By Susan Casey
Apr 05, 2011
BEFORE YOU
REACH
for
another
artificially
flavored,
fat-laden
"treat"
from
the grocery store shelf, consider this: Nature
itself is serving up a
BOUNTY OF
SUPERFOODS that could change the way
you eat, feel, and live. SUSAN CASEY ventures
into the wils of Peru for a mouthwatering tour.
O’s editor in chief travels to Peru to
experience a trove of life-giving superfoods
that just might revolutionize your view of
nutrition.
page 3
Around 4 o’clock on any given morning, Darin
Olien will walk into his Malibu, California,
kitchen and make himself a smoothie. This will
not be an ordinary drink. The other day, for
example, he tossed the following into his
blender: coconut water, fermented sprouted brown
rice, maca, aloe vera juice, barley grass
powder, kamut juice powder, almond butter, camu
camu, avocado, goji, lucuma powder, noni juice,
cacao nibs, MSM, maqui, bee pollen, sacha inchi
oil, omega-3-DHA/EPA oil, Hawaiian deepwater
salt, chia seeds, nopal, goat yogurt, luo han
guo, and a powder called Shakeology.
If you’ve never heard of many of these
ingredients, you’re not alone. But stay with me
here, because they’re among the most powerful
nutrients on Earth. Olien’s specialty is what’s
known as “formulating,” taking wildly beneficial
substances and combining them into something
even more potent: a supplement, a snack, a tea,
a medicine, a smoothie. Every food in nature
contains a mix of proteins, fats, and
carbohydrates, along with noncaloric vitamins,
minerals, fibers-all of which fuel our cells-and
each one has unique abilities that we really
don’t understand, but it is now clear that some
foods pack an extra biochemical punch. Camu camu
fruit, for instance, provides the richest source
of vitamin C known to exist. Maca, a hearty root
that grows only in the high Andes, comes in
yellow, red, and black varieties, boosts
fertility, is said to balance hormones, and
dispenses a day’s worth of kick-ass energy.
Sacha inchi is another South American treasure,
a protein-rich, metabolism-revving nut that
delivers an omega-3 bonanza. Olien’s final
ingredient, Shakeology, contains more than 70
components itself, a crazy cornucopia of good.
page 4
No one understands Shakeology
better than Olien, who created it in 2008, after
Carl Daikeler, CEO of the fitness company
Beachbody, challenged him to come up with a
supplement to match the tagline The Healthiest
Meal of the Day. His customer was someone who
wanted optimum wellness, wanted to lose weight,
wanted cholesterol levels to drop-but had no
intention of eating a platter of broccoli each
day. Daikeler gave Olien no limits on quality,
no cost/revenue restrictions; the goal was to
shoot the moon, to seek out and combine the most
extraordinary plants, fruits, nuts,
herbs-nature’s secret weapons. And Olien found
them: ashwagandha from China, cordyceps from
Bhutan, yacon from Peru. An alphabet of vitamins
and minerals from the purest sources.
Prebiotics. Probiotics. Green tea and grapeseed
extracts, chlorella and spirulina and hydrilla,
a spectrum of enzymes. Since hitting the market
in March 2009, more than 400,000 bags of Shakeology,
at $119.95 each, have been sold.
Olien himself is a strapping guy, north of six
feet and solid. He looks, in fact, like the
steak-fed Midwestern varsity football player
that he was, until a back injury derailed his
athletic career. From that low point Olien had
tried to rehabilitate himself using traditional
methods-lots of animal protein, relentless
physiotherapy-but it was only when he adopted a
radically new diet of superfoods that he was
able to regain his strength. This not only
improved his health, it revealed his calling.
