The Man Who Ate Everything (22 page)

Raw red cabbage, brussels sprouts, and beets contain an antivitamin that binds with the B vitamin thiamine and stops its absorption. Similar antithiamine substances are also found in mustard seeds, some berries, cottonseed (the oil of which finds its way into the cheaper salad dressings), and some ferns (fiddlehead fans take note). The raw egg in a Caesar salad contains avidin, which binds up the B vitamin called biotin in much the same way. Magnesium, zinc, and copper get the same binding treatment from phytates in uncooked grain protein, which includes the wheat germ that some folks sprinkle on their salads. Raw soybeans contain antagonists to vitamin B
₁₂
and vitamin D and can cause rickets. And a vitamin E blocker in raw kidney beans, alfalfa, and some peas increases the incidence of liver disease in animals. But at least they won’t suffer from an
excess
of vitamin E, which blocks the conversion of beta-carotene into vitamin A.

One of the most offensive phrases used by nutrition buffs is “empty calories,” applied to such culinary triumphs as the frozen Milky Way bar. I, for one, would rather eat an empty calorie than a toxic one. And what could be emptier than a bowl of bound and blocked raw spinach, cabbage, or peas?

As you might expect, raw vegetables that would otherwise be alluring as rich sources of protein or starch may be equally rich in
defensive chemicals that render the protein or starch indigestible. Protease inhibitors in raw turnips, rutabagas, chickpeas, bamboo sprouts, cashews, peanuts, and most beans counteract the enzymes in our bodies that digest protein. In a similar fashion, amylase inhibitors in raw red kidney beans and navy beans make their carbohydrate content unusable.

The careful reader will notice that each of these salad ingredients acts as an antinutrient only in its raw state. Like some of the toxins we’ll come to later, antinutrients are destroyed by proper cooking. Boiling water dissolves or dilutes chemicals that are soluble in water; high heat denatures many proteins, including most nutrition blockers and some toxins; other toxins quickly
oxidize
into harmless compounds at high temperatures. It is important to know the right method, temperature, and cooking time for each perilous vegetable. Consult your old wives’ tales for further instructions.

This year we celebrate the forty thousandth anniversary of the miracle of cooking. Current anthropological thought suggests that modern
Homo sapiens
rapidly displaced the Neanderthals in Europe because
Homo sapiens
could cook and Neanderthals could not. We have seen that most protein-rich vegetables—grains and beans particularly—require cooking to become nutritious.
Homo sapiens
were able to gain a new and stable supply of protein by disabling the nutrition blockers and toxins in raw vegetables and thus achieved a crucial advantage in the battle for survival. The way I see it, Neanderthals, with their flat receding foreheads and bad posture, continued to eat salad and erudite until they died out, which is why we call them Neanderthals, which means crude and stupid people, and also why we use the term for people who still eat the way Neanderthals did. I cannot say whether they preferred Thousand Island or Green Goddess, but then again, anthropology is not my field.

Vitamin and mineral blockers merely hoodwink people who believe that salad is good for them. Much more sinister are the toxins in raw vegetables, which can make them very ill. Some of
these are destroyed by cooking, and some are not. As you would expect, vegetables that have been bruised or attacked by mold or fungus manufacture these poisons many times more enthusiastically than healthy ones.

The earliest published description of poisoning by lima bean is from 1884 in Mauritius. Seven deaths were reported in Puerto Rico between 1919 and 1925 from the ingestion of undercooked beans. Lima and other broad beans contain high concentrations of cyanogens, which poison just like the cyanide in those death-row-on-Alcatraz movies. (Cyanide pellets attached to the underside of the prisoner’s chair are released by remote control into a pan of acid below. The lethal gas curls up toward her nose and mouth.) Cyanogens are also found in unripe millet, young bamboo shoots, and cassava (see also manioc, tapioca, and so forth), the starchy root that supplies 10 percent of the world’s caloric requirements and still turns up in the Nigerian newspapers as a cause of death. Cassava is unlikely to turn up in your salad, but immature bamboo shoots probably will. Both must be carefully peeled, washed in running (not still) water, and boiled without a lid to prevent the cyanide from condensing back into the pot.

