broccoli

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"Maybe you have been reading recently about the debate over the toxicity or not of tomato plant leaves. Or, you might be humored to know that eggplants contain nicotine. (Yes, eating 20 pounds of eggplant is equivalent to smoking one cigarette. I figure you would have to eat the 20 pounds in the same seven minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette to really have this work, and I doubt anyone has studied the secondary effects of such eggplant consumption.)"

from:

What Broccoli Leaves To Be Desired

If I read a title like that, I’d figure the guy was about to embroil the poor innocent vegetable—but you’d be wrong. No, the title stems from this week’s basket filled with tips of broccoli plants, mostly leaf, the result I’m assuming of the overheated end of its seasonal cycle. Broccoli, like its brassica buddies, prefers to be cool as cucumbers (yes, there was one of them in the basket, too). I was told by experienced chefs to remove the leaves from broccoli before cooking. But, since in this batch the florets seem to have butted out, into the sauté pan they went with their fellow basket-dwellers onion and garlic. What a surprising wonderful delicate flavor which I attribute directly to the fertility of Steven and Gloria’s Demeter certified biodynamic soil. And it turns out that the leaves have a higher content of betacarotene than the florets in any case. So, I repeat, what broccoli leaves to be desired—maybe you hear it differently this time (unless you are suffering cauliflower ear!).

Actually, I had meant to write about eggplants before today’s greens garnered my attention. The nightshades are far more storied and controversial than broccoli. Nightshades come in many forms including potatoes, peppers, tobacco, tomatoes to mention a few. Maybe you have been reading recently about the debate over the toxicity or not of tomato plant leaves. Or, you might be humored to know that eggplants contain nicotine. (Yes, eating 20 pounds of eggplant is equivalent to smoking one cigarette. I figure you would have to eat the 20 pounds in the same seven minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette to really have this work, and I doubt anyone has studied the secondary effects of such eggplant consumption.)

The only controversy over broccoli that I can remember was when the first president Bush made the mistake of publicly indicating his distaste for the vegetable. The California broccoli growers association responded by airlifting ten tons of broccoli onto the White House lawn. HW would have none of it. [You can read all about it at http://eatbroccoli.org/politics.aspx] That was back in the 90’s. I doubt it was organic. How times have changed. I’d guess they are growing organic broccoli in the newly minted White House garden. Starting that garden in soil that’s been sprayed for security purposes and kept ferrous green for the media must have been a harrowing experience—I tell you, the irony of it.

It seems appropriate here to cite another reference to broccoli in a political commentary. This is from an essay, “The Fallacies of Anti-Reformers,” by Sydney Smith written early in the 20^th century in which he excoriates (as in how you prepare apples for applesauce) the politicians who were trying to pass “irrevocable law.” Aside from indicating that such laws are worse than the tyranny of Nero or Caligula (hard to imagine since as Caesars their salad days were over) he goes on to say: “…how are the Parliament…to be awakened from that dust in which they repose—making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades, and use the relics of these legislators to give breadth to broccoli, and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus?” That was written back in the day when folks really knew how to use language. I can only assume, aside from the linguistic use of consonance to express his consternation, that by “breadth to broccoli” he was not referring to some kind of casserole, but rather to the use of the ash as fertilizer. The reference to broccoli was no doubt a paean to populist proclivities, while the asparagus alludes to more aristocratic appetites. The prosody of it all! Thank heavens Smith didn’t make reference to a vernal eruption of vetch—then we’d really have something to complain about.

I apologize if you’ve lost your taste for broccoli or the story line along the way. I haven’t forgotten that broccoli is the subject and object of this article. (Can it be both?) The challenge is that, as I mentioned, broccoli is a little unexciting from the standpoint of good gossip. The Italians are of course most famous for their varieties of “nightshade stew”—a Bolognese, or caponata, eggplant “parm” with tomato sauce—and they are also responsible for creating the cultivar of broccoli, broccolo. It seems to have emanated from the region of Calabria, emigrated to Asia and the west of the US, particularly California where it has achieved true eminence (remember the airlift!). Broccoli is rich in nutrients and anti-carcinogens. Interestingly the latter are more extensively activated when the broccoli is cooked with tomatoes. This discovery, which you can read more about at the useful website www.whfoods.com, is meant to be my (another v-word) vindication for having included nightshades at all! Cooking broccoli—but not overcooking and definitely not boiling—helps with the chemical formation of sulforaphane, a noted anti-cancer compound, among many other beneficial properties. Pure non-science would connect this with the sulfurous smell that arises while cooking. But, please, for liability sake, don’t take my word for it. I implore you to do your own research or consort with your own inner nutritionista before presuming, assuming or consuming anything!

A closing observation about the broccoli plant: Much has been made of its tree-like form with trunk, stems, and branches. The comparison makes perfect sense, though it would be a challenge to explain a true scientific correlation other than circumstantial morphology. On that logic, turn the floret upside down. What I noticed when I did that was a remarkable resemblance to the bronchi and bronchioles that make up the better part of the lung’s air exchange system. I couldn’t tell you what to make of the observation, and I could not find any shared etymology short of reading Sanskrit. Some might think that the whole human organism and its subsystems are simply upside-down pictures of the plant world—but that is another story altogether.

As the broccoli season passes for now until the approach of autumn, we can bid it farewell with the same brassica band cacophony with which we consoled the kale. Those casseroles will have to await the relief of cooler clime, as even the leaves make like a tree and….

John Bloom

© 2009

image:
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