavier, somehow.

Our rampant and broadly undiscriminating diet may have had much to do with the ignorance and inexperience of youth, but now, with the food police everywhere checking salt and sugar intake, cholesterol, transfats, vitamins, minerals and roughage, greens and yellows on down the long and growing list, we're living in the shadow of looming pyramids that blot out the view as they stretch to the nutritional horizon. It's no longer the simple and satisfying nomnom of eating, but the correctness of ingestion, the appropriateness of diet, with bibles of restraint, health, beauty, vitality, longevity-- buzzwords like a full colonic, how buff can you be, carbon footprint on the nape of the neck.

Jelly donuts with fat labels, cheesecake borderline criminal, like smoking and drinking. When will we return to the heedless glomming that is our birthright? Pretty much never, in my case. It has a lot to do with aging and unavoidable wisdom. As much as the distant teenager in me would like to follow up my tofu and lightly stir-fried fresh organic vegetables with a chunky wedge of New York cheesecake the size of an industrial door stopper - the kind of dessert I used to scarf like a hungry dog when I was ignorant of time and capable of promethean consumption - I'm chronically wiser now, and can enjoy the amazement that I've survived. I'll follow up that lunch with a nice grape.

My former food pyramid is but a molehill now-- time and wisdom will do that to a man, though when I return to the States on my vacations I still frequent the aging structure; nothing lasts forever...

THE COWS AGREE

THOUGHT FOR THANKSGIVING...

One week's food
Japan: The Ukita family of Kodaira City

Photo 1 of 16 from WHAT THE WORLD EATS

MEGASIZE ME!

The other morning I spotted this train ad
for the tallest meat construction I ever saw for commercial sale
(note the fluffiness of bun, the tenderness of lettuce,
the softness of cheese, remeniscent of fat hanging over a belt),
though the looming Megateriyaki was no svelte offering.
I remember when I thought a Big Mac was huge
and before that, when a burger and fries was a meal...
I suppose in another two years it'll be six burgers high, and then eight...
Are the jaws widening as the bodies do?

MEAT AS ENERGY

Found this a few days ago, and am just getting around to it-- it won't spoil.

I've posted a few anti-meat/milk, pro-vegan things in the past on PLM, generally expressed in terms of health, agricultural waste, pollution, economic inefficiency etc. But this study merits a good look not only because it comes from Japan, but more especially for the fact that it conveys the research results in terms of energy expenditure.

Carried out by Akifumi Ogino et al. of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, the study found that: “A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home… In other words, a kilogram of beef is responsible for the equivalent of the amount of CO2 emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometers, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days… [Moreover] The calculations… did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests.”

This certainly sheds more darkness on that thick steak...

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?

According to the McDonald's PR, out of sheer integrity (we can't stand keeping the consumer in the dark even one second longer than 50 years!) the burgermonger is at last going to tell its customers exactly what they're eating, right on the wrapper. I kind of doubt it, though.

Surely they're not going to say that this very quarter-pounder you're about to add to your body comes from cattle raised on factory farms where the animals have been weaned on cow blood, injected or medicated with antibiotics and growth and other hormones and fed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton seeds laced with slaughterhouse waste and tainted animal fats while standing and sleeping in their own waste for two years?

I don't think that'll wrap the Mac. The wrapper will say in tiny letters (that no hungry scarfer will ever pause to read) scientific-sounding stuff like: Big Mac Calories: 560, Carbohydrate: 47g, Total fat: 30g, Saturated fat: 10g, Salt: 1.3g...

What the labels should say in big red letters all over the place is simply "Believe us, you don't want to know."

OCA