Goitrogens are chemicals that cause extreme enlargement of the thyroid among people with little iodine in their diets by preventing iodine uptake. Goitrogens are found in raw cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, turnips, rutabagas, cauliflower, mustard seeds, and horseradish, and contribute to their characteristic flavors. Some studies blame high cabbage consumption in the Midwest among German and Eastern European immigrants and their families for the high incidence of goiter there. Cows that forage on marrow-stem kale in parts of Tasmania transmit goitrogens through their milk, which accounts for endemic goiter in the population. Goitrogens are largely broken down by cooking.

One reason to travel to France and Italy is that they don’t force salad on you with the napkins, the silverware, and the incantation “French, Italian, or oil and vinegar?” When you
request a salad, it is not thrown together by the dishwasher between his more demanding tasks. It is treated as food, not fodder. It is thoughtfully composed, animated with duck or smoked fish or foie gras, and often served as a first course. Consequently, it does not delay dessert. On the other hand, France and Italy are the source of the current culinary love affair with foods like fava beans, chickpeas, and plantains—all native to exotic lands where life after forty is not an everyday thing.

Favism is a disease named after the fava bean, or vice versa. This darling of the nouvelle cuisine may well turn up raw in your salad. Mild cases of favism result in fatigue and nausea, acute cases in jaundice. The mathematician and cult figure Pythagoras, who was nobody’s fool, forbade his followers to eat fava beans. The Iranians never listened to him, and a recent survey of 579 cases of favism there blamed the broad bean for all but four. The good news is that favism attacks mainly people who have something called G6PD genetic deficiency and eat huge quantities of raw favas. The bad news is that G6PD deficiency shows up in a hundred million people of all races worldwide.

Both the ancient Hindus and the great Hippocrates warned that chickpeas could cause lathyrism—neurological lesions of the spinal cord which result in paralysis of the legs. The sale of chickpeas is illegal in many states in India, where they would otherwise completely dominate the diet of the poor, who make chapati out of chickpea flour, which is ground from raw chickpeas. If you soak chickpeas overnight or cook them in an excess of boiling water, they will not give you lathyrism. But don’t try to make chapati this way. As for plantains, eat them in moderation. Africans who ignore this injunction ingest too much serotonin and end up with carcinoid heart disease, apparently whether they cook their plantains or not.

Nor will cooking protect you if you make your potato salad with green immature potatoes, which can contain
lethal
amounts of solanine in their sprouts and skin. Undercooked kidney beans in those popular al dente mixed-bean salads contain hemagglutinins, which make your red blood cells stick together and account for poor growth among children in parts of Africa. Monkeys placed on a diet of alfalfa sprouts develop lupuslike symptoms. Soybean sprouts and yams are high in estrogenic factors, which can wreak havoc with a woman’s hormones if she consumes too much of them or if the plants have been attacked by mold. Purple mint, popular as a condiment in Japan and now widely available in the United States, causes acute pulmonary emphysema in cattle foraging on it. Better stick with reliable old garden-variety green mint.

The list is endless. But the government virtually ignores these and other natural poisons in your salad bowl while worrying itself to death about artificial food additives and industrial pollutants. Unmasking this double standard—particularly concerning carcinogens and mutagens—has become something of a mission for Professor Bruce Ames, chairman of the biochemistry department at Berkeley. Ames likes to describe the carcinogenic potential in an average serving of some everyday food by comparing it to the polluted well water in Silicon Valley in California, which has been condemned as carcinogenic by the state Department of Health Services. Aflatoxin, for example, is among the most potent carcinogens known and is present in mold-contaminated grain and nuts, like those peanuts you sprinkle on your salad or enjoy in peanut butter. The FDA permits so much aflatoxin in food that the peanut butter in your sandwich can be seventy-five times more hazardous than a liter of contaminated Silicon Valley water, the amount you would drink in a day if they would only let you.

