Doctor Said I Wasn't Getting Enough 'Yellow' In My Diet
"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." — Hippocrates 431 BC
I don't really have a doctor. It's not that I necessarily have anything against doctors, it's just that I haven't needed one in a long time, and would like to keep it that way if I can.
In this photo are dandelion flowers and leaves, kale, spinach, and violets.
Eating The Right Colors
The farmlands of the world are infamously depleted of minerals due to excessive and improper agricultural activity over the years. This deficiency of minerals in the soil then means that we must find ways to supplement our bodies with the minerals that we require for healthy living on the planet.
The most heavily farmed areas of the world may be lacking in minerals, but meanwhile the natural meadows and fields on the planet that have remained untilled or plowed will still contain rich minerals that have been buried there for eons.
Mining for minerals deep in the earth, a wild dock growing among evergreen bunching onions.
While the onions that I planted can take minerals from near the earth's surface, nestled in with them is this deep-feeding dock plant, which sends a root down into the planet's past, finding minerals that haven't seen daylight in a long time.
The leaves from these deep feeding dock plants often end up in my salads and smoothies, giving me needed minerals, plus all of the green that my heart could desire.
Mining For Colors
Through unimaginably complex combinations of minerals, the color of a plant can be seen as those building materials being geometrically arranged so that only that color is reflected. The individual minerals which create this colorful effect in plants and animals are drawn from the earth specifically for each living thing, as if everything that lives is built from tiny crystalline formations, bending light around.
To imagine how such crystal structures bends light around in the building of a human body, it may be helpful to imagine the human body as a single prism, separating white light into all of the colors of the spectrum.
I've never seen a chakra, but I've seen the way that they supposedly are laid out in the human body, with red at the root of the spine, green in the middle, of course, with the heart, and then purple or violet at the top, the crown.
How to Build a Human Body Out of Light and Color
To build a human body out of light then, we might eat reds and yellows like carrots or beets to assemble the lower sections of the body, then we would have the center-- the greens-- for the heart of the device, with green being a combination of blue and yellow. Then there's our crown, a royal purple, which might suggest our more ethereal connection between the red of our root in the earth and the blue of the sky above, making a violet color in the process.
Minerals On My Mind
Minerals are derived from geological formations, while a geological formation can be seen as a distinct geometric pattern, a shape that is easily recognized within a structure made of minerals, like us.
We are said to be made of minerals, or collections of these geometric shapes. Our bodies are composed of water and minerals.
Sometimes it is said that we are made of light, and since we never really see light itself, but only it's reflection, then perhaps our bodies are just reflections of what we actually are; light, playing with our prism of color within a labyrinth of crystals.
At any rate, the image of the salad above is mine, and the salad is mine to eat, with lots of green, some purple and yellow. If I am a prism for consciousness to beam through, then I plan on keeping the crystal as clean as I can, to see if I can brighten things up a bit more around this organic kaleidoscope that I'm operating here.
all images above are mine, 2018. All upvotes and support are appreciated here, and thanks, as usual, for looking in with me here.
Very interesting stuff. I am hoping Roland will put in a little garden this spring. Perhaps we could visit you and your garden, too.
Yes if you have the space, even a little garden is rewarding. Definitely, let me know when, come visit sometime.
I have a very large backyard .... so space isn't an issue. Might need raised beds though because it does flood when it rains a bit. Let me know when you are playing somewhere ... maybe we can plan a visit that includes music !
This is a great post. Everything we need and how to see it is in here.
Although I have never eaten dandelion, not sure that I can asI always get the image of a dog peeing on it lol, I do plan to force myself to at some point. A friend has once told me it was good for the animals as well, like for dogs to help with their urine infections and whatnot. Everything we need can be found in our backyard or not far from it. I am discovering more and more. Thank you for sharing , it was a joy to read ^_^
I avoid the areas where dogs roam for that reason!
Here there are dogs everywhere, no dandelion is safe XD
It looks like some rocket in there too! YUM!!
I'm not familiar with rocket, is it a wild plant?
Not sure if it grows wild by you, but it could. It is also very cultivated...
That must be the young dandelion leaves, there are lots of them here right now, very similar leaf structure to your rocket.
The dandelion leaves are kind of bitter, I throw them and most of these greens into a kefir smoothie with honey and a banana, and usually a carrot. Spinach I usually eat straight from the garden, it rarely makes it back to the house!
