Tuesday, August 7, 2012

are mud pies a superfood?

rain, dirt road, mud pies by paloetic, on Flickr
rain, dirt road, mud pies by paloetic, on Flickr

No, not the chocolatey confection, but the ones you made sitting in a pile of mud when you were a three-year-old.

I've noticed that advertising soil bacteria on your probiotics is becoming more and more popular.

It occurred to me that this was a rather stupid thing to buy cause I have dirt in my yard; presumably with soil bacteria in it. I've been composting the heck out of my garden for years and it's full of worms and other slimy things, so I imagine bacteria are happy out there too.

OK, so I wasn't really planning on sitting out there with a spoon and digging into the dirt. I mean, there's WORMS in that dirt after all!

But it occurred to me... healthy microflora has several hundred species of bacteria and most of your probiotics only have a handful. Maybe this is why homemade ferments, like sauerkraut, are so much more health-giving than fermented products from the grocery, sterilized and then inoculated with only a few bacteria.

And then it occurred to me, maybe I should just not wash my vegetables. I mean, they grow in perfectly healthy compost. I've made the jokes in comments in several blogs recently; that we ought to consider eating dirt.

And yesterday, I discovered Dr. Ayers' blog (Cooling Inflammation, linked in the sidebar) and saw that in several posts, he recommended eating unwashed vegetables. So I'm not the only one with this peculiar notion!

Of course, they need to be organic, you don't want to eat pesticide and herbicide coated vegetables without washing them. The veggies in my garden qualify, and I've always eaten them out there without washing, though I usually wash them when I bring them inside.

But maybe I'll stop. Seems cheaper than buying dirt pills.

3 comments:

  1. Well if you're going to eat compost, you may as well eat the worms too. Why are you so picky, anyway?

    I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. My mother never taught me manners. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. You were obviously not beaten enough as a child. ;)

    Steve was laughing at me all weekend while camping. Hygiene standards are a bit different when camping.

    So when he is cooking and carefully lies the spatula down on a log, I tease him that the log was on the ground too! And he says, yes, but there's less actual dirt on the log. And I reply, but that means you're robbing us of soil bacteria!

    It was the theme of the weekend, how camping increases our intake of soil bacteria!

    ReplyDelete

Short version of comment policy: be nice
For the long version, see comment policy in the footer of each blog page.