Local Greek super foods

What the hell are superfoods?  Basically something invented by advertisers

They are foods that are loaded with nutrients and if eaten regularly MAY prevent disease, help you to live longer in good health, make you feel happier, give you strength and boost your brain cells.  
But take blueberries for instance, one of the top so-called superfoods. Blueberries contain a lot of vitamin c and other stuff.  We can't get blueberries here but the kiwi fruit, citrus fruit and other berries available have similar properties.  Just about every fruit, bean, nut or vegetable is a superfood.  Well, maybe not an iceberg lettuce.  The iceberg is valuable though, as a base for all those other goodies  in your salad.  Broccoli and all dark leafy greens are full of vitamins and minerals.  Here we have an abundance of pomegranites, elsewhere you find acai berries (?).

How much of them do you have to eat to make any difference?
Apparently you have to eat 28 cloves of garlic a day to make any difference in your cholesterol level.   You'd have to live in isolation and eat a greek diet of tzatziki and skorthalia (garlic sauce) and you still wouldn't get your 28 a day.

There is no such thing as a miracle food, a superfood.  Eat what you've got fresh and local.  The Eskimos or Inuits eat seal blubber, the greeks eat olive oil, the French drink red wine and eat loads of butter (or they will when the shortage ends). 

These are our local superfoods.  It would take a couple of posts to mention all the different plants, herbs and fruits from the rest of Greece.

Lemons fresh

Good source of vitamin C.  Drink a glass of water with the juice of a lemon squeezed into it.  Makes plain water interesting, or so I tell myself.  Helps fight infection.  My husband assures me the best medicine for a cold or flu is to mix up a glass of whisky, lemon juice and honey, drink up and go off to bed.  Repeat till feeling somewhat 'better'.

We have two lemon trees in the garden.  Some years we get a wheelbarrows of lemons and some years our crop is pathetic and we scrounge from the neighbours but we always have a few kilos of fresh lemons in the house.  Lemon juice goes on everything from fish to garden greens.

Olives, oil and the olive leaf

Everyone knows about olives and oil and the mediterranean diet.   Olive oil is good for the heart, lowers blood sugar, keeps your arteries open and so on.  Drink an infusion of olive leaf for even more benefits and eat the olive in your martini. 

Pomegranite

Vitamins A C and E.  Helps strengthen bones.  Drink pomegranate juice. 

Oranges and mandarins

More vitamin C.  Help lower blood pressure.  We are in a citrus area and have more oranges and mandarins than we can handle.  Greeks don't eat pudding or sweets after a meal but a plate of peeled and neatly cut up oranges, mandarins and apples are often offered instead.

Grapes and raisins

Packed full of antioxidents.  Help keep the blood vessels clean. Full of vitamins.  Eat them, drink the juice and the wine. 

Pistachio nuts

Full of protein, fiber and unsaturated fat.  Eat them in the shell, without being roasted in oil and salt and you have a terrific snack.  Getting them out of the shell takes time and effort and so you probably won't eat too many of them.  You'll have sore fingers if you have to prise them apart.

Figs

Aids digestion.  Known for treating constipation.  Don't eat too many!  Eat them fresh or dried.   You can eat the leaves too.

These are all my photos and have been taken within a hundred metres of our home.  We certainly have fresh just-about-everything within our reach, including a herd of goats to cull if we were hunters as well as gatherers. 

I bet you have your own superfoods growing around you and if you're neither hunters, growers or gatherers you will have access to a market somewhere nearby.

If you want to live long and healthily then eat sensibly and be happy.  I know someone who smokes a packet a day and is in her eighties (dear old Vaso).  I also know/knew someone who ate only what he grew or what his neighbours could supply fresh, washed his hair and himself with only homemade soap, never smoked and rarely drank even a glass of wine and died in his late seventies of alzheimers.

Enjoy what you've got today!!