Authors: Nina Planck
Why? The benefits of fish to mother and baby are "enormous," says Dr. Michel Odent, an expert in prenatal nutrition.
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Odent is concerned that more women fear excess mercury than understand how important fish oil is. In 2005, a study by the
Harvard School of Public Health confirmed this view, arguing that the mercury warnings could cause pregnant women to eat too
little fish, not only for the baby's brain but also for their own health. "I think we've got two messages," said Joshua T.
Cohen, who led the research. "If you're not pregnant and you're not going to become pregnant, eat fish. If you are pregnant
or you are going to become pregnant, you should still eat fish, but you should eat fish low in mercury.'
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Like the FDA, Odent advises pregnant women to avoid the big carnivorous fish, and encourages women to eat plenty of the small,
fatty ones, like the anchovy, pilchard, herring, and common mackerel. Mostly herbivorous, farmed fish such as catfish, carp,
trout, and tilapia are also good choices if mercury is a concern. The jury is out on tuna, a carnivore; the cautious pregnant
woman might prefer to avoid it. If you don't care for fish, do take a high-quality fish oil, in capsules or liquid.
WHERE FISH KEEP OMEGA-3 FATS
Oily fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel) store omega-3 fats in muscle. The soft brown flesh beneath salmon skin is a particularly
rich source. Flaky white fish store omega-3 fats in the liver. I can buy monkfish liver, a Japanese delicacy, at my local
farmers' market. Saute it in butter and put a slice on toast. The French call it
le
foie gras de la mer.
The best supplement is the traditional favorite of old-school nannies: cod-liver oil, rich in omega-3 fats and vitamins A
and D. Some brands have a mild citrus flavor. Another good choice is wild sockeye oil. All fish oil should be wild and unrefined.
Quality fish oil supplements don't contain mercury or PCBs.
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Should you eat fish raw? Yes— traditional diets include a lot of raw fish. The Inuit eat mostly raw seafood and blubber, the
Japanese love sashimi, the Spanish make seviche, and Scandinavians have gravlax (salmon cured with sugar, salt, and dill).
These recipes make nutritional sense because polyunsaturated omega-3 fats are very sensitive to heat. According to Stoll,
when you cook a piece of fish, the omega-3 fats are partially protected by lower temperatures in the middle. Nevertheless,
the less heat the better. Serve salmon and tuna medium or rare, if that's to your taste, or try seviche, sashimi, and cold-smoked
lox. I adore these dishes, but if you don't, eat fish the way
you
like it. My guess is that for most people, any fish is better than none.
Why I Never Rebelled Against Vegetables
FARMING is RELENTLESS; my father calls it a "vegetable-driven existence." Our season started in March, with tomato seedlings
in the greenhouse. In April, we picked the always-thrilling first crop (I still love spinach for that reason), and soon after
came the more glamorous strawberries and rhubarb. When the June heat hit, zucchini production exploded, cucumbers were next,
and blueberries came in on the Fourth of July. In the height of summer, we picked and sold hundreds of bushels of tomatoes.
After Labor Day, we had to pick sweet corn before school, and when we came up the hill from the bus stop in the afternoon,
a note on the kitchen table told us where to pick beans. By late September, we were all half praying for an early, hard frost
to end our vegetable-driven days, but the cool-weather crops were still to come. In October, we lugged baskets of butternut
squash, and our hands got numb from washing turnips and collard greens in big tin buckets. For vegetable farmers, winter is
a great relief, like silence after listening to jack hammers. I don't know how dairy farmers keep going twelve months a year.
You might expect a childhood like that to put me off vegetables forever. But I love everything about them: how pretty they
look on the plant, picking them when they're just right, even washing, chopping, and cooking them. Most of all, I love to
eat vegetables; I know there are a few I don't like, but without effort I can't remember what they are. Salsify, maybe— but
then I never seem to cook it properly. And white asparagus.
At the farm in high summer, abundance is the norm. The fields, the cool basement, and the kitchen are filled with the finest
varieties of the freshest vegetables you'll ever taste, and maybe that's why I eat more vegetables than anyone I know. For
a salad to serve two, I use a large head of lettuce. Whatever we're having for dinner— pork loin, sauteed chicken livers,
fish— I usually make at least two vegetables, often three or four. On my own, I often make an entire meal of vegetables, usually
with some richer topping, like butter, walnuts, or blue cheese.
There's no nutritional advice more dog-eared than "Eat your vegetables," but that won't stop me from repeating it here. A
heap of solid evidence shows that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables helps prevent macular degeneration, age-related decline,
heart disease, and cancer. Fruits and vegetables are packed with good things, including fiber, potassium, and vitamin C, but
the exciting research is on huge classes of antioxidants like carotenoids and flavonoids. Scientists have identified four
thousand different flavonoids alone; the task of learning what each one does, and how, is gargantuan.
The research tidbits emerging about phytochemicals (plant chemicals) are fun for the produce-obsessed. For example, anthocyanins,
the flavonoids in blackberries and blueberries, are the most powerful antioxidants of 150 flavonoids.
