Eating stems

Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, March 29, 2024

A while ago, while scrolling through the social media accounts that I’ve convinced myself make a difference in my life, I came across a young chef (Max La Manna, who seriously looks like he isn’t old enough to drive) cutting up cilantro stems instead of using just the leaves. 

This may be old news to many of you, but I’ve watched and copied cooks painstakingly picking off leaves, so the hack got my attention. La Manna was also using carrot tops, and now makes banana peels into vegan bacon. He is a celebrity “low waste chef.”

A quick online corroboration revealed not just the glories of stems (parsley, dill, basil, chard, kale, broccoli, cauliflower) but the entire world of root-to-steam eating and sustainability in the kitchen. Where had I been? In a “whoosh,” a whole hidden world or consumable parts appeared.

I had inklings during my childhood. For instance, we grew up eating radishes our French mother’s way: before dinner as an appetizer, a half inch of the stem and green left on, with a little unsalted butter and a touch of salt. You can call it a low carb snack or an indulgence depending on your point of view, but we all just called it delicious, the creamy against the crunch, the oily against the sharp. We were told to eat the green part “for digestion.” 

Looking back on all our home grown garden veggies, however, I don’t recall other waste-not surprises, just radishes. Being the kind of engineer and order freak he was, my dad might have gone whole hog on whole food use, but my recollection does not include garlic scapes, or onion tops, or cauliflower, fava or cucumber leaves. Lots of edible stuff got composted – and now I’m rethinking this. We should probably almost always be eating more plants; but we could also be eating more of the plants. 

In terms of the humble radish, the entire plant is edible and highly nutritious. The greens themselves are rich in potassium, magnesium and vitamins C and K (K in huge amounts), and they may help reduce memory loss and protect the lung tissues, according to some of the research. They are very high in fiber, which on average we are typically low in (15 grams daily versus the minimum recommended of 25-30 grams). They can be sautéed, used raw, thrown into soups, quiches, or made into pesto. In my book, every green we can add to our diet is a nutritional gold star.

Though sustainability in the kitchen and garden have been around a long time, we get stymied by the flagrant inconsistencies of our consuming world. The ninja-level non waste in a restaurant kitchen versus the hundreds of pounds of uneaten food waste at the end of a shift. This idea that one person’s sustainability is unlikely to offset the world’s careless level of throwing away.

For many years, I have promised myself, in the profusion of dandelion parts visible in spring and summer, to eat more dandelion greens (or toss more blooms in salads) or do something awesome with the root. This is a plant I so admire (its name means “earth nail” in Chinese) because it is entirely edible and grows in great, undaunted profusion. On the other hand, it’s also seen. as an enemy of our gardens and small patches of grass. We have weed pullers almost exclusively relegated to the dandelion problem.  Still: why are we so lazy in consuming them – right down to the “capers” which can be made from uprooting the new bud before it grows any stem? 

The bottom line is that most of us eat like kings and queens. And in a world where many are starving or beleaguered by impoverished diets, we are called upon to simply waste less and less, and to aware of the abundance in our lives as we continue to study the incredible bounty of plants, their complexity, and why they are just so good for us. 

Why would we throw away a potato peel when it has so much to offer? And how about fennel- stalks, cauliflower cores, watermelon rinds (the whole plant is edible), citrus peels and celery leaves? These are valuable commodities. 

And if you don’t want to eat it yourself, or compost it, consider giving chopped up lower-waste veggie parts to your canine companions. Mine has almost never met a veggie he didn’t like — sorry zucchini, for some reason you are at the very bottom of his list.