Eating Well

In Praise of Wayside Plants

"Modern Homo sprays his dandelion with pesticides, killing many less weedy plants, and perhaps himself, slowly, and then goes to the drugstore to buy a lecithin/selenium pill. The dandelion is one of the best sources of lecithin, according to my database. And all plants apparently contain selenium. The bitter compounds, mostly important phytonutrients for us, discourage herbivory and diseases of these bitter herbs, actually increasing their weediness. The meek shall inherit the earth. Where once the green trees were kissed by the sunrise There's a highrise 'tween the sunrise and the smog in your eye. All the other flowers got twisted by the herbicide squirt The last dandelion's laughing, man's bitter dessert." Jim Duke, Phytochemicals

July 4, 2001. As the United States celebrated Independence Day, how many back yard chefs tossed dandelion greens, chicory or wild garlic in their salad or slaw? Quite a few. Even as giant-sized supermarkets spread all over the world, foraging for wild foods resurged in the USA.

"We're seeing more people going out into the woods to find truly 'natural' foods," Ellen Weatherbee, author of Edible Wild Plants, told Detroit reporter David Shepardson a few years ago ("Forests, fields full of fine food").

In major cities, greenmarkets and supermarkets carry some of these wild foods -- wild leeks (ramps), dandelions (extra large, how did they grow them?) and purslane -- in and sometimes out of season. But this serious eating only for a tiny minority of the population.

In parts of Sicily about a third of the people eat locally grown wild vegetables three times a month or more. It's just food. The group that eats wild vegetables most often, a researcher said at a conference in France this summer, is made up of older men. These men also eat more cabbage, leafy and root vegetables, mushrooms, tomatoes and other fruiting vegetables and more olive oil.

They seem healthier for it. Men in this Southern part of Italy had, when last measured in 1980, consistently lower rates of stomach cancer, colorectal cancer and cancer of the esophagus, pancreas and liver than men in the wealthier industrial North East.

Older men in the USA who eat more than two servings a day of any dark green and deep yellow vegetable have a lower rate of heart disease, according to the US Department of Agriculture. They have up to a 70 percent lower risk of cancer than men who eat less than one serving a day.

As a person matures their taste for bitter fruits and vegetables increases - the tastebuds for bitter actually outlast tastebuds for sweets. If so, the food industry is not really helping this older population.

Dr. Adam Drewnowski, an expert on taste and food preferences, obesity and cancer prevention said last year that the food industry has spent decades ridding foods of natural chemicals that taste bitter. Yet many bitter foods are healthful. The solution, Drewnowski says, is not food processing but good cooking. Olive-eating people around the Mediterranean appreciate bitter as a true flavor and dress it out with salt and pepper, lemon, vinegar and olive oil. Or the cook takes a bitter ingredient -- rhubarb or citrus rind, say -- and adds just enough sugar to leave a tangy edge.

USDA by contrast has patented an enzyme process that "removes the bitter white portion of grapefruit peel, eliminating hand-peeling and allowing more precise portion control." The prepeeled fruit, they say, "is ideal for school lunch programs and restaurants." Not so many years ago, school children who needed nutrients would eat the bitter white lining of citrus peel. We still don't know all of what's in it.

Seed-breeding too has usually had contempt for bitter plants. USDA phytochemical specialist Dr. Jim Duke writes: "All of these bitter herbs contain many important nutraceuticals which primitive and modern agriculture tends to select against as seeds of more palatable variants are saved, more bitter ones discarded; or modern agriculture selectively breeds to diminish the bitter nutraceuticals. I suspect that a half cup a day each of ... five bitter herbs would lower the incidence of many diseases of modern man."

Only a massive turn around could induce North American men to eat like Sicilian men. But even an occasional taste of wild plants keeps the palate primed. And we really have to do this for ourselves. There is much to gain.

Last month scientists in the UK published an article in The Journal of Clinical Pathology to show that salicylic acid, "a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, is present in fruits and vegetables and is found in higher concentrations in vegetarians than non-vegetarians." A diet rich in fruits and vegetables raises the level of salicylic acid in the blood, although not as much as a daily aspirin. "These findings may explain, in part" the researchers said, "the health promoting effects of dietary fruits and vegetables." Now it is true that salicylic acid is a COX-2 inhibitor and an antitumor agent and has many other properties. Plants highest in 1) salicin and 2) salicylic acid are the 1) willow and 2) licorice root. They have been used medicinally for thousands of years. Willow is the source of aspirin. If you look in Jim Duke's database you'll see that he lists traces of salicylic acid in peanuts, pumpkin seeds, strawberries, raspberries, wine grapes, violets and many other edible or medicinal wild plants.

Salicylic acid is just one phytonutrient among unreckoned numbers of plant chemicals whose value is not yet fully assessed. The sharp flavors of edible "weeds" like sorrel and rocket and of many garden-raised and market plants -- rhubarb, mustard and collard greens, endive, watercress, damson -- set our teeth on edge and teach us to eat nothing to excess. Our palates are designed to learn from childhood up which plants and which parts of them are wholesome.

It takes a culture in which this is valued. Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years has made use of bitter as one of "six flavors" to categorize medicinal plants. Chinese Traditional Medicine, which identifies five flavors, says that "the property and flavor of a drug should not be treated separately but should be taken into consideration as an integrated whole. Only in this way can drugs be understood and used correctly."

With the spread of monoculture and lawns, weeds have been rooted out or sprayed with poisons to an extent that few trust a wild leaf or berry in their own yard or neighborhood. Now the war on weeds is armed with patented seeds engineered to make favored plants withstand floods of herbicide aimed at all the rest.

Half of the soybean crops planted in the USA already include genetically engineered Roundup Ready ™ soybeans. Most Americans have already ingested a gene modified substance, whether they know or not. There's probably no harm at all in the modified bean, though we don't know that. But if the entire globe converts to Roundup Ready ™ crops, how many edible, health-protective "weeds" will be lost forever? And what else do those wild plants contain that our scientists haven't analyzed yet? © J. STRAX

Links to sites consulted for this article:

Ann Ist Super Sanita 1996;32(4):453-69 [Geographic distribution of digestive system tumor mortality in Italy, 1970-87]. [Article in Italian] Cislaghi C, dal Cason M, Tasco C, Braga M. Istituto di Biometria e Statistica Medica, Milano.

http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/syllabus/module6.htm

"Natural salicylates probably occur in all willows, poplars, meadowsweets, and at lower levels in all plants." Jim Duke

Phytochemicals [Jim Duke]

Dec. 1, 2000, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition -- review by Dr. Adam Drewnowski, Director Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Nutritional Sciences WU

Discovery of Taste Receptors May Make Bitter a Bygone Taste NIH March 16, 2000

The Sense of Taste (one of John Kimball's hyperlinked Biology Pages)

Phytonutrient Laboratory, USDA
FAQ

New Crop Resource Online at Purdue University

Essential Oils: Advanced Studies August 6–16, 2001

Ethnobotanical approaches to the discovery of bioactive compounds. Trish Flaster, 1996.

Growing and Marketing Chinese Vegetables in Central Kentucky Wenwei Jia, Mary Witt, and John Strang 1996

Domestic Production of Herbs and Spices Dario Cisneros 1996

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