Eating on the Wild Side

“Eating on the Wild Side,” by Jo Robinson was an extremely informative book. It helped open my eyes to how to prepare different fruits and vegetables in order to extract the most amount of phytonutrients from them. Since this is not a typical fiction or non-fiction book, it is broken down chapter by chapter by vegetable, which is how I will share the lessons that I learned from some of the chapters.

Alliums include onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, chives, and scallions. Onions and garlic are the most prevalent in our diet. Historically onions were used to enhance performance in the Olympics. The more pungent the onion, the more phytonutrients that exist within it. When you cook an onion the phytonutrient quercetin’s content increases.

Garlic was used as Penicillin in Russia. 3 cloves of garlic were equal to 15 IU’s of Penicillin, which was the average dose. Garlic contains alliin, a protein fragment, and alliinase, a heat sensitive enzyme. When the two are combined together they make allicin, which is the powerful antioxidant, antibacterial, antiviral, anticlotting, and anticancer substance. One fact I found extremely interesting and has changed the way that I use garlic is that in order to retain allicin when cooking you must chop up the garlic, which causes the enzymes to combine, and leave out for 10 minutes so the allicin can fully develop and sustain while cooking.

Corn on the Cob has an intriguing history. Corn originated from teosinte, a Mexican corn that 5 inches, thin, and had 5-10 kernels on it that were as hard as an acorn. Over a 7,000 year period corn became what we know it as today. This next information blew my mind. Scientists decided to create new varieties of corn, so they performed an experiment and planted corn near Hiroshima to determine the effects of an atomic bomb on corn. Most corn ended up shriveled, twisted, and not edible. Then one scientist, John Laughnan, decided to taste it and found it to be extremely sweet. He decided to develop a marketable sweet corn. This sweet corn is mostly what we eat today. Unfortunately, the light yellow high sugar levels of it have caused it to be lacking in nutrients. The darker the corn the more nutrients are within it. Also, boiling corn leaches it of any remaining nutrients it has. All the nutrients go into the water. Boiling is not an effective way to cook any vegetable.

Apples: The discovery of apples was spread by Alexander the Great. He discovered apples while in Kazakhstan and sent seeds to Greece to be grown and invested by Aristotle. Of course the adjusted the apples to create the sweetest apple they could. Apples receive their red coloring from the direct exposure from sunlight. The more red the apple the more phytonutrients that are within it. You must eat the skin because it will give you double the health benefits. When drinking cider or apple juice it is best to choose the cloudy version. Cloudy apple juice will provide you with four times more phytonutrients.

Oranges in Greece in 500 BC were extremely bitter. This bitterness caused them to be more medicinal to the point that they were used as an antidote for snake poison. Prisoners were condemned to die in a pit full of snipers but if they ate oranges before they would survive the snake poison. The most nutritious part of the orange is the pith. It provides the greatest concentration of phytonutrients. The pith is referred to as the albedo and it’s rich in pectin and has a high concentration of flavanones. A navel orange with a pith has 400 milligrams of phytonutrients, without it the orange only has 100 milligrams.

Tomatoes are one of the most eaten vegetables in the United States. However, it’s not in the fresh form it’s in the form of Ketchup. The original tomato came from Peru and were as small as berries. Of course over time we have altered tomatoes to be the big beef steak tomatoes that we know today. Thomas Jefferson actually brought tomatoes to the United States. Tomatoes are high in lycopene, a powerful phytonutrient. The darker the tomato the higher the lycopene in it. Tomatoes are one of the few vegetables that are great for being stored. The juice and pulp of a tomato is high in glutamate and the skin and seeds provide 50% of the Vitamin C, lycopene, and antioxidants. When you cook a tomato for more than 30 minutes the lycopene value doubles in it. Cooking a tomato will break down the fruit's cell wall and make the nutrients more bioavailable. Cooking a tomato also twists the lycopene molecule into a new configuration that makes it easier to absorb. Once the tomato is cooked then the best way to store it is to can it. The heat of the canning process makes the lycopene more bioavailable. Canned tomato paste is actually the most concentrated form of tomatoes and contains 10 times more lycopene than raw tomatoes.

This is a great book that I would recommend to anyone that cooks. It truly helps you to understand how to make your vegetables last longer. It also helps you to understand how to get the most amount of nutrients out of the vegetables that you buy at the store. Everyone who cooks should read thi