Real Food (19 page)

Local food tastes better. Does organic food taste better, too? Sometimes. The important factors of flavor are soil health,
variety, maturity, and freshness. Out of necessity, most big organic producers use the same varieties as industrial farmers,
pick them underripe, and ship them a long way. It's good that large organic farms don't pollute the rivers, but the tomatoes
are tasteless. In Britain, the main commercial strawberry, Elsanta, is known in the trade as the "three-bounce berry." Sturdy
Elsanta may be, but it doesn't taste very good, even when it's grown without chemicals. Farmers who care about good food grow
varieties with superior flavor, pick them at peak maturity, and sell them fresh. When I hear someone say, "Organic tomatoes
taste better," I think, "Which tomato, grown where?"

Farmers have expanded the traditional seasons for local foods with techniques such as row covers, heated greenhouses, unheated
hoop houses, and long-season varieties. In New York, I can eat greenhouse salad leaves in snowy January. Tomatoes grown in
heated greenhouses— either in a liquid nutritional formula or in soil substitute— appear in the spring, well before field
tomatoes, and ever-bearing strawberries are available all summer. For all these foods, we are thankful.

Yet I prefer fruits and vegetables grown outdoors in proper soil in peak season. Soil, which varies from farm to farm, gives
produce its flavor and nutrients. That's
terroir,
the French idea that the features of a particular spot— soil type, minerals, moisture, frost— impart special character to
the grapes and thus the wine. Environmental stresses— wind, rain, insects— also yield sturdier and more robustly flavored
plants. It's a kind of character-building theory of flavor. Hydroponic tomatoes are insipid because they have no
terroir
and no character. If you buy tomatoes out of season, look for those grown in proper soil, often in unheated hoop houses.

Local foods are more diverse than what you find in the supermarket produce section. At my local farmers' market, there are
dozens of tomatoes and more than a hundred apple varieties, but supermarkets carry just a few. The eighteenth-century Newtown
Pippin, native to the Newtown Creek in what is now Queens, New York, is a superior dessert, cider, and storage apple, but
it has been replaced by the rock-hard, often underripe, and less tasty Granny Smith. In October 1785, Thomas Jefferson, who
grew 170 varieties of fruits at Monticello, wrote James Madison from Paris, "They have no apples here to compare with our
Newtown Pippin."

This lovely apple— now being revived by the equally delightful Ed Yowell, who leads the New York City convivium of Slow Food—
has modern fans, too. "The green-skinned, yellow-fleshed Pippin is both sweet and tart; crisp and tender," says Peter Hatch,
director of the Monticello gardens. "The citruslike aroma— some describe it as
piney
— lingers in the mouth like a dear memory."

Growing different varieties is also more interesting for the farmer. No one wants to plant, pick, sell, and eat the same zucchini,
year after year. My parents grow about a dozen different cucumbers and two dozen varieties of tomatoes, both heirlooms and
hybrids. Why grow modern hybrids at all? Aren't heirlooms better? They can be. Let me explain.

The revival of traditional varieties— often from seeds saved over many generations— has been a boon for what the poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins called pied beauty. "Glory be to God for dappled things," he wrote. Now we have green escarole speckled with
red dots, cucumbers that look like lemons, candy-striped beets, and a tomato that reveals tropical sunsets when sliced. One
of my favorites, it's called Pineapple.

Beyond beauty, genetic diversity itself is valuable: a large library of traits gives breeders more material to work with.
The Sturmer, an English apple now difficult to find, has five times more vitamin C than Golden Delicious. Americans can thank
the Irish potato famine for the Green Mountain potato, an almost-forgotten Vermont native. Around the time of the Irish catastrophe,
blight nearly wiped out New England potato farms. Wary of another crop disaster, farmers and breeders developed a blight-resistant
variety in the 1880s. For fifty years, the tasty but oddly shaped Green Mountain was America's most popular baking potato,
until the more consistently oval Russet took over.

