Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEFF COX, former editor of Organic Gardening magazine, helped lead the organic movement from a fringe idea to a phenomenon. He was the host of Your Organic Garden on PBS and Grow It! on HGTV and is the author of seventeen books, including the James Beard Award–nominated The Organic Cook's Bible. His Web site is organicfoodguy.com.

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Why Should You Choose Organic Foods?

Organic food has never been more popular, and for good reason: it tastes better, it's more nutritious, and it's better for the environment. This handy guide shows you how to select the freshest, tastiest varieties and transform your organic groceries into memorable meals. You'll find guidance on what to look for when shopping, how to handle each food in the kitchen, and why, when foods are organic, they're so darn good for you. Here's everything youneed to enjoy food that you can feel great about eating:

• Profiles of more than 100 organic foods

• Complete coverage of fruits, vegetables, nuts, herbs, dairy, eggs, meat, and more

• At-a-glance advice on peak seasons, nutrition, good varieties, and what to look for

• Detailed information on preparation, storage, complementary flavors, and kitchen uses

• More than 100 tasty recipes and dozens of cooking tips

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The Organic Food Shopper's Guide

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

When I worked at Organic Gardening magazine during the 1970s, the company had a lunchroom in a house on Main Street in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, called Fitness House. Clients and special guests were taken there to sample real organic food and healthy cooking. It served the most unpleasant food imaginable: unsalted buckwheat groats, sweet potatoes without butter, potatoes boiled in milk, musty-tasting sprouts. At that time, organic food was thought of as good for you and good for the environment-clean, pure, and nutritious-but not all that tasty.

I usually passed Fitness House by and went to Richard's Market for a really delicious Italian hoagie or one of Richard's hot ham sandwiches on a sesame bun with horseradish sauce and melted cheese.

Granola and groats became synonymous with organic food in many places in the 1970s. I ate many an awful meal at back-to-the-land communes from Maine to California. Thank goodness that era is long gone.

Nowadays organic food has come to be appreciated for its richness of flavor, its freshness, and its purity. But as the years passed, I wondered if a special organic cuisine would develop-something that could truly be called organic cooking. And I wondered what it might be. Would it be in the gourmet style of organic cooking found at some trendy restaurants? Writing in the New Yorker in 2003, Dana Goodyear described the fare at Counter, an organic restaurant in the East Village in New York City:

This is a meat-and-potatoes kind of joint, if by meat you mean "meat loaf" made of portobello mushrooms ground up with almonds, macadamia nuts, and cashews in a porcini-mushroom-and-cabernet gravy-and by potatoes you mean cauliflower and pine nuts whipped into a fluffy cumulus and seasoned with parsley and a few shards of uncooked garlic.... The menu attracts a loyal crowd of long-haired sirens so eerily happy-looking and outgoing they might be mistaken for members of a West Coast religion.

While such creative dishes can certainly be tasty, connecting such fabrications with organic food is limiting. This isn't how most people cook at home every day, and it hardly reflects the range of organic cooking.

Organic cooking is real food for real people-good, solid, everyday food made with organic ingredients. It's no longer about faux potatoes made from whipped cauliflower and pine nuts or imitation meatloaf made from portobello mushrooms, and you won't find recipes like those in this book. Good organic cooking can mean cooking in any style, if only because we live in an age when ingredients once found only in ethnic enclaves in America, or in the homelands of different ethnic groups, are available to us fresh, in season, and often in organic form. In fact, organic cooking is most interesting when it is inclusive.

To understand how organic food can enhance any sort or style of cuisine, the organic cook needs to take a good look into the heart of the organic method of growing food, because it's there that the secret of its quality lies. So please bear with me as I condense the knowledge I've gained over thirty years of writing and gardening into a few paragraphs that I hope will be enlightening.

Compost

Healthy soil makes healthy plants makes healthy people. -Old organic maxim

Put simply, "organic" is a method of growing food using only naturally occurring substances. Properly done, it recycles all wastes and improves the soil as it increases crop yields, working with nature's laws and tendencies, rather than attempting to counteract or defeat them. Practitioners of the method conceive of all life in an ecosystem as an interrelated whole to be strengthened, rather than as a group of creatures to be selectively supported, suppressed, or chemically eliminated.

Compost is the heart and engine of the organic method. The rotted remains of what was once living tissue is both the source and destiny of life. What was alive dies and decays to form a nourishing seedbed for new life: the concept is as old as life itself. Go into the woods and look closely at the forest floor. You'll see the leaves and twigs of past years decaying to form a rich, spongy duff that nourishes the trees and plants currently growing there, which will in turn eventually die, decay, and nourish yet another generation of plants. William Shakespeare articulated it well when the friar in Romeo and Juliet proclaimed:

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb; What is her burying grave that is her womb.

Compost is the perfect fertilizer. It contains plant and animal remains, which have the elements needed for the construction of new plants and animals. But compost is much more. It is teeming with microscopic life of many kinds and functions. A teaspoon of fresh compost may contain billions and billions of living microorganisms. They tear apart and digest the remains of old plants and multiply in a tumultuous explosion of life. A well-made compost pile can reach temperatures of 140 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit as these tiny bits of life colonize the feast of organic matter laid out for them.

Within each microorganism is a fluid that's slightly acidic. When these tiny single-celled organisms die, this acid spills into the soil, where it dissolves various elements, forming soluble mineral salts that further enrich the compost. Some of these soluble mineral salts, such as potassium nitrate, are plant nutrients, which get absorbed by root hairs; without the acid from the compost, much of the soil's mineral content would remain trapped in its insoluble state, of no benefit to plants.

Meanwhile, as the old plant matter (dead roots, leaves, and stems) is chewed up by the life in the soil, it eventually becomes a substance called humus. If you could shrink down small enough for a particle of humus to seem as big as an automobile, you would see a dark, almost black lump with deep crevices, nooks, crannies, and channels creating an enormous surface area in a compact space. If you could stretch the automobile-sized particle out flat, the surface area would cover several acres. This humus particle is negatively charged, and it attracts positively charged ions.

Now nature, being the wonderful mother she is, has given the soil solution (as the soil water is called) a remarkable property called its cation exchange capacity. As plant roots absorb and deplete positive ions from the soil solution, the cation exchange capacity replaces the ions to keep the cations at a fixed, balanced level. The replacement cations come from the humus particles, where they are stored on those negatively charged surfaces.

There's something else remarkable about the soil cations. Because they are the product of biological activity, their molecules are configured in a special way; soil scientists describe them as "left-handed." This is exactly what growing plants require to build healthy tissues, because plants, being biological entities themselves, must have left-handed molecules to work with. Fertilizers made in a chemical factory, on the other hand, contain a random mix of left- and right-handed molecules, which throws a chemical monkey wrench into the whole process.

As soil temperatures rise in the spring and plants start growing rapidly, they need more nutrients from the soil...