Category: Mainstream

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Fermented diversity

Luigi’s post on The glut of bugs in your gut opened a window here on a neglected aspect of biodiversity: the bacteria associated with certain foods and those associated with digesting that food. In all the background murmuring about probiotics and prebiotics, I’ve been hearing a lot of good sense from Seth Roberts. He’s the self-experimenter who devised the Shangri-La Diet (which isn’t a diet but a way of regulating appetite) and of late he’s been blogging more and more about fermented foods.

The things Roberts has noted are plentiful and diverse — I won’t summarize them here — but I can say that I’ve yet to meet a fermented food, in the widest sense, that I didn’t like. I also like playing with a few ferments myself. Of course there are fermentation fanatics, not just for the process as a whole but for particular “miracle mushrooms” and the like. ((To which, naturally, I have no intention of linking.)) And that puts some peoples’ backs up. But there is also probably a lot of good sense in making use not only of a diversity of ingredients, but also in a diversity of ways of processing them, outside and inside the body.

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Verdura di campo needs to be identified

In the first warm days of early spring Caterina’s mother — from the generation that lived through the wars — still roams the fields in search of that wonder of wonders… le verdure di campo (wild “vegetables”).

I bet she does. Read all about it in ItalianNotebook, and you’ll be salivating within seconds, like I was.

But fight the urge to rush out and harvest the roadside verges long enough to read the comment made by Barbara Modica at 2:39 pm on May 24th:

In the spring, there is a weed which resembles a rhubarb plant, except it is smaller, has a green stalk and green leaf shaped and about the same size as rhubarb. My husband’s family (from Sicily) boiled the stems, discard the leaves, then breaded them and fried them in olive oil. They called them gardoni (or something similar to that). Are you familiar with them? They are only edible in the spring, later on turn into a tall plant. We carry on the tradition and our grandchildren love them also.

Any ideas?

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The glut of bugs in your gut

A long article on The Why Files discusses changing attitudes to the human gut flora:

These critters, mainly bacteria, vastly outnumber the cells in our bodies, and we are utterly dependent on them. Bacteria make vitamin K, essential for clotting blood. As they do in cows, bacteria play an essential role converting our food into usable chemicals. And bacteria form a complex barrier against invading pathogenic microbes.

The realization of which has led to an explosion of proper scientific work on probiotics ((“Live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host,” according to the WHO.)), formerly confined to the lunatic fringe.

A springboard for the growing interest, Huffnagle ((Gary Huffnagle, professor of internal medicine and microbiology at the University of Michigan Health System.)) says, was a discovery by Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University, who found that bacteria “can talk to the epithelial cells that line the GI tract, which can turn on different genes depending on who is living nearby.”

What’s the connection to agrobiodiversity? More from the article in The Why Files:

Probiotics can be taken in supplement pills, or in many cultured products, such as yogurt, cottage cheese, tempeh and kefir. It’s not clear which mechanism is better, says Sanders ((Mary Ellen Sanders, executive director of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics.)), who consults to the dairy industry on microbiology. “Often probiotics are incorporated into the production of a food product, but we don’t really have a good sense of how important that might be. During the fermentation of milk into a dairy product, they may … produce organic acids or peptides that contribute to the health effects of a probiotic yogurt, but unfortunately there is no good research to sort out the benefits of a fermented dairy product versus a dry supplement.”

So microbial agrobiodiversity doesn’t just result in a huge range of delicious products with strong niche market potential. It’s also good for you.