Gardening for Maximum Nutrition

This book is a guide to gardening techniques to maximize the nutrition you can get from your garden. The book begins by explaining how nutrients begin to disappear the instant a fruit or vegetable is harvested. Minnich describes how a green pepper, for instance loses much of its potential nutritional value as it is plucked in the field and shipped to the warehouse, and then trucked across the country, then stored in a refrigerator, then sliced to appear on an appetizer plate and made to sit for several hours. Minnich also points out that Americans are eating far fewer fresh vegetables and fruits than ever before, while consuming many more processed foods, from which the vitamins and minerals have been oxidized or cooked. After reading this chapter, it becomes crystal clear why health food enthusiasts talk so much about the importance of buying locally grown produce in season- -by the time "fresh" fruits and vegetables reach a far-away supermarket, nutritionally, they're hardly better than the plastic they're wrapped in. (But they're still better than highly processed food likes chips or canned veggies.) Minnich argues that if you want to enjoy the highest levels of nutrition, you should eat produce within hours of harvest, the harvesters should be careful how and when they harvest, and there should be a minimum of processing, including slicing. In a chapter on building soil for nutrition, Minnich points out that soil scientists have rarely taken up the question of how to prepare soil to grow fruits and vegetables that are nutritious. There has been quite a lot of research devoted to plant nutrition, how to make a plant grow vigorously and have large yields. There has been a small amount of research on how to grow crops to provide the nutritional needs of cattle. But nobody has investigated how to grow crops that provide a maximum of vitamins and minerals needed by humans. Minnich suggests that in order to maximize human nutrition rather than plant nutrition, the most important factors are soil structure and micronutrients. He argues that these can best be supplied by organic composting and soil building techniques rather than with chemical fertilizers, which may feed the plant, but won't necessarily result in more nutritious products for humans.Later chapters cover such topics as planning (choosing the most nutritious things to grow and the best varieties), harvest, storage, and preparation, and growing for nutrition. One of the best features of the book is its high quality comparison charts for nutrition. Using these charts, which list values for such things as iron, calcium, and vitamin C, Minnich points out some surprising facts. For example, a serving of watermelon has more iron than a serving of spinach; and if you grow turnip greens, you should make a point of eating the greens, since they are quite nutritious, while the turnips themselves are almost nutritional zeroes. Sources are very well documented with endnotes. There