Almost as hazardous are the hydrazines in one raw mushroom or the basil in a dollop of pesto sauce (which contains lots of estragole). Safrole, a compound related to estragole, is the reason natural root beer is now banned by the FDA. Much worse than Silicon Valley water and almost as bad as basil is the daily spoonful of brown mustard in your piquant salad dressing. The psoralens in celery (which increase a hundredfold if the celery is moldy) regularly cause dermatitis among supermarket checkers.

Healthy celery in your salad does no harm, but can you be absolutely sure your celery is healthy? Some investigators warn that psoralens are so carcinogenic that all “unnecessary exposures should be avoided.”

I should mention that Professor Ames himself seems to have nothing personal against salad. (He even speculates about the anticarcinogenic potential of some vegetables.) But great minds sometimes fail to see the full implication of their own work. This task falls upon the shoulders of those who follow. Salad fanatics may notice that I have presented no evidence against raw zucchini or carrots. The reason is that I found none. Mother Nature could never have foreseen that zucchini—which has little taste in its raw state and even less nutritive value—would be used as a food by modern
Homo sapiens.
Then again, should we regard those who eat raw zucchini as modern
Homo sapiens?

Raw carrots do contain the aptly named carotatoxin; when extracted from this red-orange, spindle-shaped root, carotatoxin does produce a severe neurological disorder in mice. But a human would have to eat 3,500 pounds of carrots at one sitting to consume an equivalent dose.

And what about raw fruit? Unlike the antisocial vegetable, ripe fruit is gregarious and loves to be eaten and have its seeds widely dispersed. That’s why all ripe fruits generate chemicals— flavors, sugars, dyes, and softeners—to
entice
animals rather than injure them. Raw ripe sweet tasty juicy fruit was designed to give ceaseless pleasure to man and beast alike, even to Neanderthals and their modern cousins. And you never have to boil it into submission.

June 1988

1990: The Bar-and-Grilling of Gotham

Wood-oven pizzas and grilled everything are now pandemic. Some call it bistromania, but it has nothing to do with bistros. A bistro is not an expensive hamburger-and-chicken joint with shoestring potatoes, red-pepper puree, and five French words on the menu. A bistro is not a bar and grill. (In New York, a bar and grill is not a bar and grill. The Gotham Bar and Grill, for example, is no more a bar and grill than 1 am.) If there are fewer than, say, fifty true and honest bistros in Paris, how many would you expect to find in New York? Five? The real mania since 1985 has been trattoriamania, the proliferation of informal Italian-style restaurants specializing in pasta, pizza, salads, and postmodern decor. (Nationally, over the past five years the number of Italian restaurants has grown 50 percent, more than any other category.)

“Bistromania” was always just a muddled slogan. What’s really happening now is the Grilling of Gotham. In 1989, according to the National Restaurant Association,
nearly half of all restaurant entrees nationwide were broiled, charbroiled, or grilled.
Frying, the favorite cooking method five years ago, has been demoted to a weak second. Simmering, poaching, baking, braising, boiling, steaming, and roasting— every one of these classical cooking techniques is now history. New York, for over a century the great center of cosmopolitan cuisine, has finally succumbed to the suburbanization of the kitchen. This is the food of the fifties, of the Eisenhower years, of the nuclear family and the single-family house, of Dads grilling steaks and chickens in backyard America on Moms’ well-deserved day off. It is a democratic kind of cooking that needs no professional training, teeny amounts of hand-eye coordination, a few moments of
mise-en-place,
even less time upon the flames. The little booklet that came with the grill tells you how to do it. Just don a silly, floppy grease-stained toque and pour a can of kerosene over a pile of charcoal briquettes. Everything tastes terrifically the same—the acrid tang of burning fat and blackened muscle fiber, the haunting scent of the gas station.

Now fish has been added to the grill and sometimes vegetables; potato chips have grown into pancakes, shoestrings, and hash browns. That’s how far we have come in thirty years.