“It was one of the greatest turns in my life,”
Olien says, “because it got me into the
question, ‘What can I do to fix this?’ I became
very curious about the body, switched my major
to exercise physiology and nutrition. Then I
healed myself.” Over the years he also managed
to help many others with their diet and fitness
regimens, and Olien’s “concoctions,” his powders
and bars and health innovations, began to
attract attention.
page 5
On the first morning I met Olien I watched him
doing squat jumps holding 40-pound weights,
while holding his breath underwater. Another
workout he likes to do involves harnessing
himself to a 150-pound railroad tie and dragging
it through thick sand. Whatever he eats needs to
fuel these exploits, so people are often
surprised to hear that his diet consists mostly
of plants. Olien consumes no processed foods, no
polysyllabic ingredients invented in labs, no
high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats, no
artificial flavorings, no antibiotic-laced dairy
products, nothing that comes out of a
drive-thru. In short, he doesn’t eat what’s
generally on offer in the modern food world.
“When people find out that I don’t eat this or I
don’t eat that, I feel a sense of pity coming
from them,” he says, “and I think, ‘Wow! You
have no idea. I’m not deprived at all. Come to
my kitchen! I’ll blow your mind.’”
Thing is, science is now catching up to
something that nature has known all along: the
rich greens, the vibrant yellows, the deep
indigos of plants are key to our well-being.
That meat we love so much? Proven to clog our
arteries. Convenience foods-heavily sweetened
and salted, laden with fat and chemicals-wreak
havoc on everything from our immune systems to
our moods to our weight. Here are the facts and
they’re not very pretty: Americans are the
fattest people ever in history. Obesity, a body
composition topping 30 percent fat, is the most
pressing health crisis we face, with 34 percent
of the adult population falling into that
category (plus 29 percent of all children). If
you add in the merely overweight it’s closer to
68 percent. In the past 50 years the weight of
the typical American citizen has increased, on
average, by 25 pounds. If we continue at this
rate, by 2050 every last person will have eaten
himself into the danger zone.
“Every time you eat processed foods, you exclude
from your diet not only the essential nutrients
that we are aware of, but hundreds of other
undiscovered phytonutrients that are crucial for
normal human function,” Joel Fuhrman, MD, writes
in his new book, Eat to Live: The Amazing
Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained
Weight Loss, which stresses the importance of a
diet full of high-quality produce. Mehmet Oz,
MD, who wrote the foreword to Fuhrman’s book,
believes that even a slight shift away from meat
can improve your health. “What we really want to
do is have people nudge themselves in the right
direction,” he told me. “If you want to have a
few bacon bits on your salad, God bless you,
fine. That’s not where we’re losing the battle.
We’re losing the battle when you have sausage
for breakfast, a big pastrami sandwich for
lunch, and pork chops for dinner.”
page 6
Yet we live in a mass-produced, big-box culture,
where economic interests hold sway. Meat, corn,
sugar-they come cheap, and we buy them. Plus, we
tend to like the taste. But there are steep
hidden costs in a food system that makes
calories rather than nutrients-from the factory
farms that treat animals like parts on an
assembly line to the fact that obesity-related
ailments like heart disease, stroke, and
diabetes are skyrocketing and account for
approximately $150 billion in healthcare
expenses each year.
As both Fuhrman and Oz would attest, anyone
consuming a steady diet of man-made edibles
would benefit even from something as prosaic as
lettuce, but far more intriguing foods exist. As
Olien began to talk about the vegetables,
fruits, grains, herbs, and other plants he was
hunting, I realized there was an entire universe
out there I didn’t know about. I had never heard
of lucuma or sapote or aguaje. What the heck was
gac? The list was long.
Learning more requires a passport, because in
acquiring these superfoods Olien doesn’t simply
call up a supplier with his FedEx number, he
goes directly to the source.
In doing so he often ends up in extreme places,
searching out plants that-although they may have
been revered by past civilizations-are now
largely forgotten. South America, with its
jungles and rainforests and mountains, is
especially rich. So when I heard that Olien was
headed back to Peru, I invited myself along. I
wanted to see firsthand what he was up to
because it sounded so incredible to me, so
mysterious and even magical. I wanted to taste
these lost, powerful foods that had fueled
warriors and emperors, plants with miraculous
properties that had somehow almost vanished,
disappearing beneath a sea of fast-food
wrappers.
