Poisoned by Vitamins!

Being vegetarian I sometimes take a multi-vitamin to supplement my diet. But not all vitamins are good for you.

A lot of multivitamins have super-high dosage, which may be bad for us. Maximum does not mean optimum.

Also, our bodies cannot process synthetically-made vitamins as well as the vitamins naturally found in food. Not a surprise! Unfortunately, vitamin makers do not have to specify how vitamins are made.

This article explains the science behind this and advises you to detect the difference between natural and synthetic vitamin supplements by reading in between the lines on their labels:

The most notable difference between natural and synthetic vitamin supplements is in their claimed potencies. Natural vitamins as in plant foods are never highly concentrated. Nature provides us with balance, complexity and bioavailability but not with a high potency. Conversely, synthetic and crystalline (chemical isolated from natural source) vitamins do appear in high unnatural potencies.

When examining products labeled as natural vitamins, note that labels of truly natural food based vitamins, should indicate the exact natural source from which each of the vitamins is obtained. Simply put, if the vitamin concentrations are high and/or their natural sources aren't listed, most likely these vitamins are synthetic. Chemical sources for synthetic vitamin supplements include petrochemicals, coal tar, chemically manipulated sugar and inorganic minerals.

The take-away:

Get your vitamins from food, not supplements. They are meant to just be supplementary.

For vitamins, more does not mean better--get the vitamins that are less concentrated and more likely thus to be from natural sources.


Photo by takomabibelot

Surimi, or Imitation Crab / Fish

Surimi is imitation crab or fish made from flakes of white fish or haddock, egg whites, starch, and crab flavorings. Without the added flavoring, surimi has not much taste.

Usually, surimi has red stripes on one side, which is dyed to make it more visually appetizing. And, as you can see above, surimi can be decorated with not just red stripes but also Hello Kitty faces! Very cute! But do you really want to eat toys' faces?

So surimi is a fish product that has little natural taste and is naturally visually unappealing. Hungry yet?

If you are still hungry, follow the last link here to watch a Food Network video Eat Me Daily posted to show the 4-hour surimi processing procedure.

Photo from Oishii Yo!

Suffering for Foraged Nettle Tea

As we lounged by Berlin’s canal, one of my friends noticed that we were sitting next to a patch of nettles and suggested that we harvest some leaves to make tea.

Using nothing more than folded flyers, we harvested some mature nettle stalks with lots of leaves. Apparently, if you are careful, you can harvest nettle leaves safely with just your bare hands. Since the pricklies only grown on the underside of the leaves, you can fold the two halves of the leaf together, holding on to the upper side, and then pull the leaf off the stalk.

While making the tea, I got stung! Here I am taking the sting off with a jar of frozen red beans.

To make the tea, I just boiled the leaves for 10 minutes and then strained them. The smaller leaves are younger and less bitter. But I don’t mind bitter in my tea.

If you boil for less than 10 minutes, the stinging chemicals remain. In fact, two of my guests claimed they felt a little tingling on their tongues upon their first sip of the tea. It wasn’t painful or bad, however.

Too bad we didn’t have any lemons, because nettle tea turns bright pink after adding lemon juice, because of the ph change.

Other than tea, the leaves are edible too, like spinach. The tea can be cooled and used as shampoo.

Visiting the organic oyster mushroom farm in Berlin

An organic oyster mushroom farm sprouts in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

Here a girl plays in the farm’s courtyard.


The mushroom farmers buy buckets of wheat with the spores living on them.


Then they wash and heat up hay in these industrial potato cookers.


They stuff plastic bags with a mix of heated and sterilized hay and the inoculated wheat, hang them in a room on the ground floor, and wait around 2 weeks for the spores to inoculate the hay.


Then they take the mushroom logs downstairs to the basement where the air is cooler.


(This photo and the one above are both in the basement space. I didn't photograph the ground-floor room because there was nothing there.)

They also had a fan downstairs, although I am not sure whether that was for guests or for the mushrooms. Oyster mushrooms need light so that they know what direction to grow in. In the mushroom logs are holes, and the mushrooms will sprout through them.

The mushroom logs hang from the ceiling on hooks, like sausages!