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Tart cherries are another nutritional gold mine, with seventeen different antioxidants, including two powerful anthocyanins
not found in blueberries or cranberries. In Michigan, they swear by Montmorency cherry juice to beat pain and inflammation
from arthritis and gout. It's also delicious.
A RAINBOW OF GOOD THINGS
Carotenoids— fat-soluble compounds that protect plants from the sun and our cell walls from attack by free radicals— are the
most famous antioxidants in plants, but there are thousands of others. Here, some potent antioxidants are grouped by color,
the catchy organizing principle of books like
Eat Your Colors
and
What Color Is Your Diet?
By the way, I don't use the microwave, which destroys antioxidants, enzymes, and vitamins dramatically more than conventional
heat.
Yellow and green
Spinach, peas, and avocados
Lutein and zeaxanthin help prevent cataracts and macular degeneration
Orange
Carrots, mangos and sweet potatoes
Alpha-, beta-, gamma-, and zeta-carotene fight cancer, and beta-carotene prevents LDL oxidation
Red and pink
Tomatoes, pink grapefruit, and watermelon
Lycopene lowers LDL and helps prevent lung disease and prostate cancer
Red and purple
Blueberries, grapes, red cabbage, and red peppers
Anthocyanins delay cellular aging and reduce blood clots
Have you noticed that most natural poisons, from hemlock to deadly nightshade to toadstools, are found in plants, not in meat,
fish, and eggs? Plants are rooted to the ground and can't run from predators, so they need other defenses. Plants respond
to an invasion (or prevent one) by making bitter compounds called phenolics. Insects like aphids dislike the taste of phenolics,
so they abandon the plant for other food. Scientists have identified some ten thousand compounds designed to foil the hungry
animals who would devour plants, including alkaloids (potatoes), tannins (tea), and oxalates (rhubarb).
"Plants produce these weapons only if they need them," writes the naturalist Susan Allport in
The Primal Feast.
Watercress, for example, is peppery yet sweet when young but turns bitter when it flowers, just when it needs to keep insects
at bay to make seeds for the next year. The same is true of lettuce. Once hot weather hits, lettuce bolts; instead of sending
tender leaves
out,
it shoots a firm stem straight
up
to prepare a seed head. As any gardener knows, once the lettuce has bolted— I love the term, which suggests fleeing the scene
on short notice— it turns bitter.
Some of the bitter compounds in plants, such as strychnine (part of the alkaloid family) are toxic to humans. In large quantities,
the green blush on potatoes left out in the light is poisonous, as are rhubarb leaves. But many phytochemicals are powerful
antioxidants and very healthy. Bitter herbs, often represented by horseradish, have a prominent place on the Passover plate.
I like to ponder the material reasons for enduring culinary traditions, and this one certainly makes nutritional sense. All
leafy greens are good for you, bitter ones especially so.
GOOD FAMILY NAMES
When you know the value of whole plant families, it's easier to shop for the foods you prefer. If you don't fancy a stir-fry
of beef and broccoli, get your phytochemicals from leek soup, roasted turnips, or watercress salad with blue cheese.
The Alliums
Actually members of the lily family, onions, garlic, leeks, and scallions contain allicin, an antibiotic that fights tumors,
reduces cholesterol, prevents blood clots, and reduces blood pressure.
The Aster Family
The asters include lettuce, endive, radicchio, chicory, and dandelions. This would be easier to remember if you ever saw a
lettuce flower; it looks like a little dandelion or wild aster. They're digestive tonics and rich in beta-carotene.
THE CHICORIES
• Belgian endive (missile-shaped with cream-colored, yellow-tipped leaves)
• Radicchio (typically round, with rich pink, densely packed, curvy leaves)
• Puntarelle (wild chicory spears, dressed with oil, lemon juice, garlic, and anchovies in Italy)
• Dandelion (quite bitter and worth adding to salads)
THE ENDIVES
• Curly endive (frilly, green and yellow head; also called frisee)
• Escarole (a broad-leafed endive that looks like romaine)
The Family
Brassica
Also called the mustards, Brassicas include broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, horseradish, kale,
kohlrabi, mustard, turnips, and watercress. They contain beta-carotene and sinigrin, which fights colon cancer.
WATERCRESS AND NASTURTIUMS
• Watercress (another Brassica) and the flowering garden nasturtium (family tropaeolacrae) deserve a special mention because
they're too little appreciated. Watercress and nasturtium (leaves and flowers) are peppery and lovely in salads. Rich in beta-carotene
and vitamin C, watercress is a mild stimulant, diuretic, and digestive tonic.
Curiously, we are the rare animal that actually likes the bitter taste of radicchio or black tea. I fear, however, that Americans
raised on sugary soft drinks are losing the taste for things savory, sour, and bitter. It's pitiful that commercial salad
dressings contain sugar, and even sweet corn hybrids are much sweeter than when I was little. We're not alone. In Britain,
plant scientists are breeding sweeter hybrids of the brussels sprout, famous for its dour presence at Christmas lunch, but
the more palatable sprouts may lack the healthy, bitter compounds.