Lima
From the outside, Nicolaza Mendoza’s warehouse
looks like any other drab building on the
industrial fringe of a sprawling Latin American
city. When I walked through the door, however,
that impression was washed away by a wave of
earthy scent. Colorful sacks were piled high on
wooden palettes, each one stuffed with precious
plants. Their names-una de gato, achiote,
huasca-were written on the sacks in thick black
marker. Mendoza, a small-statured woman with a
serious face, is one of Peru’s most respected
herbalists. She spoke no English; her daughter
Luz Maria, a striking 32-year-old in a short
black skirt and lavender eyeshadow, was there to
translate.
page 7
“How do you say, ‘Hit the jackpot’ in Spanish?”
Olien asked, smiling. He was carrying a list of
substances he wanted to investigate, and it was
a good bet that many were on the premises.
Standing beside him, Bernd Neugebauer, PhD,
surveyed the warehouse and nodded. At 59, with a
mane of white hair and vivid blue eyes,
Neugebauer has a distinguished air, bolstered by
the four languages he speaks fluently and his
provenance from one of Germany’s oldest forestry
families. Neugebauer’s accomplishments and
interests include cultivating organic aloe vera,
beekeeping, shamanism training, and studying
ancient farming methods. Currently he is
restoring an entire Mayan village in the
Yucatan. But his primary interest is soil. Only
healthy, mineral-rich soil produces healthy,
mineral-rich food, and the world’s topsoil is
under great stress these days, overused,
undernourished, and (due to increasing
deforestation) prone to erode into the sea.
Though he is an organic farming expert,
Neugebauer has gone even beyond that, reaching
into history to discover how past agricultural
empires-Maya, Aztec, Inca-treated the land, and
what we can learn from them. In 2006 Olien read
an academic paper by Neugebauer about creating
holistic and sustainable agricultural practices,
and sought him out as a kindred spirit. Now the
two team up often, with Neugebauer helping the
farmers who grow Olien’s raw materials get the
most out of their crops without pesticides or
chemical fertilizers.
Olien’s relationship to his suppliers is a
deeply personal one. He believes in cultivating
relationships first, supporting indigenous
practices, seeking the highest-quality products
and paying generously for them. The farmers he
works with have become his close friends. “It’s
fair trade on steroids,” he says of his
approach. To that end, every last leaf that now
sat in Mendoza’s warehouse met this gold
standard. The herbs here were locally grown and
carefully harvested. Her collection was all the
more impressive when you considered Peru’s
outlandish biodiversity. Luz explained how her
mother traversed the country constantly, from
one extreme to another, from the Amazon to the
Andes to the Pacific Coast and everywhere in
between, seeking out each region’s botanical
treasures. The stakes were high: Billion-dollar
drugs had been obtained in the rapidly dwindling
rainforest-antimicrobial, antipain, anticancer
medications, among countless others-and yet
scientists agreed that only a small fraction of
nature’s pharmacopoeia had ever been studied.
“I’m amazed by what she knows,” Luz said,
shaking her head.
page 8
I walked down the aisles behind Mendoza and
Olien, leaning over the herbs to examine them.
Una de gato, or cat’s claw, was a vine that had
been chopped into little shingles; it was adobe
red and smelled like the primeval forest. I had
seen it referenced in a number of books as an
antiaging “superherb.” Recently scientists have
discovered that the most prized plants and herbs
in native cultures contain high levels of
nutrients that contribute ferociously to
cellular health in ways we are only beginning to
understand; cat’s claw has been shown to fight
infection, decrease inflammation, and repair
DNA. “This is the real pharmacy,” Olien said,
gesturing at the sacks. “Hippocrates said, ‘Let
food be your medicine’-and there’s a lot of
medicine out there.”
