Moringa: From India to The Philippines

I had no idea that there exists a huge grocery store that caters to Filipino tastes.  The smell and sight of fish made me a tad uneasy though.  While intellectually it is easy to understand and appreciate the vast diversity of human eating habits, well, the real world experience is not always easy.

The vegetables, however, looked familiar.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a few. Like moringa leaves.  Moringa? Here in the US?  Not in any frozen food section, but as fresh food?  (Here's a post on moringa from 3 years ago.)

A big bunch of those leaves we picked up.  I made my own version of a favorite moringa leaf dsih from the old country.  While my mother might have laughed at my creation, it was awesomely tasty.

As kids, my brother and I ate everything that mother made.  My sister was the picky one who stayed away from quite a few.  We didn't need any grandmother to tell us that we had to eat them in order to be healthy.  We loved the taste of them all.

The moringa leaf dish was one of those.  Moringa is one of those that can easily quality as a superfood. (Read this essay in The New Yorker on why it is an under-appreciated superfood.)  Or like the neem tree that I was talking about a few nights ago with a visitor from West Africa.  "Veppampoo rasam" (a soup made from neem blossoms) was possible only because there was a neem tree in our yard.  The world continues to find out more and more about the awesomeness of neem--maybe soon I will also find neem blossoms in a store here!

I don't ever understand why people have a difficult time embracing a diet that has a wide variety before they are highly processed.  Instead, they rush from store to store buying the latest health fad at prices that shock me.  Like kombucha--I have never ever tasted one--that is not cheap, especially as a regular habit.

The moringa and the neem are examples of foods that do wonders to the awesome bacteria in our gastro-intestinal ecosystems.

One way to foster healthy intestinal bacteria is to eat more of the foods these bugs like to eat—namely, fiber.  Increasing your intake of plant fibers from vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds is like filling a bird-feeder with the kind of seeds that the beautiful songbirds you want attract like best. If you feed them, they will come!  
And if we want to attract a lot of different types of songbirds—er, bacteria—then we want to put out a variety of foods. That means you don’t just want to get all your fiber from a single source, such as a fiber supplement. You want to get it fiber from lots of different kinds of vegetables, fruits, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. 

Like I often mention here, sanitas per escam!