top of page

Plants

Plants

Recent History

January 1, 1888

Nina Teicholz

The Big Fat Surprise

GreatWhiteOncomingSquare.jpg

Best to avoid leafy greens.

URL

Meanwhile, also contrary to our common impression, early Americans appeared to eat few vegetables. Leafy greens had short growing seasons and were ultimately considered not worth the effort. They “appeared to yield so little nutriment in proportion to labor spent in cultivation,” wrote one eighteenth-century observer, that “farmers preferred more hearty foods.” Indeed, a pioneering 1888 report for the US government written by the country’s top nutrition professor at the time concluded that Americans living wisely and economically would be best to “avoid leafy vegetables,” because they provided so little nutritional content. In New England, few farmers even had many fruit trees, because preserving fruits required equal amounts of sugar to fruit, which was far too costly. Apples were an exception, and even these, stored in barrels, lasted several months at most.

January 1, 1892

The principles and practice of medicine : designed for the use of practitioners and students of medicine

GreatWhiteOncomingSquare.jpg

Osler describes oxaluria which occurs in the urine and the crystals form a calculus. "The amount varies extremely with the diet, and it is increased largely when such fruits and vegetables as tomatoes and rhubarb are taken"

VII. Oxaluria. 


Oxalic acid occurs in the urine, in combination with lime, forming an oxalate which is held in solution by the acid phosphate of soda. About .01 to .03 gramme is excreted in the day. It never forms a heavy deposit, but the crystals— usually octahedra, rarely dumb-bell-shaped— collect in the mucus-cloud and on the sides of the vessel. The amount varies extremely with the diet, and it is increased largely when such fruits and vegetables as tomatoes and rhubarb are taken. It is also a product of incomplete oxidation of the organic substances in the body, and in conditions of increased metabolism the amount in the urine becomes larger. It is stated also to result from the acid fermentation of the mucus in the urinary passages and the crystals are usually abundant in spermatorrhoea. When in excess and present for any considerable time, the condition is known as oxaluria, the chief interest of which is in the fact that the crystals may be deposited before the urine is voided, and form a calculus. It is held by many that there is a special diathesis associated with this state and manifested clinically by dyspepsia, particularly the nervous form, irritability, depression of spirits, lassitude, and sometimes marked hypochondriasis. There may be in addition neuralgic pains and the general symptoms of neurasthenia. The local and general symptoms are probably dependent upon some disturbance of metabolism of which the oxaluria is one of the manifestations. It is a feature also in many gouty persons, and in the condition called lithaemia.

January 3, 1906

The Natives of Australia

GreatWhiteOncomingSquare.jpg

To describe in detail the vegetable food of the Australian aborigines would demand far more space than can be here allotted to the subject. Probably they employ as food at least three hundred species of vegetables, using the roots or tubers, the pith, the leaves, the fruits, kernels or husks, the seeds, and the gum, according to the species. Often more than one product is in use from a single species. When other food is scarce nardoo is the stand-by of the natives in the centre of Australia, but its nutritive properties are small.

This brings us to the subject of plant-food. 


Grey says that a species of flag was cultivated in West Australia, at any rate to the extent of burning it, in order to improve the next crop. He describes exten- sive yam grounds on the Hutt River, but it does not follow that these were artificial. The evidence of Gregory, however, leaves no doubt that there was actual cultivation on the west coast. He says that the natives, when they dug up yams, replaced the heads {fourn. Antli. hist., xvi. 131), and this can only be described as cultivation. The cultivation of purslane {Portulacd) seems to be a well-established fact. It is grown like melons on slightly raised mounds ; before the seed vessels are ripe, the plant is cut, turned upside down and dried in the sun ; then the seed vessels are plucked and rubbed down and the seed collected. Many pounds' weight can be collected in a day, even where there is no cultivation, and the cakes from it are far more nutritious than the well-known nardoo cakes, on which Burke and Wills tried to subsist. 


To describe in detail the vegetable food of the Australian aborigines would demand far more space than can be here allotted to the subject. Probably they employ as food at least three hundred species of vegetables, using the roots or tubers, the pith, the leaves, the fruits, kernels or husks, the seeds, and the gum, according to the species. Often more than one product is in use from a single species. 