There was a row dedicated entirely to teas, lush
manzanilla (chamomile), lemony cedron,
eucalyptus, and menta blanca-white mint so
strong it was as though an entire field had been
squeezed into a teacup. Every smell was
amplified. “Stand here for three minutes and
just breathe deeply,” Neugebauer advised, “and
you will be in wonderful condition.” The
intensity of these substances was striking,
given that we live in a diluted world, willing
to eat a tomato that only vaguely tastes like a
tomato, or an orange that looks orange only
because it’s been shot full of dye.
One sack had frayed at the ends and its contents
spilled out, revealing a root that looked like a
thick, spiral cinnamon stick. I was examining it
when Miguel Berumen, another member of Olien’s
team, came over. Berumen was a walking
superfoods encyclopedia, and the learning had
started early. As a boy growing up outside
Mexico City, he’d watched his grandmother heal
family members with plants from her garden. “I’d
get sick,” he recalled, “and she’d come over and
brew up some herbs and say some prayers. That
was just the logical thing to do.” When Berumen
was asked a question about, say, sarsaparilla,
the knowledge poured out, streams of words
rushing and tumbling over themselves in
excitement. “In ancient times they used this
herb to make root beer. They also used
sassafras. And manioc root to generate the
bubbles!”
“Can you ask Nicolaza about kaniwa?” Olien asked
Berumen. He’d mentioned kaniwa, a grain I’d
never heard of, several times today.
“Kaniwa is a beautiful plant,” Neugebauer said,
with admiration in his voice.
“It bounced off the page to me this morning,”
Olien said, pointing to his notes. New quinoa,
high Andes, he’d written in the margin. “We
could sprout it. Make it a little more
bioactive.”
Olien had explained to me how his formulas come
together first by instinct, a gut knowing that
eventually leads him into the lab, where
everything will be rigorously tested. “I start
with a question,” he said. “For Shakeology
it was, ‘What do people need to thrive?’” From
that point the different ingredients pop into
his mind, inspirations bubble up, ideas
appear-”and then I back into the science.” Once
a product has been fine-tuned, Olien uses
himself and his friends as guinea pigs. “That’s
the ultimate test,” he said. “In your own body.”
The intricate synergies that keep our livers
humming and our eyes focused and our brains
remembering where we put the car keys are
mirrored in the plant world. Each organism
contains a universe within itself, countless
components working together seamlessly to keep
things in perfect balance. When Olien combines
his raw materials-all of them functional
foods-he’s seeking this same effect, in which
the whole adds up to more than the sum of its
parts. When we supplement our diets with
specific vitamins-a vitamin D capsule, a CoQ10
pill-we’re doing the opposite: breaking nature’s
systems apart. “The best example of this is the
work that’s been done on vitamin A,” Oz had told
me. “When you eat vitamin-A-rich foods like
carrots, you reduce the risk of lung cancer.
When you take vitamin A as a pill you increase
the risk of lung cancer. How is that possible?
It’s possible because when you take a carrot and
put it into your mouth you don’t just get
vitamin A, you get all the retinols. The
different subtypes of all these different
phytonutrients. And they’re in the perfect mix
for us. Literally dozens of them in the right
combinations-they’re the key that unlocks the
cells’ abilities to defend themselves against
cancer. If you take only a massive
pharmaceutical dose of vitamin A, then you
actually block the body’s ability to absorb the
other components of the carrot.” The way these
things operate, Oz said, is like a band playing
in perfect tune: “The true benefit doesn’t come
from just having the drum banging. You need the
guitar, a little trumpet, a singer. That’s what
makes the music.”
This vast, emerging alchemy was the most
exciting part of his work, Olien agreed,
stepping out of Mendoza’s warehouse into the
hazy afternoon heat: “I’m not a fan of
isolating. Who are we to separate things out?
All of these herbs and vitamins have their
buddies, and they want to come together.” He
walked toward the bus that would take us from
Lima into the wild folds of Peru. “It never
ceases to amaze me,” he added, “watching the
magic.”
