micro greens...

'Red micros', purchased from the Goshen Farmer's Market yesterday.
These are sprouted from arugula, mizuna, kale, amaranth, mustard, cress
and tatsoi seeds.
Crisp. Spicy. Extraordinary.

I'm addicted to microgreens. I guess that's not a bad thing. Sprouts are in fact the most nutrient dense food on earth, themselves ripe with the magic of life's essential enzymes. My mouth told me as much when I first tasted the mix above at the same marketplace a few weeks ago. A package or two later, my increased energy became their best spokesperson. A micro second later came the familiar nagging greed for possessing the knowledge of 'doing it myself'.

So I embarked on a Google journey. After hitting dead end after dead end in my search for a workable home system (let's just say most info sources are geared towards selling the expensive little gems), I discovered a wealth of info at SproutPeople. There I found my ideal: hemp bags. Seeds for micros need some sort of medium and the hemp fiber is an easy, reliable and reusable (and therefore economical) one. Next step: obtaining a bag of seeds that replicates the 'wow' of the above mix.

An Amish farmer at the above market declared that it now take five apples to match the nutrition found in a 1965 version of one. Depleted soil, herbicides, pesticides are perhaps the basic culprits. But a larger issue looms on a grander scale: In our good intentions to feed humanity easily and thoroughly, we may not have done either as we super-manage food producing, processing, packaging. "We're consuming 'edible foodlike substances' -- no longer the products of nature but of food science." (Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food). Honing the art of nutritional science, we're seemingly much less healthy than where we started. Malnourished some would say. Perhaps we've lost something essential: What food was truly meant to be.

Thank goodness the pendulum is showing signs (...not macro quite yet) of swinging...of increasing awareness of and desire for health and wholeness. Being human, we will ever do it imperfectly. For now, I'm choosing a micro remedy - with some hope and gratitude in the mix.