When other food is scarce nardoo is the stand-by of the natives in the centre of Australia, but its nutritive properties are small. Of all the fruits eaten by the natives the most remarkable is perhaps the bunya- bunya nut. It is found in a limited area behind Brisbane, and bears fruit in abundance only once in three years. It is ripe in January, and tribes come from a distance for the feast ; each has its own trees ; in fact, each family owns one or more. The nut is roasted in the fire ; it is also placed in a water-hole and eaten after germination. Zamia nuts {Cycas media) form an important article of diet in many parts ; in its raw state it is poisonous. The shell is taken off the nuts, which are broken, pounded, and left in a dilly bag for four or five days in running water ; when they are soft enough they are pounded and baked under the ashes. Grey gives a somewhat different account. He says they are soaked, after being gathered in March, then they are placed in holes in the sand, where they remain till the pulp is quite dry. They are eaten raw or roasted, and in the latter state taste quite as nice as a chestnut. The yam {dioscored) is also highly important ; in some districts the holes from which the natives have dug them cover miles of ground. It is generally considered the province of the women to dig roots, but in some parts the men do so too, in which case the produce is reserved for their use. To get a yam half an inch in circumference and a foot in length, a hole has to be dug about a foot square and two feet deep. To do this the women have only a pointed stick ; this they drive firmly into the ground and shake it, so as to loosen the earth, which they scoop up and throw out with great rapidity with the fingers of the left hand. The roots are eaten raw or roasted ; but in West Australia the natives always mix it with an earth before eating it, alleging that it otherwise is apt to cause dysentery. In Queensland it is washed, baked for four hours, and mashed up in a grass dilly bag ; it is then strained through the dilly bag into a bark trough, in which the bag also remains until only fibre is left in it. Then the mash is washed, sometimes with seven or eight different waters. As soon as the washing is com- pleted a hole is dug in some sandy place and lined with clean sand ; into this the semi-liquid mass is poured, and when all the water has drained off, it looks much like tinned potato, according to Dr. Roth. 


Morrell, the English sailor who was captive among the Queensland natives many years ago, gives an account of the way in which the fruit of Avicennia officinalis was prepared ; a hole was dug and stones heated in the fire arranged on the bottom ; on this was put the fruit and water sprinkled over it ; then bark was put on the top and it was baked for two hours ; a second hole was dug, the fruit put in, water poured over it twice, and it was ready for eating. 


The bean-tree, or Moreton Bay chestnut, is prepared by being steeped eight or ten days ; then it is dried in the sun, roasted on hot stones and pounded ; mixed with water, it is made into thin cakes and baked. 


Solanum hystrix, known as walga in South Australia, is prepared in a curious way ; it is pounded and mixed with congoo, i.e. mallee root bark ; then the shell and seeds are removed and a cake made. When the fruit was not obtainable, the blacks bled themselves and mixed blood and bark into cakes. 


Mylitta australis, a kind of truffle, sometimes called native bread, was eaten in Victoria and possibly elsewhere. In West Australia the natives obtained from the acacias a kind of gum, called kwonnat, and on the grounds where this was obtainable assembled large crowds and held their annual markets. 


A kind of bulrush was largely eaten in South Australia ; it was prepared by being cooked between two stones ; it was to them what bread is to the European. It was cooked on a heap of limestone with wood laid on the top ; another layer of heated stones was placed on these and then wet grass to make steam ; a mound of earth completed the oven. After chewing the bulrush root they spat out the fibrous part, which they converted into rope for fishing-lines, nets, etc. The mussel was usually eaten with the bulrush root. 


This brief survey has not touched on a tithe of the important food-plants, but some idea will have been gained of the extent of the Australian garden and of the complication of the cooking processes ; indeed one may well wonder by what process they arrived at these ingenious processes, especially in the case of poisonous substances. 


It is often asserted that the Australian does not store food ; this is as untrue as that he does not cultivate his soil. Much of his food he must perforce eat quickly, or natural processes would make his labour in vain. But the bunya-bunya nut, grass and other seed cakes, and possibly other kinds of food, were certainly put aside for future use. 


Before we leave the subject of vegetable products mention must be made of pituri, a remarkable plant, the botanical name of which is Diiboisia Hopwoodii. It does not grow in all districts, and is the most important article of commerce. As soon as it is ready — it flowers in January — that is to say about March, messengers are sent, sometimes hundreds of miles, with spears, boomerangs, nets and other wares, to exchange for the pituri, which is in the form of half-green, half- yellow tea with plenty of chips in it. After roasting them on the ashes the chips become pliable and are wetted, teased up with the fingers, and the larger frag- ments removed. Some acacia leaves are then heated over the fire and then burnt ; the ashes are mixed with pituri and the whole worked up into quids about 2| inches long by f inch diameter. These are chewed, and when not in use are carried behind the ear. 