Tarma
Fresh cacao is a strange and wonderful fruit.
Outside, it’s a tough vermilion pod the size and
shape of a toy football, but inside it contains
another set of textures: a mass of wonky-shaped
cubes nestled in a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, each with
a furry white covering and a chewy bean in the
center. When you bite into cacao the sensation
is sexy and silky and delicious, kind of bitter
and kind of sweet, with a darkly complex flavor
that only hints at the chocolate it will
eventually become.
“They called it the Food of the Gods,” Olien
said, handing me another cube. “And it truly
is.” He was wearing a pair of black shoes that
slipped on like gloves, all five toes outlined,
giving his feet the appearance of paws. It was
perfect jungle footwear. We stood on the
slippery hillside with three men from the small,
organic cacao plantation where these fruit trees
had been planted. Olien was always on the
lookout for good sources of cacao, a key
ingredient.
page 9
Botanists and herbalists-and superfood
hunters-tend to get very worked up when
describing cacao; its health attributes seem
almost too good to be true. Cacao has more
protective antioxidants than red wine,
pomegranates, and blueberries combined. It’s a
huge source of magnesium, a critical mineral for
heart health, bone strength, and brainpower that
many of us could use more of. These little beans
contain a rainbow of minerals, a wallop of
vitamin C, many essential fats, and the calming
amino acid tryptophan, which in turn elevates
levels of the happiness-inducing
neurotransmitter serotonin. “Cacao is an
absolutely perfect mood stabilizer,” Olien said.
And more: The beans are rich in a wonderful
substance called phenylethyl-amine (PEA) that
our bodies produce when we fall in love; PEA
also acts as a natural appetite suppressant. An
aphrodisiac that helps you lose weight is so
precious, in fact, that the Maya and Aztecs used
cacao beans as currency, valuing them above
gold.
“I want to make a convenient medicinal
chocolate,” Olien said, holding up one of the
pods. “As pure and raw as possible, all hand
grown. It’d be like handing out delicious
antidepressants to people!” To be honest, it was
quite an idea: What if the foods we loved also
happened to be incredibly good for us? What if,
instead of doughnuts and nachos, we craved
nature’s most exquisite gifts? What would the
world look like if everyone functioned at peak
energy, tipped the scales at their ideal weight,
and ran around in a good mood? What if we didn’t
need to take drugs to be happy or keep our
hearts running smoothly or get a decent night’s
sleep?
Neugebauer began to talk to the farmers, giving
them some new ideas to fend off a fungus known
as Monilia that was reducing their harvest. I
watched him speaking to them in Spanish,
kneeling down next to the trees and examining
the soil. A walnut-skinned man in black rubber
boots listened intently, a curved machete
hanging from his belt. Standing at the edge of
the path, Olien and Berumen were deep in
conversation. “It can’t help but propel me into
neurotransmitters,” I heard Olien say. His face
was still smeared with red achiote dye from a
stop we’d made earlier at a lowland jungle
village called Pampa Miche, where we’d visited a
tribe called the Ashaninka, renowned for their
knowledge of local plants. Olien had stood by
good-naturedly as a group of village women
painted his face with scarlet stripes, looped
boa constrictors around his neck, and dressed
him in a native outfit consisting of a loose
caftan, an elaborate sash of beads, and a jaunty
straw hat.
|
Later, on an exploratory walk through the
rainforest, he had downed a murky brown drink
with a bitter flavor and the texture of phlegm.
“What are the medicinals in this?” he asked
Nuria, a sturdy woman in a red headscarf. She
responded in a gale of Spanish, gesturing at the
towering trees.
“Five different tree barks,” Neugebauer
translated.
“Para potencia!” Nuria stressed. The women
erupted in giggles.
Olien went on to sample wild cashew nut, a
reddish fruit shaped like a small bell pepper.
