Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [31]
Leafy greens are nature’s spring tonic, coming on strong in local markets in April and May, and then waning quickly when weather gets hot. Chard will actually put up a fight against summer temperatures, but lettuce gives up as early as late May in the south. As all good things must come to an end, the leafy-greens season closes when the plant gets a cue from the thermometer—85 degrees seems to do it for most varieties. Then they go through what amounts to plant puberty: shooting up, transforming practically overnight from short and squat to tall and graceful, and of course it is all about sex. The botanical term is bolting. It ends with a cluster of blossoms forming atop the tall stems; for lettuces, these flowers are tiny yellow versions of their cousin, the dandelion. And like any adolescent, the bolting lettuce plant has volatile chemicals coursing through its body; in the case of lettuce, the plant is manufacturing a burst of sesquiterpene lactones, the compounds that make a broken lettuce stem ooze milky white sap, and which render it suddenly so potently, spit-it-out bitter. When lettuce season is over, it’s over.
These compounds are a family trait of the lettuce clan, accounting for the spicy tang of endives, arugula, and radicchio, while the pale icebergs have had most of these chemicals bred out of them (along with most of their nutrients). Once it starts to go tall and leggy, though, even an innocent iceberg becomes untouchable. This chemical process is a vestige of a plant’s life in the wild, an adaptation for protecting itself from getting munched at that important moment when sexual reproduction is about to occur.
But on a brisk April day when the tranquils are up and Jack Frost might still come out of retirement on short notice, hot weather is a dream. This is the emerald season of spinach, kale, endive, and baby lettuces. The chard comes up as red and orange as last fall’s leaves went out. We lumber out of hibernation and stuff our mouths with leaves, like deer, or tree sloths. Like the earth-enraptured primates we once were, and could learn to be all over again. In April I’m happiest with mud on the knees of my jeans, sitting down to the year’s most intoxicating lunch: a plate of greens both crisp and still sun-warmed from the garden, with a handful of walnuts and some crumbly goat cheese. This is the opening act of real live food.
By the time the lettuce starts to go flowery and embittered, who cares? We’ll have fresh broccoli by then. When you see stuffed bunnies dangling from the crab apple trees, the good-time months have started to roll.
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First, Eat Your Greens
BY CAMILLE
I’ve grown up in a world that seems to have a pill for almost everything. College kids pop caffeine pills to stay up all night writing papers, while our parents are at home popping sleeping pills to prevent unwelcome all-nighters. We can take pills for headaches, stomachaches, sinus pressure, and cold symptoms, so we can still go to work sick. If there’s no time to eat right, we have nutrition pills, too. Just pop some vitamins and you’re good to go, right?
Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they’re not coincidences. Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millennia in response to all the different foods—mostly plants—they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt trauma, but they did not have diet-related illnesses like heart disease and Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society