When I was a kid, I liked to gross out my friends by eating foods that others wouldn”t. Artichokes, anchovies and asparagus tasted wonderful and often left me alone at lunch where I was infamous for sneaking hot peppers into others” meals.
Turns out I was a genius, not a brat. Or maybe both?
Weird and ugly foods are good for you and most adults don”t know it any more than the kids did.
Far more bizarre items than I ate often turn up at the Food Bank, after grocery buyers prove too much like my timid middle school lunch companions and reject them. For Season of Sharing, I took along an even more adventurous friend, Petra Schulte, to watch me gather what was offered and talk about its nutritional value.
Schulte works in the Fort Bragg schools to improve nutrition and has been focusing on a grant program to figure out how to get more nutrition to low income people. She was telling me how wonderfully nutritious these unusual and scorned foods often are when we encountered one of the strangest new foods showing up every week gigantic sacks of long skinny mushrooms, clean with roots still attached in sealed 5-pound bags.
They were baffling to all but the young couple with a baby standing next to me in line.
Krsna April Johnson and Kenny Rosner are true food entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it with Shroom Shack, which seeks to connect mushroom lovers, harvesters and farmers both online and in person. They are all of the above and have appeared at farmers markets.
Rosner identified the mystery mushrooms as two types, and then proceeded to give recipes. This expert that had suddenly emerged fascinated the clients, volunteers and staff along with Schulte. A crowd gathered. The huge bags of mushrooms suddenly had many takers.
From capers to cardoon
In six years of eating and writing Season of Sharing, my palette has expanded much more at the Food Bank than during my five years in the Napa Valley, surrounded by all those rich people and fancy restaurants.
I”ve met and tried Romanesque, oca, no pales, Mexican squash, capers and cardoon. It turns out variety of colors means a variety of vitamins. Each new item of fresh produce you eat, the more you expand good stuff in your body.
Cardoon looks like a rough and oversized clump of celery, but is bitter when eaten raw. Cooked, it tastes like artichokes, but holds the shape and consistency of celery. In my time of eating what the clients at the Food Bank eat, as part of my writing this series, I”ve found true magic in the crock-pot. The “just a bit” beyond ripe foods make some fabulous and always surprising flavor combinations, with a little planning and a pinch of pepper.
Cardoon stands up and tastes sharp even after 12 hours in the crock-pot, yet many shoppers pass up the not so glamorous or advertised vegetable.
But how much healthier do all these veggies make all of us who eat them?
Schulte was particularly delighted when we found in the produce section more than just green lettuce and cabbage but also red beets, white asparagus, blueberries and golden squash.
“A rainbow of colors like this is a very healthy mixture,” she said. “Phytochemicals, which are plant chemicals that protect our bodies, determine the color of plant foods. So eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables give us a variety of plant chemicals that protect our bodies from disease.
“I like that they had vegetables such as winter squash, sweet potatoes and broccoli sprouts. Quite a few of the other vegetables were older, which reduces their health benefits,” she said.
She also pointed out someone could eat a lot of bread, chips and the worst offender of all soda.
“I was surprised at the quality and the variety of the fruits and vegetables we saw. It was true that we had to pick through it to find the better quality, but if someone was doing that for their family, they could do very well and eat a nutritionally balanced diet from just what the Food Bank had today,” Schulte said.
The soda question
Schulte and I then went to the office of Food Bank Executive Nancy Severy. I had made the mistake of having a diet cola in hand when Schulte arrived. We had looked at a burrito from Amy”s being offered in line. Schulte said while the burrito has its nutritional drawbacks, it also fills some needs of clients.
Soda, on the other hand, is pure bad. Sugar soda, I said, nodding my head. No, diet is even worse, she said. She told me all the horrors of diet soda I already knew, the sugar substitute tricks your body into actually storing more fat. And it leaches calcium from the bones.
While she told Severy how impressed she was with the quality of the Food Bank, she asked why soda is given out.
Severy said this question is one the Food Bank grapples with all the time.
“Ah, the perennial question of do we ban unhealthy donated items like soda or do we pass them through to our clients, knowing realistically that many are likely consuming sodas from other sources? It”s a tough question. We certainly never purchase or seek to obtain donated soda pop for clients, but we do get small amounts donated and we have been making them available to clients.