The shell of the nut contains a burning acid
(something Olien had learned the hard way in
Mexico last year, and ended up having the skin
of his lips peel off). Stepping off the path,
one of the Ashaninka men, who happened to be
carrying a small monkey, reached up with a long
knife and cut into the trunk of a nearby tree. A
thick red sap began to ooze out. “Sangre de
grado,” Berumen said, leaning over to examine
it. “Dragon’s blood!”
This was a sighting: Sangre de grado is a
substance so valuable and rare that counterfeit
versions often show up in the markets. Used
externally as a salve, it acts as a second skin
to close wounds and stop infection; taken
internally it heals ulcers and other stomach
ailments. Dragon’s blood also exhibits antitumor
and antiviral activity, qualities that have
captured the pharmaceutical industry’s
attention.
Nuria rubbed a few drops onto Olien’s forearm.
The sap first looked red, then quickly turned a
shimmery golden, before morphing again to a
soapy white. “It’s sticky,” he said, touching
it. “That’s how you know it’s really good,”
Berumen said. “When it gets creamy like that.”
The visual effect was startling. The dark red
liquid stood out against the light bark, as
though the tree really were bleeding. It looked
eerily like a human arm or leg. Olien traced the
wound, letting the liquid drip onto his fingers.
He was completely transfixed, and he stood there
for several minutes, oblivious to anything else
around him, even the scampering monkeys.
Junin
At 14,000 feet in the Andes, not much grows in
Junin. There is one noteworthy exception: maca.
This windblasted place is the maca capital of
the world, and for that Olien loves it. “Ah,
yeahhh,” he said as the lunar vistas rolled by,
dust-colored barren hillsides dotted with the
tiny figures of llamas and vicunas. The more I’d
heard about maca, the more fantastic this little
tuber seemed: A relative of the radish, it has
been cultivated for 2,000 years in these parts.
Maca is an adaptogen, Olien said, explaining how
the brutal terrain had bred into the plant a
kind of survivors’ guile that enabled it to
respond to any conditions. In the body it helps
balance whatever’s out of whack, particularly
hormones. It boosts endurance, allowing people
(and animals) to work long days at high
altitude. Incan warriors liked to take maca
before going into battle. In Junin, the local
people ate it roasted, stewed, marinated, dried,
fermented, made into tea. But for all its
benefits, maca had flirted with extinction. In
1979 only 70 acres of it could be found in Peru.
Since then its stock as a superfood has been
steadily rising, and small farmers have started
planting it again, realizing it’s worth far more
in the marketplace than potatoes.
We were headed to visit Dina Guere Vega, a maca
farmer whom Olien had been working with for six
years. She and her family lived in a jumbled
compound of low buildings that included a
warehouse filled with maca bulbs. Guere Vega was
a pocket-size woman with large brown eyes and a
brilliant smile, bundled in a hand-knit alpaca
sweater, and she greeted Olien, Berumen, and
Neugebauer like family. Her husband stood beside
her, wearing a wool hat with earflaps. Outside
the wind howled, shaking the roof.
page 10
The smell of maca is intense and unique, like
earth meets nuts meets a wood fire with
undertones of licorice and wasabi, and it filled
the warehouse-sacks of maca lined the walls. On
one side of the building two women sorted
through a sea of bulbs spread across a tarp.
Olien reached into an open bag and pulled out a
handful. The root looked like a petrified fig.
“Powerful stuff,” he said. “This is dried. Takes
about three months.” After that it would be
carefully powdered and shipped to the United
States. Maca’s strong odor (and that of other
pungent herbs) had challenged Olien when it came
to perfecting Shakeology’s
taste without resorting to artificial
ingredients. “I spent a year trying to get it
right,” he said, describing the two flavors that
resulted, chocolate and greenberry. “Because if
I didn’t, no one in Middle America would drink
it. You have to meet them in the place where
they can receive it.”