Rocket almost has a peppery taste and is great in a leafy salad...
Yes same here (but I make sure to plant extra for the table LOL) especially baby spinach!
this is really interesting. ive recently discovered and added chards into my diet. But, i've never planted my own greens or thought to forage. It always seemed to me that the greens you eat come from the supermarket. I really want to try and grow something .
In this region, the spring and the fall seasons are both good times to find wild foods, even in cities and developed areas. I've only recently, over the last ten years that is, learned how to grow some of my own food, and I slowly get better at it as I go. Chard does well around here in the colder seasons, the ones in the photo were planted last year, and live in a little greenhouse for now.
a bank around the corner from me has a vertical garden on the sidewalk. I grab greens late at night and they have chard. The funny thing is that I see homeless people walk by it constantly and I've never seen anyone take from it. There is a city garbage can about 6 feet away and they constantly search it for scraps.
A colorful diet can be a good diet. There was a time in our grandparents or great grandparent's day when they would pour the ashes from the wood burning stove on the garden soil. Thus the vegetables could receive the rich minerals from the ashes and you as well. Sadly we do not do that anymore and lack the 90 minerals and vitamins that our bodies require. Thanks for a good article @therealpaul
Yes, I have a little fireplace near the garden for burning wood, used for exactly that. There's a bigger fire pit now where I can get ashes, but you remind me that I haven't done that this year yet.
if you haven't read it already, stalking the wild asparagus is a great book about asparagus, foraging, and dandelions. Highly recommended.
I got that book for my birthday when I was about 13, still have it! A very valuable book in a lot of ways for me.
Growing up, we grew most of our own vegetables and I have always been interested in wild edibles. Now that I live in suburbia and we aren't allowed to use weed killers on our lawns, I have taken to eating dandelions. I also posted about eating daylilies this week. It's surprising how many plants are edible but that doesn't mean they are all tasty!
That's good that there's no weed killers being used, and the dandelions are a big bonus there. I have some day lilies that take over a part of the back garden, I'm encouraging them to spread out even more.
I still pick things like dock and plantain, but I throw them in the blender with honey and banana, etc, because they are too bitter and tough for me to spend time chewing on. The tastiest thing on the ground right now I think are the violets.
I have never tried putting greens in the blender. I like the naturalized daylilies. If you eat their tubers, go for the light coloured ones because they are the youngest. The flowers, fried in butter are good too. Bulrushes are supposed to have a potato-like root at the base of the stem - that's one I would like to try. It's another plant, like the daylilies, where you can eat every part of it.
I never knew minerals were part of what made colours in plants @therealpaul; thanks for that info.
Are there other edible greens that have roots going deep into the earth's crust like the dock plant?
Over here, I don't do much of salad but I do eat a lot of water leaf and pumpkin leaves too in my soup. I don't know if that counts?
I reasoned that if plants are made of minerals and water, then the geometry of those minerals would determine which bandwidth of light would be reflected, and which would be absorbed.
I can only think of a carrot as another plant that would be considered a deep feeder like dock, though there are surely more that I haven't learned of yet. There are lots of varieties of dock here, though I don't know them all by name.
The greens in the soup should count, some vitamins might be lost in cooking, but the minerals that they contain should still be there if they are cooked there in the soup, I think.
Okay thanks. I think I will do some personal research in this. I am trying to treat myself better. I am not much of a food person but I am trying to improve my diet and intake.
Ah! What would you recommend for people living in highly urbanized areas?
I can't plant my own veggies and the stuff at the grocery shops are covered in chemicals and not very tasty. My solution so far has been to buy mineral salt at the pharmacy and drink it from time to time. I do the same with vitamin c, lactobacillus and other food complements.
I'm not sure what you can do, as I think back to the year that I lived in NYC, I only could buy what was shipped onto the island, and the choices were limited. I wouldn't have known what minerals to buy, and probably wouldn't have wanted to spend money on minerals that I could have spent on cigarettes.
I like vegetables to eat as my diet, but you know I have some problems. If I eat vegetables, some gases from in my stomach and pain it. So often I am doubting that should I take vegetables or not. But I like to eat it, so if you please advise me about it and also thanks for your information that green vegetables are good for heart. Wish you a very happy time ahead, Jaya.