Keeping up with it all

On Wednesday, I meet with Mhonpaj Lee, with whom I am interning. I always hesitate before describing her role in the Hmong and farming community because it seems so informal and yet so powerful. Suffice it to say for now that she has a new baby girl, works as an interpreter at HCMC, and manages the business end of her family’s farm, Mhonpaj’s Garden.

This was our second meeting, intended to flesh out the details of my HECUA internship. We agreed that I would maintain the website, write a weekly column on nutrition for the newsletter that goes out with the weekly CSA shares, and put together recipe cards to hand out to customers uncertain what to do with bitter melon or mustard greens.

Beyond these tasks, I have other exciting opportunities. I will help put together the CSA shares on Sunday for Monday delivery. I’ll assist at cooking demonstrations, taking pictures and posting them to the website. I may even make cold calls to organic buyers around the Twin Cities (cold calls! me!).

Even the seemingly duller activities, like weeding, hold the promise of getting to know the family better and plumbing for details about traditional farming techniques, oral tradition, and the challenges of farming in a new country.

Once we got some logistics squared away, Mhonpaj started sharing some of the projects that come across her desk. Last time we met for lunch at HCMC, we sat outside and she pointed out the rooftop herb garden. She told me that they had started growing them so that the female Hmong patients could have their traditional post-partum diet. The mayor came to cut a ribbon and everything. Now MCTC is starting an herb garden and North Memorial wants to know how to get one started.

“It’s not that hard,” she laughed. “You get a box with dirt and put seeds in it.”

Mhonpaj also told me about a magazine interview (Simple Life?) that was to include her cucumber recipe. But when it got the editor, the recipe was deemed too exotic for the magazine’s audience. She was asked to share a more traditionally Asian dish – perhaps she had a spring roll recipe? Mhonpaj declined to comply.*

I wondered aloud if Mhonpaj had heard of crop mobs. She hadn’t, but apparently twenty students from Nebraska are descending on her farm on June 29th and July 1st to trellis tomatoes. Sounds a lot like a crop mob to me.

Fresh from my HECUA experience, I asked her a question about employees. Her answer led to a fascinating discussion of her farming philosophy (if you can call it that) and her landowner's wishes for his land. More on that later!

*It sounds like the magazine finally came around and the article will be printed in all its exotic glory.

flickr photo from h-bomb.

Why to head for the greens!

I’ve been exploring various sources of calcium and seeing how they stack up against one another. In general, cheese, with its low water content, does well in the Most Calcium per Gram category, especially Parmesan cheese. Leafy greens do rather well with Most Calcium per Calorie – collard greens and Chinese cabbages are winners here.

So why pick leafy greens over dairy products? Besides side-stepping the protein issue, leafy greens have so much going for them that I’m ashamed that I don’t eat them at every meal. Let’s compare a cup of plain low-fat yogurt with a cup of cooked collard greens on a smattering of nutrients: fiber, fat-soluble vitamins, and a few minerals.

Plain low-fat yogurt vs.Cooked collard greens

	Yogurt	Collard Greens
Fiber:	0g	5g
Vitamin A:	125 IU	15416 IU
Vitamin D:	n/a	n/a
Vitamin E:	0.1 mg	1.7 mg
Vitamin K:	0.5 mcg	836 mcg
Calcium:	448 mg	266 mg
Iron:	0.2 mg	2.2 mg
Magnesium:	41.7 mg	38.0 mg
Phosphorus:	353 mg	57.0 mg
Potassium:	573 mg	220 mg
Sodium:	171 mg	30 mg

Collard greens clearly have the upper hand when it comes to fiber and fat-soluble vitamins (water-soluble vitamins – C and the Bs – are more of a mixed bag), but yogurt comes rushing back in the mineral department, with the exception of iron.

But more sodium is not necessarily better, despite what Cargill might tell you, and too much phosphorus in conjunction with too little calcium is bad news for your bones.

Two more points I’d like to bring out. First, yogurt has 32 mg of omega-3 fatty acids and 76 mg of omega-6 (~1:2.4 ratio) compared to collard greens’ 177 mg and 133 mg, respectively. That’s a 1.3:1 ration, which is great! The more omega-3’s, the better, especially when they outnumber omega-6’s.

Second, a cup of collard greens has a third of the calories of a cup yogurt, so you could eat three times as much and get the upper hand on the minerals! I would recommend, however, adding between a quarter of a teaspoon to a teaspoon of olive oil or butter per cup of greens. Doing so would add up to 40 more calories, but also increase absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, satiety, and deliciousness.

I could go on about phytonutrients and the Brassica family, but I believe I hear the greens of a farmers’ market calling my name.

Photo by Mark Farnham

Calcium and protein: friends or foes?

In the last post, we saw that dairy products are a fine source of calcium, thanks to the absorption-enhancing property of lactose and the density of calcium by weight or calorie. So why consider anything else? I think many people have an idea that protein, in which dairy products are rich, interferes with calcium or bone health in some way. In the chapter on bone health in Krause’s Food and Nutrition Therapy, John JB Anderson states that “the relationship between protein and calcium is unsettled” (625).

Let’s take a step back. What is this relationship? On the one hand, protein is considered to have an anabolic (building) effect on bone. After all, around 25% of the bone matrix is protein in the form of collagen fibers. Calcium and phosphorus make up the hydroxyapatite that gives bone its rigidity. On the other hand, a chronically low intake of protein decreases the serum concentration of albumin, a protein that transports nearly everything in the blood, including calcium (Anderson, 625).

So why would high protein intake pose a problem? Here’s where the textbook gets a little fuzzy. First it says that “actions of proteins and their absorbed amino acids… [have] a catabolic [breaking down] effect resulting from the generation of an acid load” (625). But as far as I can tell, extracellular excesses of acid are buffered primarily by bicarbonate - calcium doesn’t have much to do with it.

The second reason given is that urinary losses of calcium increase following meals that contain large amounts of animal protein (625). The exact mechanism is not clear, but it may be because the sulfates generated by the metabolism of sulfur-containing amino acids (cysteine, cystine, methionine) bind to calcium ions in the kidney and prevent them from being reabsorbed (Gallagher, 115). A list of food sources of sulfur follows: meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dried beans, broccoli, and cauliflower. This is a bit misleading, as 3 oz of beef has fourteen times as much methionine as 1 cup of cooked broccoli.

Studies tracking protein consumption and bone fractures or bone mineral density are… numerous. Some come out in favor, some come out a wash. I would say that most people should consider getting more calcium from vegetables, and in the next post, I’ll explain why it’s a great idea.

Photo source: fooducate.com