In the kitchen, the classic complements to "bitter herbs" such as turnip greens, frisee, and Belgian endive are rich ingredients
with equally strong flavors: salty fatback and pancetta, pungent Roquefort. These toppings make nutritional sense, because
the body needs fat to convert the antioxidant beta-carotene into usable vitamin A. When you make a mess of greens (as they
say in the South), don't stint on the fatback; they belong together.
Thinking about our funny, plant-driven childhood, I asked my brother, Charles, what he remembered about meals on the farm,
and right away he mentioned one of my most vivid associations: red raspberries and Sunday mornings. At six AM we picked raspberries
for the Takoma Park farmers' market, which starts relatively late, at ten AM. (For selling delicate produce, nothing beats
a sign saying PICKED TODAY.) After the market truck left, we picked another pint or two for raspberry-studded pancakes. The
syrup was simply berries boiled with sugar until they fell apart.
We grew other small fruit, too: black raspberries, blueberries, tart cherries, and strawberries. I love them all. Now we grow
only one strawberry— a little thing with a short season called Earliglow— because we've never found a better one. We feel
about Earliglows as William Butler, the sixteenth-century English physician, felt about strawberries. "Doubtless God could
have made a better berry," he said, "but doubtless God never did."
Berry picking is a pleasant job, even when you are picking for market, and I am a fast berry picker. I also have a sharp eye
for spotting wild fruit. On the farm, I know the fencerows where furry wineberry bushes lurk and where to find mulberry trees
drooping with white or purple blobs. Finding berries in baking-hot suburban parking lots or running along old canals is fun,
too. In New York, my local mulberry tree is only blocks away, in a little park on the East River.
Plants, as we've seen, make themselves bitter out of self-defense. Berries, likewise, dress up pretty out of self-interest.
The vivid crimson and blue of wild raspberries, blueberries, and cranberries must have popped out like jewels to the hunter-gatherer
eye. From the plant's point of view, looking lovely draws the attention of animals, who will then eat the fruit, travel, and
spread the seeds— a neat trick if you're a blackberry bush and can't walk around. For the forager, meanwhile, sapphire and
ruby clusters are like the bitter taste of dandelions: they signify good things, including vitamin C and anthocyanins.
When I see quarts of dark sweet cherries at the farmers' market or glimpse a purple splotch in a tangled green fencerow, I
smile and cheer up a little. I like to think that's my Stone Age brain, perking up.
WHEN WE PICTURE INDUSTRIAL MEAT, the images are unpleasant: animals crammed on concrete floors in dark barns, tails docked,
getting fat on hormones— and that's about right. It's more difficult to conjure up an industrial tomato. Sure, large commercial
farms probably don't look like a backyard garden, but how badly can they mistreat a simple tomato? In fact, the traditional
and industrial tomato have little in common.
Before the first seed is sown, soil is sterilized with fumigants like methyl bromide, which is toxic to wildlife and people.
Healthy soil is never sterile; it should be teeming with fauna, from earthworms and nematodes to microbes. Soil fertility—
and thus plant health— depends on the interaction of these organisms with the soil and plant roots. A teaspoon of grassland
topsoil may contain twenty million fungi and five billion bacteria, creatures who want to be fed with minerals, compost, and
other organic matter. On industrial farms, however, soil life is not nurtured; it's murdered.
The seeds are different, too. Industrial varieties have traits convenient to large growers, distributors, and retailers. An
industrial tomato, for example, is bred to be solid and thick-skinned, the better to tolerate mechanical harvesting, washing,
packaging, and long-distance shipping. Uniform shape and size are also important. Flavor and texture take a backseat. Gardeners
and small farmers prefer great flavor to good looks, not that the two qualities are mutually exclusive.
Industrial farming also favors monocropping, but single crops, as the Irish learned the hard way with potato blight in 1845,
are more susceptible to devastation by pest invasion and disease. The industrial answer is herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides
to kill weeds, insects, and molds. So powerful are these chemicals, industrial farmers have dispensed with crop rotation—
the age-old method for keeping pests and disease at bay— but the apparent efficiency is illusory. With this system, pests
and pathogens traditionally kept in check by switching crops accumulate, thus requiring yet more pesticides.
As with factory animals, rapid, high yields are the goal on industrial produce farms. Synthetic fertilizers, especially nitrogen,
make plants grow fast, but nitrogen-driven growth produces weak, watery, and overly leafy plants which are more vulnerable
to insects. Furthermore, most of the nitrogen runs off, polluting streams, rivers, oceans, fisheries, and drinking water.
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Industrial farmers use hormonelike chemicals to push plants to grow bigger and set fruit faster. Almonds, broccoli, grapes,
melons, onions, potatoes, snap beans, tomatoes, and other crops may be treated with growth enhancers such as AuxiGro. Rather
like a steroid for plants, it promises enhanced flowering, larger fruit size, and greater yields— with what effect on texture,
flavor, and nutrition, I don't know. We do know that steroids enhance performance in cattle and baseball players, and we know
the extra beef, milk, and muscle come at a price. Plants have equally delicate hormonal systems.