Eat Your Ugly Veggies

The supermarkets are loaded with gorgeous fruits and veggies, grown on large commercial operation farms and cared for using traditional fertilization and pest control. My backyard garden, on the other hand produces some...umm, how to put this...'quirky' looking veggies. Sometimes malformed, lots of times bug or bird bitten. But what about nutrient value versus the big stores better looking selection.

the marketplace today rewards farmers for yield and disease resistance in their crops, not for how much of these beneficial micronutrients a crop may contain.

Mitchell’s team has also been investigating whether organically grown fruits and veggies differ from those produced by conventional farming.

Her team compared identical cultivars grown on certified organic plots versus those where standard fertilizers and pesticides were being applied. And as a rule, organics far surpassed their conventionally grown kin for vitamins and beneficial micronutrients, such as the antioxidant flavonoids quercetin and kaempferol, Mitchell reported

She also thinks she knows why that is. Plant nutrients tend to fall into two broadly defined categories: primary and secondary plant metabolites. We know the first category better. It includes fats (or oils), carbohydrates, amino acids and simple sugars. The second group includes the phenolic acids, flavonoids, alkaloids and terpenoids.

Conventional farming has optimized its practices and crop amendments to maximize a plant’s production of the primary metabolites. These are the ones listed on food labels. However, plants normally have a fairly balanced ratio of both primary and secondary metabolites: the primary ones don’t dominate.

And that makes sense, Mitchell points out, since many of the secondary metabolites are defense compounds — essentially a plant’s natural pesticides or sun screens, for instance.

When plants aren’t stressed, they produce fewer of these compounds. But the relative paucity of plant-protective agents available to organic farmers means that crops on their farms tend to suffer more damage from pests and the weather. And they respond by revving up production of defensive secondary metabolites.

The extra stress that organically grown plants typically experience may lead to less attractive veggies — like spinach greens with a hole in each leaf. But the resulting nutritional value of each gram of spinach from moth-eaten plants can be superior.

And so it is, maybe my backyard veggies with their less-than-perfect forms are better and more nutritious than Big Farm produce.

Links:

To above article
To Alyson Mitchell website and website