SK

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.