Modern hybrids— which are bred from two parents, thus blending their traits— also have good points, such as high yields, hardiness,
and pest resistance. Other qualities I'm less keen on, such as thick skin or excessively firm flesh, are hallmarks of industrial
produce. Hybrids per se are not objectionable; after all, breeding is an old and honorable agricultural practice. One laments
the loss of useful qualities. When seed companies began to focus on industrial production, flavor and other fine traits were
neglected, some lost forever.

Three cheers, then, for seed savers who brought back charmers like Cherokee Purple, a tomato with dark creamy flesh and superlative
flavor. We've also grown some lackluster heirloom tomatoes, like Great White and Purple Calabash. Some heirlooms have abysmal
yields and poor consistency; even superior flavor may not be enough to make growing them worthwhile. Happily, the renewed
demand for flavor and texture has opened the gene libraries of many good seed companies, and that means more and better traditional
varieties for farmers to try.

Meanwhile, we're big fans of hybrids like Early Girl, Lady Luck, and Lemon Boy. Dad calls them "garden" hybrids. They taste
great and yield well, but for various reasons— small size, delicacy— they don't suit industrial growers, so you won't find
them in supermarkets. For me, flavor is tops. I won't spend four dollars a pound on tomatoes merely because they're a wacky
color or the sign says HELIRLOOM. They must taste good— and many hybrids do. Yield matters to the cook, too; if I have to
cut away large parts of a funny-shaped tomato because of scarring, my salad gets more expensive. With a shapely and reliable
hybrid like Lady Luck, that's unlikely.

How to Eat More Vegetables

YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is a good thing. The trick is actually doing it. If you also
cook for selective eaters— children or adults— perhaps you worry that they don't eat spinach every day. Relax; no one eats
spinach every day. It may help to think not in terms of meals or even days, but rather in weeks. What's important is your
overall diet; you won't be malnourished in one day.

Buying local food makes eating vegetables easier and more fun, but if you want to eat more vegetables, it doesn't matter where
you shop. Farmers' markets, farm stands, farm shares, green grocers, and supermarkets are all good. These are my tips.

Stock up.
If you don't buy produce, you'll never eat it. I tend to be frugal, but in this case, I much prefer to have produce on hand
and risk throwing it away than not have any. Buy large amounts of produce when it's cheap, especially during a glut. On most
trips to the market, I stock up on basics like lettuce and zucchini, and rarely buy expensive treats such as wild blueberries
or fancy mesclun. I find "baby" vegetables overpriced and insipid. At my local market, lettuce is a bargain at one dollar
a head all summer; for most of the year, I use two heads a day. There is always fruit in the house for dessert.

Have a salad at every meal.
Once you adopt this habit, lunch or dinner without a raw vegetable seems incomplete. If you tire of lettuce, there are lots
of leaves: watercress, radicchio, endive, escarole, dandelion, purslane. Try salads of shaved fennel and orange slices or
lightly cooked vegetables, as in celeriac remoulade. At the farm, we have a plate of sliced tomatoes at every Summer meal.
Be aware that some vegetables are more nutritious when cooked. The broccoli and cabbage family contains goitrogens, which
depress thyroid function. Spinach, beets, and chard contain oxalic acid, which blocks calcium and iron absorption. Goitrogens
and oxalic acid are reduced by cooking. Beta-carotene in vegetables is more available to the body once it has been liberated
from tough cell walls; thus shredding, juicing, and cooking beets and carrots are all ways to make them more nutritious.

Dress it up nicely.
Say good-bye to plain steamed broccoli. Every vegetable should be properly dressed, and to me that means the right fat, a
little salt, and perhaps one flavor, such as fresh herbs or good cheese. When the only fat I used was olive oil, all my vegetables
tasted the same. Now I'll make buttered carrots with thyme, roasted zucchini with garlicky olive oil, and a green salad with
macadamia oil and macadamia nuts. The vegetables taste better, they taste different, and it's easy to eat all three.

Eat salad first.
I happen to prefer the American habit of eating salad before the main course. Raw vegetables stimulate digestion and leave
you hungry for the next course. Protein, hot foods, and creamy dishes, by contrast, are satiating. After that sensory experience,
you're not hungry for salad anymore. But suit yourself on this one.

