Enjoy whole foods

Enjoy whole foods is about how we can ruin favas, also known as broad-beans, real bread and brown rice.

Anyone who reads this column with any regularity will know that I am totally enamored by broad beans. Thus I was delighted when I saw that Dr Weil, had written up a recipe for a Fava Bruschetta^[1]. He is definitely someone to follow but like Bernard Preston with a just a touch of skepticism.

In this instance Dr Weil takes what is basically broad-beans on toast, gives it a fancy Italian name, and then proceeds to utterly desecrate what is in actual fact a very fine whole food.

First he recommends you shell the beans and then pop them out of their skins. It effectively removes almost all of the fibre and is the reason why contrary to all other legumes, favas are reckoned to have a very high glycemic-index; doubly refined in this way they certainly do.

Then he instructs the cook to grill the bread in the oven; what’s the matter with the toaster, requiring a fraction of the electricity and taking perhaps a tenth of the time?

Finally cut some garlic in half and rub the toast, the inference being that you then discard the clove.

He has taken a simple and nutritious dish that can be made in fifteen minutes, robbed it of much of its nutrients and made it far more difficult and time-consuming to prepare; enough to put anyone off, so I rewrote the recipe as broad beans on toast, which is a wonderfully nutritious and tasty dish.

Whole broad beans; shelled, skinned and the fibrous remains.

Finding 100% flour for the toast under your broad-beans is more difficult. You must have a wheat mill to make your artisan bread; it is truly a whole food which is almost impossible to buy. You have to grind the meal yourself; you simply won't find it on the shelf of your supermarket.

Green mealie risotto

And then there’s America’s test-kitchen, another site with many good ideas; their column titled 10 good things to know about green mealies is superb, but they utterly ruin the newsletter with their Corn Risotto.

They recommend making it with white rice and corn from which they have extracted the puree and discarded the solids. In short both the rice and the corn are now highly-refined starches with a glycemic index that will push your blood glucose into orbit if you are the slightest bit insulin resistant; and that’s a good many people. It will be very fattening.

Again I rewrote the recipe, calling it green-mealie risotto, using brown rice and all the fibre in the corn; it makes a very fine and nutritious dish. There is heaps of research stating how beneficial whole grains are, but their risotto is akin to eating white bread.

It seems to my cynical mind that even top chefs love to take a simple dish, extract and discard half the goodness and then make it difficult to prepare. It’s little wonder that Americans are so obese. And so are we in South Africa, not because of bruchettas and risottos but largely because of sugary colas, chocolate cake and koeksusters; and refined mealie meal too. It is no coincidence that the USA and SA rank in the top five nations where the C-19 virus wrecked such havoc. 

Enjoy whole foods

Enjoy whole foods because they provide the fibre our colons must have; and the nutrients that our cells demand if we are to enjoy long and vigorous lives.

L-dopa

Broad beans are a unique vegetable because they are about the only natural source of the precursor of dopamine. That is the neurotransmitter missing in people suffering from Parkinson's disease.

More than half of the L-dopa is found in the pod. Dr Weil's recipe discards most of the real virtue of this wonderful bean.

Real bread contains all the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids of the whole-grain; the three streams of bran, germ and endosperm are not separated.

However millers are allowed by international law to remove forty-percent of the goodies and still call it whole meal. It's a big fat lie.

This wholemeal is quite different to anything you can buy. And the bread made from it unbelievably wholesome and tasty. Having enjoyed artisan bread you'll never go back to the commercial loaf.

Enjoy whole foods and there's a good chance you will live long in the land.

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