I asked Christian Klein why he chose the sausage-form, and he said that it was a question of space. He had already tried to grow oyster mushrooms one without much success. The first time he had put the spores + hay mix in boxes. In the sausage-form, there is more air circulation and surface area.

He would like to sell logs so that people can grow oyster mushrooms at home, but the problem with cultures is the bad bacteria. I am not sure what the enemy of oyster mushroom is, but as you can see below, it is green.


A close-up of oyster mycelium. This white structure is what you want.


Christian Klein wrote his thesis on the oyster mushroom. He had chosen it because shitakes take a long time to grow, and white button mushrooms you cannot propogate yourself. His goal is eventually to be able to propogate the oyster spores.

Unfortunately, I did not eat any of the farm's mushrooms since they were in between growth cycles, and oyster mushroom do not keep. But you can buy the oyster mushrooms from the farm itself or in a flowershop on the Friedhof Eisackstraße on the U-Bahn station Innsbrucker Platz.

Why fermentation?

Culture your Food

I started fermenting after reading Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, full of good recipes and tips and stories. He makes fermentation sound like fun, easy, delicious, and political—all of which it is.

Political: Because our food system is premised on mass production, which favors industrialization, sterility, uniformity, usually at the expense of nutrition and flavor, reclaiming food autonomy by making food ourselves is a political act.

Easy: And fermentation is easy! Mostly, what you need are ingredients + container + culture (what we call the mold or bacteria—I like to call them my beasties!) + time! Sandor says that fermenting vegetables is even easier than making yogurt, which is already pretty simple. I just need to find a large ceramic or glass jar. And patience to wait anywhere between 3 days and 3 years!!!!

Delicious: Plus, my kombucha, soy yogurt, tempeh, nut cheeses, strawberry honey wine/mead, preserved lemons are delicious! They are my babies! Actually, I take that back. I didn’t like the preserved lemons so much, but I may not have had the right recipes to help them shine.

Fun: I like having a more intimate relationship with what I eat. By making it, I can tweak it to my taste. But more than that, I like the rhythm it confers on my life. Making yogurt and kombucha every week gives my kitchen life a cycle. As spring wakes after winter’s hibernation, so relive kombucha and yogurt creation weekly or biweekly in my kitchen. I find certain comfort in making patterns in my life.

One of the most personally important reason is that, through fermentation, I participate in fertility—in the most extravagant understanding of the term. Other people may have plants and pets. I generate more life by feeding my beasties at the right temperature. Cultivating life in the right environment is easy. My beasties are resilient. In fact, they kill the germs that would make me sick. After I eat them in yogurt, they become a part of my internal microfloral landscape and keep me healthy and safe. I give to my bacteria communities and receive from them. Is it too much to claim that we are accountable to each other?

You can hear Sandor Katz speak on Awesome Pickle.

Nutritional tidbit of the day: I knew that table salt was bad for me. In the talk, Sandor tells me why: table salt is so cheap because they who make it don’t make money from selling it. How do the salt sellers make money then? They strip natural minerals from the sodium chloride and sell the minerals to vitamin producers! That explains why unrefined salt, though less processed, is more expensive than table salt. But it is better to get your minerals with your salt rather than in pill form. It is always better to eat whole foods rather than processed foods—and vitamins are processed!

Image from howsyrface (totally crazy image, no?)

Nuka and Narazuke Pickles

Photo from kyotofoodie

I have been reading about nuka pickles, which is a Japanese method of fermenting with rice bran powder, water, and salt.

It looks like so much fun! Like playing with mud, but you can actually eat the vegetables after fermentation!

Unfortunately, with my schedule, I can’t make the time to turn the pot twice a day. One more reason to live with another fermentator as collaborator…

But the more I learn about the possibilities of fermentation and pickling, the more amazed I am. For example, I just learned about narazuke, an alcoholic pickle made in Japan! After sitting in sake lees for 1-3 years, I guess the vegetables can’t help it.

Bottling Homebrew Beer

Last night I sterilized 36 bottles and helped my friend F. bottle his homebrew beer, which he made from ‘beer mix’ he brought back from Australia.

At first he thought that it was contaminated with mold on the top, but I convinced him that it was just yeast.

Check out the dregs at the bottom!

I got to take home the last bottle, because it had so much of the dregs that disgusted F.

We taste in two to eight weeks…if the bottles don’t explode first!