Eat salad as a main course.
Cobb salad is one of my favorite one-dish meals, but there are many others. Learn to make Caesar salad dressing, buy Romaine
lettuce, and do what restaurants do: top it with chicken or shrimp.

Put it out there.
We know very little about how eating habits form. Why, for example, do some children develop a diverse palate and not others?
You might suspect cultural factors— maybe some parents offer kids cayenne and garlic, others bland foods— but the studies
are equivocal. However, it's safe to assume that if you don't put food out, no one will eat it. One small study, hoping to
shed light on the eating habits of overweight kids, found that the sole factor predicting how much they ate was the amount
of food on the plate. This applies equally to adults. If you want to eat more of something, serve it. My mother set out raw
fruits and vegetables before dinner, when we were hungry. In the summer, we had sliced tomatoes and in the winter, a jumble
of apple, carrot, and turnip slices.

Eat local food.
Here's a paradox. Eating local food leads to
more
variety in your diet, not less. When offered the same global fruits and vegetables all year long, many people get stuck in
food ruts. They buy the same fruits and vegetables— bananas and broccoli, or whatever their favorites happen to be— year round.
If you buy local food in season, meals will vary without planning or effort. You'll eat spinach in April, strawberries in
May, fennel in June, corn in August, and pears in November.

Mix it up.
Variety whets the appetite. In fact, science has documented this phenomenon. They call it
sensory-specific satiety.
A fancy term, but all it means is that you're more likely to eat four different vegetables— one creamy, one crunchy, one sharp,
one sweet— than four servings of one vegetable. As I write, in the height of July, there are four local fruits in the kitchen:
sweet cherries, red gooseberries, blueberries, black raspberries. After lunch, I'll have a bowl of mixed fruit and raw Jersey
milk: five foods in one dish.

It's entirely up to you whether you eat more fruits and vegetables. But someone has to be responsible for the nutrition of
babies and small children. How much should we worry when they don't eat vegetables? Every parent will have to wrestle with
this question, but my best guess is that from zero to two years old, the overriding nutritional requirement is for high-quality
fat and protein for growth and development, starting, of course, with breast milk. But the older you get, the more important
antioxidant fruits and vegetables are. Why?

Free radicals (unstable atoms with unpaired electrons) are a normal product of cell metabolism, created when cells use oxygen
to burn fat. Unfortunately, their numbers rapidly increase with age and damaging environmental factors. Whatever the source,
free radicals are highly damaging to cells. They cause the body to oxidize and age, like rusting iron, and contribute to heart
disease and cancer. Antioxidants in fresh produce battle the cumulative effects of environmental carcinogens and free radicals.

When your baby starts to eat solid foods, try three simple things. First, steer clear of extra calories from corn oil, juice,
and sugar, because any inferior food displaces some more important nutrient. (The easiest way to do this? Don't buy them.)
Second, puree the food the whole family is eating, rather than create separate meals for the baby. There is every reason for
him to eat a soupy version of homemade spaghetti Bolognese or roasted vegetables; that's exactly what store-bought baby food
is. It will be faster than making a separate dish, and cheaper and better than commercial baby food. Third, buy wild fish,
ecological produce, and pastured meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs if you can. Children are more vulnerable to pesticides and
other toxins than adults.

Otherwise, try to feed children as you would anyone else: with a diverse and balanced diet of whole foods, in hopes of creating
good eating habits to last a lifetime. Most kids don't grow up on vegetable farms, and they turn out fine. It would be too
bad if children became teenagers still hating vegetables, but it's probably not dangerous. After all, most of us survived
our junk-food years.

Suppose you try all of these things and still don't eat enough broccoli and blueberries. Is taking vitamin C and anthocyanin
pills good enough? In cases of deficiency, vitamin therapy is safe and effective, and some supplements, like fish oil, are
highly beneficial, and consistently so. But there are some questions about vitamin supplements. The results of trials with
supplements isolated from whole foods range from unhelpful (smokers taking beta-carotene had higher rates of lung cancer)
to promising (vitamin E prevents second heart attacks) to merely equivocal (another vitamin E study on heart disease showed
no effect).
⁶
However, studies consistently find that diets rich in antioxidants from
whole foods
lower risk of heart disease and cancer.