Foodie and author Jo Robinson wants us to take a bite on the wild side and not fear foods that are bitter, sour or acid.
鈥淲e have reduced a lot of our fruits and vegetables to pabulum in terms of their flavour and consistency,鈥� said Robinson in a telephone interview from her home on Vachon Island near Seattle.
鈥淲e are just really averse to strong flavours, the bitter flavours, the astringency, all those things,鈥� she said. 鈥淪o I like to invite people to bring a little bitterness back into their diets.鈥�
Robinson is the author of Eating on the Wild Side, The Missing Link to Optimum Health. She will be in Victoria on Saturday, part of the Health, Wellness and Sustainability Festival.
Her book is not just a lament for what she says generations of farmers and marketers have done to the vegetables and plants on our table. It is also a hunter鈥檚 horn call to recapture the strong flavours once found in earlier, wilder foods because of the nutritional benefits they can provide.
It turns out plants produce strong-flavoured edible compounds, phytonutrients, to ward off diseases harmful to themselves. Evidence is accumulating that when we ingest these phytonutrients, they can also assist us in warding off diseases or chronic medical problems.
For example, Robinson said countries such as Italy or France, where people regularly consume bitter-tasting salad greens, have much lower incidences of medical conditions such as dementia.
鈥淲e are now learning a lot of phytonutrients can cross over the blood/brain barriers and reduce our risks of dementia,鈥� she said.
Unfortunately for us, ever since people started farming and learned to select and manipulate plants for characteristics such as sweetness and carbohydrate density, our diets have become less rich in those health-guarding but strong-flavoured nutrients.
Robinson said you can鈥檛 really blame farmers or grocers. As organisms, we are hard-wired to select foods high in sugar, fat and carbohydrates over things that are sour, bitter or high in fibre.
鈥淲hen we were gathering wild foods, we just had to take what was there,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut when we became farmers, we said: 鈥楬o, we can do better than that.鈥�
鈥淪o we plant the foods that are mild-tasting, rich in starch, sweet as possible and with less fibre because they are easier to prepare. We went for flavour and convenience.鈥�
Fortunately, said Robinson, foods high in phytonutrient content can still be found in the 21st-century supermarket.
鈥淚鈥檓 not suggesting people go and gather wild plants,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e are not going to do that.
鈥淲hat I try to do is try to help people find what I call the bio-equivalents of the wild foods.鈥� She offers some quick examples.
鈥� Go for the small cherry tomatoes. They have thicker skin, for extra fibre, carry less water and are higher in acid compounds than the big ones.
鈥� Buy green scallion onions instead of the big bulbs. The green segments are higher in phytonutrients than the bulbs and have a comparable flavour.
One segment of the grocery store has been left relatively untouched in modern shoppers鈥� quest for mild flavours and sweetness: herbs and spices.
Since they are primarily used for flavour, they carry no incentive to breed them down.
鈥淲e haven鈥檛 bred them to get rid of their strong flavours, which we have done with everything else.
鈥淲e want those flavours as seasonings. So we left those plants pretty intact, so they have more phytonutrients than just about anything else we eat.鈥�
Robinson is scheduled to speak Saturday at the Victoria Health, Wellness and Sustainability Festival at the Victoria Conference Centre, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, go to healthandwellness festival.ca.