Dina and her husband reappeared holding trays of
a golden liquid. “Liquor de maca!” Neugebauer
said, reaching for a glass with a somewhat shaky
hand. Since our arrival we’d been chewing coca
leaves, the native remedy for altitude sickness,
but he was feeling the elevation, and hoped that
a little maca toddy would clear that up. We had
three rounds of the stuff and later we would
drink more maca, blended with dark beer and
papaya. Its effect was smooth and kicky, like
stepping on the accelerator of a fine sports
car. As Olien said, it was an easy plant to
love. The locals felt the same way and had even
installed a 70-foot-high, shocking purple maca
monument in the nearby town of Huayre.
But the picture wasn’t entirely rosy. Part of
Neugebauer’s task here was to solve a pressing
problem: Over the past year Dina’s fields had
been producing far less maca, and the plants
that were growing had shrunk dramatically in
size. Dina thought that climate change was the
culprit, erratic weather patterns bringing
warmer temperatures and rain out of season.
Neugebauer, however, believed a change in
planting methods would not only restore her maca
yield but double it. The two of them hunkered on
a couch in the drafty room with wool caps pulled
low over their heads. “He wants her to use a
crane rather than a tractor,” Berumen
translated. “To reach out and loosen a little
area without turning the soil over. And he
doesn’t think she’s digging deep enough.”
Neugebauer also explained how he had resurrected
the chaquitaclla, an Incan maca-planting tool
shaped like a spear gun: “I took it into a
machine design shop in Germany and told them,
‘Please mechanize this.’”
As old as maca’s tradition was, I could see that
much of what was happening here was new. “Five
years ago, none of this existed,” Olien said,
surveying Dina’s compound, where a
2,000-year-old crop was being reintroduced to
the world. Though we tend to think of progress
as a straight charge ahead-more, new, bigger,
faster-in maca’s case, moving forward required
going back in time. I recalled a conversation
I’d had with William Li, a Harvard-trained MD
and the cofounder of the Angiogenesis
Foundation, a vanguard group that’s proving how,
at the molecular level, the foods we eat have a
direct impact on whether our bodies are
vulnerable to cancer. “Today we’re at a very
awkward moment, I think, in human existence as
it relates to food and health,” Li had said,
“where we know intrinsically that there’s more
to these things than we concretely recognize.
And there’s a lot of historical stuff that’s
been lost. How do we rediscover that? How do we
take ourselves out of this cereal box?”
“I mean, why not think about trying to replace
wheat with maca, for example,” Neugebauer had
mused earlier. “Maca is the absolute superfood.
Wheat has all sorts of problems.” On the surface
this sounds preposterous-but is it? Considering
that we’ve adopted a food system that’s created
massive increases in both obesity and hunger,
where prices are spiraling out of control, and
monoculture and genetic modification work in
opposition to nature’s strategy of endless
diversity, what these maca fields really
represented, I thought, were ancient yet urgent
ideas about how to live.
Huanco
“What does this look like?” Berumen asked,
holding up the aguaje fruit in the open-air
market.
“A hand grenade?” I said. Because it did.
“An ovary!”
The aguaje is a huge source of phyto-estrogens,
Berumen said, and a perfect example of
biomimicry in action. In other words, even
before there were textbooks and search engines,
nature had given us very clear directions. It’s
no accident that walnuts, with their squiggly
oval hemispheres, are the ultimate brain food.
Or that a plant the rainforest natives call
chanca piedra (“stone breaker” in English),
which produces tiny green balls, is a natural
remedy for kidney stones. Or that dragon’s
blood, the sap that acts as a coagulant,
actually bleeds out of the tree.
We stood in an aisle of the Huanuco market,
squeezing aside as people bustled past. A short
woman in a flouncy skirt walked by with a pig on
a leash; another woman crouched on the ground
next to a net bag writhing with tiny chicks.
Fruits and vegetables were heaped everywhere. A
light rain drizzled outside. Huanuco is a
midsize city in central Peru, usefully located
between the sierra and the high jungle. If
you’re a farmer, there’s a lot of business to do
here.