“We very much care about nutrition, and, personally, I consider soda pop as pretty much the “anti-food” (worse than no food at all). But the question of food censorship is a rather thorny one to grapple with,” Severy said.
Nonetheless many nutritional programs are banning soda altogether, with this movement picking up steam in recent years.
Fresh produce
Severy told Schulte and I what the Food Bank does to get the most nutritious foods to clients.
“We use earmarked grant funding whenever we can to purchase nutritious foods such as brown rice, dried beans, milk for children, and fruits and vegetables. When offered a choice of available donated foods, we always go for the healthy stuff! Jim DiMauro, our warehouse manager who does the food ordering, is knowledgeable about and committed to obtaining the healthiest food we can,” said Severy.
Both women were excited about the new effort Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens and an older effort of Noyo Food Forest to bring tons of fresh produce to the Food Bank
In Chinese lore, brown rice, long relegated to peasants, allowed them to survive famines better than upper class people who ate glamorous and unhealthy polished white rice. In the American South, slaves created culinary masterpieces from weeds like collards, black-eyed peas and okra.
There is terrific nutrition in these foods as well as delicious irony. We found some wonderful, crisp, heavy heads of cabbage given to the Food Bank because their outer leaves had gotten dirt on them during a rain. Schulte got a big smile from celery roots, especially since a client took some for her family.
“Whole plant foods are foods that still have all parts, such as brown rice. Brown rice still has the outer layer (bran layer) and the germ, whereas white rice has been stripped of the bran layer and the germ to extend shelf life. The bran layer and germ contain fiber, B vitamins, iron, protein and phytochemicals, said Schulte.
Ugly foods are good, too.
Vegetables that aren”t exactly the same shape or color as those on TV end up rejected by society and its stores. Rejected are potatoes too big or funny-shaped, pears shaped like turnips and apples with bumps or worm holes. Society”s demand for foods as perfect looking as its celebrities is a big blessing to food banks, but a curse to those producing the healthiest, freshest and most local produce. Perfect appearing foods may have gotten that way with the help of scary pesticides.
Schulte and Severy bonded on an idea they came up with having kids in the schools write recipes to be given to food bank clients showing them tasty ways to use fruits and vegetables.
“I love the idea of getting kids involved with awareness of nutrition and what foods are nutritious and how to prepare them. And what better way than a hands-on project for the kids to come up with recipes for healthy foods and provide them to the Food Bank,” Severy said.
Schulte noticed that there were many more whole grains at the Food Bank than when we did this same visit three years ago. We found sprouted grain hot dog buns and less bleached white bread.
For me, I am done with diet soda. I have had as many as 20 in a day. Is there such as a thing as Aspartame Anonymous?
Season of Sharing
Since 1996, the Advocate-News and The Mendocino Beacon have raised roughly $301,543 for the Food Bank through the Season of Sharing fund drive. Since 1999, the nonprofit Community Foundation of Mendocino County has administered the drive as a courtesy to the newspapers. Every penny donated goes directly to the Food Bank.
“There are many nonprofit organizations in our area, all very worthy of support, but the Food Bank addresses the most basic problem facing hundreds of individuals and families hunger,” said Publisher Sharon DiMauro. “The goal is to give the Food Bank money it can use year-round, not just during the holidays. It doesn”t matter a bit whether a person contributes through our fundraiser or directly to the Food Bank, the main thing is to contribute and if you”re able, to give year-round.”
This week”s donors
The names of donors who contribute through the newspapers or CFMC”s website are printed each week, unless they ask to remain anonymous.
At the end of the drive, which runs through Dec. 31, the names of everyone who donates to the 2013 campaign will be reprinted.
As of press time Wednesday, donations from Jeanette Hansen, Edwin and Theresa Branscomb, Susan Nutter, Kit and Sandi Mosden, D. and C. Gittins, Myra Beals, Eric Frey, J.R. Harrison, Roderick and Kathleen Cameron, Janice and Robert Ball, Oran and Frankie Kangas, the Gill-Heckeroth Family, D”Ann Finley, Craig and Rosemarie Walter, Barbara McBroom, Charles, Alfred and Kate Lee in memory of Jean and her beloved creatures, and one anonymous donor brought the Season of Sharing fund drive total to $16,420.