Sometimes pituri is taken before fighting, but its use is common to all classes and both sexes ; it seems to produce a voluptuous, dreamy sensation. Tobacco is now in use among the blacks, of course of European importation, and they are said to smoke pituri when the supply runs short. It is said that the native women use a species of Goodenia to make their children sleep when they are on a long journey.

April 15, 1911

The Passing of the Aborigines

GreatWhiteOncomingSquare.jpg

The famine foods of the Aborigines are described in this short anecdote. Day after day small fires were lighted to cook snakes and rabbits and bandicoots, lizards and iguanas, and every living thing that provided a mouthful. They killed many dingoes, and even their pet puppies, but the little boy clung lovingly to the last one. When meat supplies faded, they lived upon edible grubs and honey, ants, and beetles, and wong-unu (a grass), the seeds of which Nabbari masticated before she cooked them when there was no water.

One day, in the heat of April, there appeared before my tent a naked woman and her crippled son. They had walked for a thousand miles, from Mingana Water, beyond the border of Western and South Australia, after having been abandoned in the desert by a mob of thirty wild cannibals. The woman’s husband was dead, and her name was Nabbari. She had a firestick, a wooden scoop for digging out animal burrows, and her digging-stick, pointed at one end. Her boy, Marburning, carried a broken spear to help him in his lameness, but Nabbari had carried him most of the way.

Following the tracks, as the mobs had turned hither and thither in their search of food and water, so Nabbari zigzagged with the boy, often forced to retrace her steps. Four seasons, each with its own special foods, had passed in her travels and never in all that time was her firestick allowed to go out; for it is forbidden to women to make fires.

Day after day small fires were lighted to cook snakes and rabbits and bandicoots, lizards and iguanas, and every living thing that provided a mouthful. They killed many dingoes, and even their pet puppies, but the little boy clung lovingly to the last one. When meat supplies faded, they lived upon edible grubs and honey, ants, and beetles, and wong-unu (a grass), the seeds of which Nabbari masticated before she cooked them when there was no water. In the arid areas she found moisture in the mallee-roots, and shook the heavy dew-drops into her weera from the small bushes and herbage so that she and her boy throve on the long journey.

Many times they came upon the scene of old fights, or the hidden places of the manhood ceremonies—of these they would make a wide detour—or an orphan water where, after she had drunk of it, Nabbari would set up her death-wail. But the live tracks of her relatives who had preceded her were always visible, and from them she gained courage to follo

January 1, 1913

Academy Co-Founder Lenna Frances Cooper: A Pioneer in Vegetarian Nutrition and Dietetics

GreatWhiteOncomingSquare.jpg

Lenna’s first book, The New Cookery (Good Health Publishing, 1913), featured nutritionally balanced, attractive, and palatable vegetarian recipes, most of which were served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Many of these unique recipes incorporated innovative nut, wheat gluten, and legume- based meat substitutes, whole grain cereals, and other vegetarian food products.

Lenna’s first book, The New Cookery (Good Health Publishing, 1913), featured nutritionally balanced, attractive, and palatable vegetarian recipes, most of which were served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Many of these unique recipes incorporated innovative nut, wheat gluten, and legume- based meat substitutes, whole grain cereals, and other vegetarian food products that were originally created at The New Cookery (Good Health Publishing, 1913) the Sanitarium. Working closely with Dr. Kellogg, Lenna developed the vegetarian cuisine medical nutrition therapy menus that were served to the Sanitarium’s patients.Because of her multifaceted talents and accomplishments in dietetics at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Lenna’s reputation gradually became recognized on a national level as a leader in her field. Those early days of training and experience working at Battle Creek gave her a strong foundation in nutritional science that paved the way to an illustrious career.

Ancient History

Books

Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination

Published:

March 3, 2009

Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination

The Hunter-Gatherer Within: Health and the Natural Human Diet

Published:

February 1, 2013

The Hunter-Gatherer Within: Health and the Natural Human Diet

The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain

Published:

April 25, 2017

The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain

Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins

Published:

May 9, 2017

Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins

Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat

Published:

July 23, 2019

Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat

The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet

Published:

February 25, 2020

The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet

Gut and Physiology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Allergies, Autoimmune Illness, Arthritis, Gut Problems, Fatigue, Hormonal Problems, Neurological Disease and More

Published:

November 23, 2020

Gut and Physiology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Allergies, Autoimmune Illness, Arthritis, Gut Problems, Fatigue, Hormonal Problems, Neurological Disease and More
bottom of page