Plants Can’t Be Franchised!
A question I’m asked a lot is, “My green smoothies are always different and sometimes I don’t like them. How can I make sure they always ‘turn out?’”
Well, that’s the thing. We’ve standardized our tastes. Ray Kroc did it famously, with the first McDonald’s. The idea was to develop a burger and fries that appealed to the taste buds, then make sure that all the franchises produced exactly the same product. People could count on getting precisely the same thing at any McD’s they went to.
Kale just isn’t like that. It grows in different soils, in different climates, in dozens of different varieties. Different colors of green. Flatter leaves or curlier. Red or white with the green, or just deep evergreen, almost black.
It’s the beauty of the thing, frankly, in a Mickey-D’s world of homogeneity. I like the surprise of my salad or my green smoothie being different every day. I notice it and try to identify and appreciate the variety. Bitter herbs have healing qualities, I remind myself when my greens are less sweet and have more kick.
I try different greens, different superfoods. Arugula or carrot tops or radish tops. Fennel or lavender oil. Bee pollen or maca or aloe vera.
Sometimes our new, vegan, super-healthy GreenSmoothieGirl protein powder if I’ve been eating too much fruit.
In a salad, I toss in fruits, legumes, seeds, nuts, vegetables, depending on what I crave, which sometimes tells us what we might be deficient in.
Here’s a photo of Kristin in a Toronto market, holding heirloom tomatoes. I love their crazy shapes and colors and the way you have to get creative with a knife to cut them.
I imagine most Americans wouldn’t even buy an heirloom tomato. They might be scared of what looks like a Frankenstein vegetable, wouldn’t recognize it as a tomato, because hybridized, homogenized, irradiated, gas-ripened, waxed produce of very few varieties are now “normal.” Back before we controlled our crops with chemicals and hybridization, we had interesting, varied, multi-color tomatoes like these. Fortunately, variety is starting to make a comeback!
Thick slices of heirloom tomatoes made another appearance in this amazing salad I ordered at the 360 Degree restaurant, the turning, panoramic-view tippy top of the CN Tower overlooking the city.
Thank you, our friends in Toronto who ventured the drive into what turned out to be a seedy part of town, for welcoming us to your country. First time ever. We hope to visit more of Canada in the next year.
Let’s celebrate and embrace diversity, not just the colors among people, but the colors in our food. I’ve said it before, and here it is again.
Buy local. Buy organic. Grow your own. Use heirloom seeds. Store them. Avoid GMO at all costs. Join the anti-GMO movement. Teach it all to your children.
Posted in: Whole Food
