Heirlooms

  Just look at the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables available to us: such variety, such color, such mouth-watering attractiveness!  All because, starting when our ancient forebears changed from being hunter-gatherers to farmers about 10,000 years ago, "heirloom" species from the wild have been selectively bred into this gorgeous panoply.  Enormous ingenuity, displayed over millennia, has produced these marvels of nutrition.

  Alas!  Jo Robinson's just-published Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health shows that such enthusiasm should be restrained, at least insofar as "marvels of nutrition" is concerned.  It seems that in progressing from heirlooms—the usually misshapen, tough, bitter and Lilliputian fruits and vegetables of the wild—to today's lush profusion, 400 generations of farmers have successively removed most of the plants' nutrition.  Their quest was for the eye-pleasing, tender, sweet and gargantuan (to say nothing of yield, disease resistance, etc.)—least of all nutrition.

  One shouldn't be surprised by their predilections.  Among us moderns, how many prefer dandelions to sweet corn?  Crabapples to sugar?  Even the most health-conscious of us cannot help ourselves—we go for the more succulent and sweet, which generally means the less nutritious.  Breeders and marketers—both unwittingly in the past and wittingly now—have followed the Lorelei's call, so our supermarket bounty gets more and more appetizing and less and less nutritious by the year.

  After my daughter recommended it, I approached Robinson's book with about as much enthusiasm as I several times have approached Pilgrim's Progress: it will be good for me to read the tome, I thought, so I'll plow through it.  Surprise!  The book is not only good for one's health, but is a spell-binder to boot.  Robinson has taken what could have been a medley of dull facts about nutrition and woven them into a tapestry as compelling as Michael Pollen's popular Omnivore's Dilemma was several years ago. 

  For each of an astonishing number of vegetables and fruits, Robinson guides us from the selection of a nutritious variety and an individual item of that variety, to how to store it, how quickly we must eat it to get its full nutrition, and how to cook it (including some recipes) to preserve that nutrition.  Each chapter on a class of fruits or vegetables ends with a concise summary of information about them.  A fascinating read.

  Part of the fascination is that virtually every page has an engrossing fact.  Here are a few, chosen almost at random (italics are Robinson's):

• "[Measurements of] the phytonutrient content of apples from 321 wild and domesticated apple trees … showed that the wild apples were vastly more nutritious than our cultivated varieties.  One wild species had fifteen times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious variety.  Another species had sixty-five times more.  The show stealer … had one hundred times more."

• "Some [scientific findings] are so different from conventional wisdom that you might feel as though you were tumbling down a rabbit hole.  Most berries, for example, increase their anti-oxidant activity when you cook them.  …  Simmering  a tomato sauce for hours … can triple its lycopene content.  Cooking carrots whole and then slicing them after they've been cooked makes them taste sweeter and increases their ability to fight cancer."

• "In a test-tube study measuring the anticancer properties of a number of vegetables, … garlic was the most effective. … In an intact clove of garlic, [the cancer-fighting compounds that need to react with each other] are isolated in separate compartments.  They do not commingle until you slice, press, or chew the garlic … [H]eating garlic immediately after crushing it or slicing it destroys … the reaction.  [K]eep it away from the heat for ten minutes [to allow the reaction to complete]."

• "When dried beans are canned, they become far more nutritious.  In a 2011 survey of the top one hundred antioxidant-rich foods in the United States, canned kidney beans and pinto beans were ranked first and second, respectively."

• "As a rough estimate, berries have four times more antioxidant activity than the majority of other fruits, ten times more than most vegetables, and forty times more than some cereals. … Blueberries … show great promise in fighting our so-called diseases of civilization.  In animal studies, the fruit has prevented tumor formation, slowed the growth of existing tumors, lowered blood pressure, reduced arterial plaque buildup and … prevented obesity and diabetes in rats that were fed a high-fat, high-calorie, and high-sugar lab chow. … The potential of blueberries to slow age-related dementia may be the most exciting news of all."

• Here's an all-American story:  A 19^th-century New England minister bred Concord grapes until he got what he sought—non-fermenting grape juice for communion.  He then commercialized rhe result under his name: Welch's grape juice.  It was shown in 2008 to have a higher nutritional value than all juices tested, including the now wildly popular acai juice.  Other research has shown that it can "make peoples arteries more flexible and lower their blood pressure … thin the blood, reducing the risk of blood clots … [and protect] normal breast cells from toxic chemicals that can damage the cells' DNA."

I could go on and on with this list, but you get the drift.

  One omission from the full story is not the author's fault.  When Robinson touts the greater nutritional value of certain species of vegetables and fruits, she is usually constrained to comparing measured levels of one or another plant nutrient.  What's often missing is evidence of a clinical connection between those nutrients and human health.  Although she frequently cites studies of their effects on the suppression or elimination of diseases in lab animals, or their ability to kill or restrain the growth of tumor cells in vitro, she is much less often able to give results of controlled clinical trials of their use in the suppression or elimination of disease in humans.  It's a long jump from measuring levels of nutrients, or studying their effects in animals or Petri-dishes, to establishing their value in human health.  What results of the latter sort Robinson is able to adduce makes her arguments infinitely stronger, and I wish she'd had more of them to cite.

  But, pending more clinical evidence, I'm only too happy to gorge on blueberries, the current varieties of which differ little from their wild heirloom ancestors.  In at least this case, the succulent and the nutritious are in the same package!