Garlic the Good

I love garlic. I remember when I was being trained on the bar at a restaurant I used to work at, and the manager was extolling the virtues of having a clean work station. He offered an analogy:

“If you’re chopping garlic and you don’t clean your cutting board, everything else you cut on it is going to taste like garlic.”

I nodded, getting his point. “Although..." I said, "everything tastes better with garlic!”

He didn’t get that I was joking. “Everything? An apple wouldn't be very good.”

“Haven’t tried it, but wouldn’t bet against it.” He stared at me incredulously, and I told him I'd keep the bar neat.

With the possible exception of apples, most things do, in fact, taste better with garlic. I use it a lot when I cook. One time at a hostel in Chile I was trying to use up all of my food supplies before packing up my backpack and moving on south. On a whim I threw garlic into the pan I was using to make a grilled cheese sandwich. So simple, yet so delicious. How it took me so long to think of that winning combination, I'll never know. 

Despite my passion for the plant, I was unaware of garlic's health benefits until fairly recently. I had heard something about its role in Eastern traditional medicine, but my skeptical side was awaiting scientific confirmation. The science was there, it turns out, I just hadn’t been looking… I was too busy enjoying garlic’s more apparent (read: tasty) virtues. 

What is it that makes garlic so good for you? It’s all in the allicin. That’s the compound produced when you chop or crush a clove of garlic, and it has been shown to fight viruses, bacteria, fungi, and various types of cancer (notably, of the colon). The trick, though, is that it takes a little while for the allicin to get synthesized. If you heat the garlic right after chopping it, you deprive yourself of all of those nice properties. Best, then, to chop it, leave it for ten minutes, and then go ahead and throw it in the pan. 

I heard about this from Jo Robinson when she was on The Splendid Table promoting her most recent book, “Eating on the Wild Side.” The book traces the evolution of the human diet, noting the shift towards good taste at the expense of nutrition. As the title hints, Robinson argues that, in order to gain the dietary advantages of our early ancestors, we should be substituting our nutrition deficient produce with those that more closely resemble wild varieties. Swap out iceberg for loose leaf lettuce. Golden Delicious for Granny Smith. Not all plants are created equal, it would seem. So how do we know which are best? Robinson points to the thousands of academic articles that she spent ten years poring over, and it’s a relief to hear that a lot of the good, more nutritious foods are already readily available: 

You can just go to a grocery store and if you were to buy green onions, they have 100 times more phytonutrients than other onions in the store. They're inexpensive, they're common and they're unheralded super foods. It's the green portions that are the best for you; when you're chopping them up, make sure you chop up all the green portions too. Kale; black, red and dark red grapes; artichokes; parsley; all of the herbs -- they're just like eating wild plants.

We can be quite confident when it comes to what science says about the levels of nutrients to be found in different types of plants. What is less certain is how those plants and their various preparations can impact our health. The science is young in this respect, and Robinson even admits in an interview on NPR's The Salt that she is careful to place a "perhaps" here and a "should be" there when talking about any potential health benefits.

I don't see the harm in letting my chopped garlic sit for ten minutes while I busy myself with other kitchen prep. At best, I save myself from colon cancer. At worst, I get to eat a delicious meal. Works for me. 

The Long Road to Vegetarianism

I'm working on another long piece similar to the Uber essay, this time on the ethics of eating meat and our evolving attitudes on the subject. It's something that I often try to not think about too hard, which is maybe the same attitude that society in general takes on. If you think too hard about anything, really, you can ruin it for yourself. All the more so when the subject in question is the taking of lives of animals so in order to eat their bodies. 

In thinking about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Philosophy Bites that was released almost exactly five years ago. Philosophy Bites is a cool little podcast featuring interviews with top philosophers about their work and the big ideas that they grapple with. The episode in question featured Jeff McMahan, currently the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, but back then he was at Rutgers. I had encountered his work before in some of my courses and found his writing quite compelling, but the essays that I had read were mostly about abortion and other bioethical issues. Now, he was being questioned about his views on Vegetarianism. 

He laid out his argument for not eating meat like this:

1. The suffering of animals is morally significant.

2. The pleasure of animals is morally significant.

3. Whatever goods we derive from eating meat are negligible compared to the harms caused to the animals from which the meat is derived.

4. We shouldn't eat meat.

A few things should be noted. First, the fact that animal suffering matters is obvious and clearly makes factory farming and the conditions that go with it morally reprehensible. Second, this is not an absolute argument against eating meat. If eating meat is necessary, really necessary, to your survival, then the balance of harms and benefits would shift and you could justify killing an animal. Likewise, if you accidentally hit a deer with your car, rather than wasting the meat you could eat it with a clear conscience.

I found McMahan's argument convincing when I first heard it. So convincing, in fact, that I became a vegan... For a week. After that, I tried to reason my way out of it. "My meat consumption doesn't make a difference," was the main mode of argument. "The meat in the grocery store is going to go to waste if I don't buy it. It'll be thrown out." Probably not true. And though I'm just one person, the collective effect of many people going meatless would be noticed, and to get people to convert you have to do it yourself. But more importantly, I also decided that the pleasure of animals probably really wasn't all that important. I started eating meat again, and I stopped worrying about it. 

Recently, I've started to become more food conscious again. I'm turned off by the idea of factory farms, and I don't buy meat products from stores likely to be supplied by them. Sad meat tastes bad. And now I'm left with that other side of the argument. How important are the good experiences that animals have? Even if the meat you eat doesn't come from an animal that led a pained existence, is it ok to kill them? Or do the future good experiences that that animal could have outweigh your right to a meat based meal? It seems chauvinistic to assume that the fleeting pleasure of eating meat can be more valuable than a few good years of life on the farm.

It seems like more and more of my friends are becoming either vegetarians or vegans. I've started to flirt with the idea again, but a part of me is still not entirely convinced. That being said, as time goes on, I can see my meat consumption very gradually falling. Maybe one day I'll get there, or perhaps there's a happy middle ground to be found, like eating weird offcuts and things that would otherwise be thrown out. I do love a good blood cake.