The Farmers' Market is a Pharmacy: food to use as medicine

(I wrote this for the website: eatlocalgrown, which has not yet posted it.)

  

Seemingly ordinary food is magical: salt extinguishes fire without causing smoke, vinegar cleans burned pots and cinnamon repels ants. More crucially, you probably have a drugstore right in your own kitchen because everyday food—what you can find at a farmers’ market-- can do what all those expensive tablets, capsules, sprays and liquids sold as medicine do. That x in the bold braggadocio of your local pharmacy’s Rx is hiding the word recipe. See the kitchen mortar and pestle?

Medicine has always been a mix of edible ingredients trusted to remedy or restore. The word hospital is the core of the seemingly unrelated word hospitality because for centuries they were actually the same. After all, hospitality is about feeding someone else-- carefully so they don’t fall ill or die under your roof or starve to death, making you a murderer. Crusaders whose war wounds were healed by the traditional “eat and be well” hospitality of strangers returned to Europe and enthusiastically established hospitals to provide a designated spot where other people could be cured by proper diet too.

Asians still rely on food to adjust human health. If you think that’s primitive, think again: you do or don’t drink coffee or tea because of the caffeine. Check out the shelves at your modern pharmacy. Boldly emblazoned across all the jar labels lined up touting promises of harmony and vigor, you’ll find cayenne, cinnamon, ginger, garlic, turmeric, fenugreek, cranberry, pomegranate, papaya, elderberry, bilberry, acaiberry, “superfruits plus”, soy, fish oil, artichoke extract, black cherry extract, green tea and seaweed. Most of today’s expensive prescription drugs are derived by reductive chemistry from food plants and animal products.

So why not go straight to the source? Here are “hospital” foods you probably have in the kitchen or can buy at a farmers’ market:

Honey: antibiotic ointment

Rub real honey on a cut, burn or wound you cannot immediately cover or repair to stave off infection. A British field surgeon on a WWI Greek battlefield with no supplies to save the wounded surmised that the busy bees all around him were up to something more important than anybody realized and, in desperation, smeared their honey on torn limbs, burns, gaping holes and all the other horrific injuries in front of him. To his amazement, the soldiers treated with honey survived until help came. 

  

Honey can also tackle the bacteria of a sore throat.

Yogurt: 5,000-year-old answer to Montezuma’s Revenge, Kaopectate and Immodium

If it is plain and contains live cultures, several doses of yogurt will stop microbial diarrhea—with no side effects. Francis I ruler of France at the start of the 16^th Century suffered from severe diarrhea no French doctor could cure, so his Ottoman Turkish ally Suleiman the Magnificent sent a doctor who cured it by feeding the king yogurt.  It will also keep your gut working properly if you are taking antibiotics by putting crucial probiotics back. And it can acclimate your body to a new location by safely introducing it to the local microbes, giving you revenge on Montezuma.

The live culture plain yogurt can also work as “cold cream”, smoothing, polishing and removing redness from your face.

Garlic: anti-bacterial, anti microbial and anti fungal sulfa drug

Garlic leaves that telltale smell on your breath because it goes straight to the lungs where it becomes a miracle cleaner of breath, blood and bronchia. Its chemicals so powerfully attack parasites and microbes, the ancients called it a demon killer. Now a very recent, highly scientific report says the traditional remedy of garlic with the equally powerful onion—a 1,000-year-old English treatment for eye infection—seems to kill the dreaded, antibiotic-resistant MRSA virus.

Soybeans: hormone replacement

A brilliant Chinese gynecologist, trained in both Eastern and Western medicine, was horrified by the hormone therapy horrors Americans asked her to remedy. Chinese women don’t need post menopausal medication, she told her patients, because they get enough estrogen from eating soy three to four times a week and broccoli at times. She counseled eating tofu at least three times weekly and broccoli every two weeks and it worked as well as dangerously side-effected medications in what’s known as ERT, estrogen replacement therapy. Japanese edamame can substitute for a tofu or two.

Ginger: anti-nausea

Historically the fastest cure for seasickness has been chewing fresh ginger. This root works so well against nausea, hospitals used to wake every post-op patient with a glass of ginger ale.

Ginger also raises body temp, which can speed metabolism and incinerate microbes.

Seaweed: iodine for the thyroid

Nori that wraps around your sushi or can be dissolved into a soup broth or seaweed salad or kombu anything can revive a sagging thyroid that needs iodine. Eating seaweed can disqualify you from suffering through the commonly prescribed nuclear isotope thyroid test and get you an old-fashioned hands-on diagnostic exam instead. Because I made myself a bowl of seaweed soup a day before my medical appointment, that happily happened for me.

Cranberries: prevent and relieve urinary tract infections

Dried, fresh or as 100% cranberry juice, these soft red marbles make the urinary tract acidic for bacteria to cling to. They do the same for the stomach lining, making it inhospitable to the bacteria suspected of causing ulcers. They also protect the prostrate gland from renegade cancer cells.

Walnuts: restore vitality (chi)

Unique chemical compounds in walnuts are nourishment for hardworking kidneys, containers of the body’s energy or chi. Chinese medicine prescribes a few walnuts a day for exhaustion because their oil revitalizes waning chi. My experience validates the remedy.

Bananas, chocolate and orange peel:  yummy Immodium, Lomotil

When you need to stop the intestinal spasms caused by diarrhea, which is essentially what Immodium and Lomotil do, eat bananas, chocolate and orange peel. They are all good and very tasty sources of pectin and other crucial binders.

Tapioca flour: same as above

Also works to remedy ulcerous colitis. Mix with a liquid and drink.

Parsley: antacid like Maalox; breath freshener like mints and gums

Parsley is the most under rated, under appreciated food in the kitchen. It’s a nutritional powerhouse that costs pennies and a working drug that can calm a queasy stomach by neutralizing its acid and clean bad breath by neutralizing the stench of that stomach acid. For the same price, its surprisingly large collection of volatile chemicals help restore energy, protect the heart and prevent many sadly common cancers like colon and cervical.

Cabbage: anti-inflammatory, cholesterol lowering

Red cabbage, especially when combined with equally anti-inflammatory turmeric root—fresh or powdered, will reduce the sort of internal inflammation that can build up and spill over into incipient cancer.  Green cabbage, steamed, will reduce cholesterol levels.

Other powerful medicinal foods: sunchokes (stimulate the stomach, protect the bowel), dandelion greens (called in French pissenlit, wet the bed, because they are a diuretic), fenugreek (stimulates mucous, enzyme and breast milk flow), basil (the famous smell comes from antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant chemicals), sweet potatoes (blood sugar regulation, anti-inflammatory) and finally, blueberries (new evidence they help memory retention).