reply to post by boaby_phet
You are welcome. Thank you for the feedback.
I may sometimes come off as being 'against' a lot of the 'naturist' themed threads around here, but it mostly stems from the completely one-sided
education many of these e-naturists seem to have.
Yes - food grown in your garden is going to be, often, of superior taste and nutritional content than what you buy at the store. I live in the
country where a lot of us have gardens, we still buy from the store or farmers' markets (which often sell to the local supermarkets, anyway).
Gardening is an involved process that requires time and resources that many people do not have... and if farmers didn't pick stuff before it was ripe
(or coat it) - it would never survive the trip to your store, let alone a couple days in the store (and forget surviving in your house long enough to
eat it).
The market for food that we have simply will not support garden-fresh foods on the supermarket shelves. It, likely, never will.
I just wish people would take a step back and see things for what they are.
And, like I said... I get tired of the "As nature intended" ... Nature did not develop so that we could eat it. We have developed to survive eating
it... and the process is ongoing.
It's a worship of 'nature' to the point of having no respect for it. Tea contains epic amounts of fluoride - consuming large amounts of tea (a
gallon per day or more) for long periods of time (over the course of years) can lead to skeletal fluorosis. Most of that is in the form of
aluminum-fluoride, which makes me wonder about the impact aluminum would have on the body, as well.
"Deadly Nightshade" is a pretty self-explanatory name that was, likely, assigned for a reason. However, many members of the Solanaceae family
produce atropine (along with other tropane alkaloids). Of course - people are advised to not even handle the plant, as any one of the many alkaloids
within it can easily put you into a coma. More interesting are the members of the family: Tobacco (nicotine is an alkaloid that is particularly
strong within it), Potatoes, Eggplant, Tomatoes, just about any pepper, and petunias.
All of which contain alkaloids that can potentially cause death (particularly in the areas where chlorophyll is present). In the case of plants like
tomatoes - you would have to eat a completely implausible amount of greens to cause a problem... but in potatoes, you should never eat a green
potato... and not even touch Nightshade.
Similarly, things get a little crazy when you start mixing foods. For example, we'll use tea, again. Adding lemon to tea helps with the absorption
of antioxidants - whereas adding milk tends to destroy the antioxidant benefits of tea as compounds within milk bond to the antioxidants.
Then you factor in environmental differences between foods and the genetic differences between species.... how preparation and serving mucks with
everything....
It becomes easy to see how the scope of "what is good" versus "what is bad" is absolutely incalculable.
Hence why I don't worry about it too much. I eat based on cravings and building off of what I'm craving using a bit of knowledge (mix grains with
legumes for complete proteins, for example). By some instinct... or just because my parents made sure to feed me a wide variety of foods when I was a
kid, I have noticed my cravings tend to be more nutritionally oriented than flavor oriented.
In either case - I've digressed, considerably.
It is always a great experience to taste/eat/enjoy the garden-ripe tomato (especially on a charcoal-grilled burger with home-grown lettuce and onion),
the raw honey as straight from the comb as possible, etc. It's not always practical, much less for those in concrete jungles.
That, however, doesn't make what is commercially produced "fake" or "bad." It is what it is, streamlined for mass production at a price
point.
It just irritates me that people don't seem to be able to step back and give it all a fair analysis.