| amaranth, wild rocket, and salad rocket leaves |
When I find myself in a momentary lapse of boredom from either sitting in a seminar, writing a tedious chapter/article for my PhD, or when I have nothing to do, I google the health benefits of the various leafy greens. I try to find recently published articles to keep up to date with the literature and make sense of the vast amount of information out there. But I soon fall into the trap of comparing plants with medicine. How much of this vitamin is in this leaf compared to general medication, and so on. I'm not fond of this reductionist thinking about things, but it is so easy to fall for its seduction. Our minds easily comprehend numbers on a spreadsheet with some nice graphs.
| wild rocket plant |
With the great success of my four favourite leafy greens — wild rocket, salad rocket, swiss chard/silver beet, and amaranthus — I have been eating a bowl of salad or some other variation of it almost every day. The psychological benefits of knowing I can do something like grow my own food, the benefit of getting in the sun, kneeling down in the garden, and then eating the things that I have grown, far outweigh the "macronutrient breakdown" of foods we sometimes obsess about.
But still, I get myself googling the health benefits of eating these plants in a salad. It is funny, it is almost like when I know that there might be health benefits linked to eating plants, it somehow gets even healthier. I mostly make my salads when I just finished reading a scientific study paper on the health benefits of eating in this case leafy greens.
| salad rocket flowers |
And this always takes me back to the idea of seeing a bowl of salad as medicine or preventative medicine. Various of these herbs and plants were used as medicine before modern medicine. Even if we do not use it any longer in the form of medicine, the notion of preventative medicine is something that still resonates with me. A bowl of salad becomes more than just food for basic nourishment, it becomes a powerhouse of nutrients that might prevent getting sick. This is obviously said with a grain of salt, but how much of the "Western diet" lacks essential nutrients that the most basic plants can help with changing for the better?
| swiss chard/silver beet |
"Becoming healthy" is so important but serves different purposes. One the one hand, it is to obsess less about what theoretic knowledge says. Obviously, this is important as a guide and can help to some degree. But on the other hand, it is about cultivating not only our garden but also our "mind garden", that is, communities of knowledge growth. Abstract and theoretical knowledge is important and can help in many cases, but it is mostly detached from reality. What can be isolated and studied in the lab is not the same as eating the whole plant in addition with other foods, and so on.
| salad rocket plant |
"Becoming healthy" on paper is thus radically different to becoming healthy by practising good habits, growing food, harvesting it yourself, getting out in the sun, sharing produce and knowledge, and so on. I know I tend to sometimes think with my reductionist cap on, but this is rarely the answer to problems.
| my salad bowl, containing the four leafy greens |
Harvesting is the most fun and delicious part of gardening. I love the fact that I can merely walk outside and grab a bunch of leaves that would cost me well over $2 per salad per day. It does not sound like much, but it quickly adds up. Currently, I have no other costs. The leaves are practically free, grown from seeds that I have collected over the years.
It all adds up in the end. Adding nutrition to my diet, adding so much else to my lifestyle, but I still sometimes find myself thinking about the individual elements of health...
It starts with a bowl of salad.
I hope that you enjoyed this more "philosophical" post, even though it is merely about a bowl of salad that I harvested.
Happy gardening, and keep well!
All of the musings are my own, albeit inspired by a bowl of leafy greens. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.