The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [81]
Both the ancient Hindus and the great Hippocrates warned that chickpeas could cause lathyrism—neurological lesions of the spinal cord which result in paralysis of the legs. The sale of chickpeas is illegal in many states in India, where they would otherwise completely dominate the diet of the poor, who make chapati out of chickpea flour, which is ground from raw chickpeas. If you soak chickpeas overnight or cook them in an excess of boiling water, they will not give you lathyrism. But don’t try to make chapati this way. As for plantains, eat them in moderation. Africans who ignore this injunction ingest too much serotonin and end up with carcinoid heart disease, apparently whether they cook their plantains or not.
Nor will cooking protect you if you make your potato salad with green immature potatoes, which can contain lethal amounts of solanine in their sprouts and skin. Undercooked kidney beans in those popular al dente mixed-bean salads contain hemagglutinins, which make your red blood cells stick together and account for poor growth among children in parts of Africa. Monkeys placed on a diet of alfalfa sprouts develop lupuslike symptoms. Soybean sprouts and yams are high in estrogenic factors, which can wreak havoc with a woman’s hormones if she consumes too much of them or if the plants have been attacked by mold. Purple mint, popular as a condiment in Japan and now widely available in the United States, causes acute pulmonary emphysema in cattle foraging on it. Better stick with reliable old garden-variety green mint.
The list is endless. But the government virtually ignores these and other natural poisons in your salad bowl while worrying itself to death about artificial food additives and industrial pollutants. Unmasking this double standard—particularly concerning carcinogens and mutagens—has become something of a mission for Professor Bruce Ames, chairman of the biochemistry department at Berkeley. Ames likes to describe the carcinogenic potential in an average serving of some everyday food by comparing it to the polluted well water in Silicon Valley in California, which has been condemned as carcinogenic by the state Department of Health Services. Aflatoxin, for example, is among the most potent carcinogens known and is present in mold-contaminated grain and nuts, like those peanuts you sprinkle on your salad or enjoy in peanut butter. The FDA permits so much aflatoxin in food that the peanut butter in your sandwich can be seventy-five times more hazardous than a liter of contaminated Silicon Valley water, the amount you would drink in a day if they would only let you.
Almost as hazardous are the hydrazines in one raw mushroom or the basil in a dollop of pesto sauce (which contains lots of estragole). Safrole, a compound related to estragole, is the reason natural root beer is now banned by the FDA. Much worse than Silicon Valley water and almost as bad as basil is the daily spoonful of brown mustard in your piquant salad dressing. The psoralens in celery (which increase a hundredfold if the celery is moldy) regularly cause dermatitis among supermarket checkers. Healthy celery in your salad does no harm, but can you be absolutely sure your celery is healthy? Some investigators warn that psoralens are so carcinogenic that all “unnecessary exposures should be avoided.”
I should mention that Professor Ames himself seems to have nothing personal against salad. (He even speculates about the anticarcinogenic potential of some vegetables.) But great minds sometimes fail to see the full implication of their own work. This task falls upon the shoulders of those who follow. Salad fanatics may notice that I have presented no evidence against raw zucchini or carrots. The reason is that I found none. Mother Nature could never have foreseen that zucchini—which has little taste in its raw state and even less nutritive value—would be used as a food by modern Homo sapiens. Then again, should we regard