“The phytoestrogenic property of aguaje is
different than soy,” Berumen continued, citing
another plant with strong hormonal effects. “It
actually assists the body in making estrogen.”
He cut into the aguaje and handed me a piece.
The fruit was bright orange, with the dry
texture of cheese. The vivid colors in fruits
and vegetables-created by chemicals called
flavonoids-signal power. So far scientists have
identified about 6,000 of these compounds-names
like peonidin, kaempferol, apigenin, hesperitin,
quercetin-but undoubtedly, thousands more exist.
Flavonoids have been shown to improve brain
function, motor skills, blood flow; they protect
cells from inflammation and potential damage
that can lead to cancer.
page 11
Eating a variety of plants is the best way to
assure your body a wide array of flavonoids; in
Peru, I’d discovered, this wasn’t a problem.
Since my arrival I’d been presented with a
steady stream of unknown foods. Along with
cacao, maca, and aguaje I’d tried granadilla, a
fruit that cracks open with a snap, revealing a
fist-size mass of seeds, each covered in a
translucent membrane. The seeds were crunchy and
sour, the membrane was soft and sweet, the
combination was sublime. Olien had produced a
bag full of dried aguaymanto, raisinlike fruits
with a sharp citrusy tang. Berumen had talked
about “monster fruit”-a corncob-shaped plant
that tasted like a cross between a guava and a
pineapple-and declared it “the most delicious
thing ever.” But Monstera deliciosa (its Latin
name) had to be carefully ripened and prepared,
he warned: “If you bite into it fresh, it’s like
eating razors. It cuts up your whole mouth.”
There was black sapote, a fruit that tasted like
chocolate pudding, and the succinctly named
peanut butter fruit. In the market we had also
come across lucuma, a fruit Olien likes for its
mild, butterscotchy taste (in Peru,
lucuma-flavored ice cream is as popular as
chocolate or vanilla). “It blends well,” he
said, slicing the skin off like that of a mango.
“Balances out the astringents.” The fruit had a
soft, cakey texture. “It’s one of the most
mineral-rich foods in the world,” Berumen added.
We walked past rows of fish on ice, midsize
animal carcasses dangling from hooks, rafts of
flowers and sheaves of herbs. A heavyset woman
in fuchsia lipstick presided over bushels of
coca leaves. In a back corner, a group of older
ladies had gathered around two large pots. One
of them, an Indian woman with a long braid,
ladled something that looked like porridge into
a metal bowl. “Medicina!” she said, pointing at
Olien and then handing the bowl to him. Then she
pointed to her stomach: “Medicina!” she stressed
again, flashing a smile that revealed many
missing teeth.
“Ah, the gringo needs some medicine,” Olien
said, raising an eyebrow. “What is this?” he
asked Berumen to inquire. The stuff in the bowl
smelled acrid, even rotten. Berumen spoke to the
women in Spanish and then after a moment he
turned to us. “It’s called tocosh,” he said. “A
traditional Andean food made from fermented
potatoes.” The process, he translated, involved
burying the potatoes in river soil for up to two
years. Amazingly, this produced a natural
penicillin.
Olien raised a gloopy spoonful to his mouth,
hesitated for a moment, and then bravely
swallowed it. Even from three feet away the
aroma made my eyes water. “It’s a lot better
than it smells,” he said, delivering the
verdict. “It’s actually good.” I tried it, and
agreed. The tocosh was warm and subtly sweet,
with hints of vanilla. There was something
comforting about it, and I could feel my body
wanting more. Later I would learn that tocosh
had been an Incan delicacy, and that even in
sophisticated cities like Lima, Peruvian doctors
still prescribed it for stomach disorders, and
for its overall healthful effects.
“Oh my God, would I like to see the nutrient
content on this,” Olien said, taking another
spoonful. “Because that is not a potato anymore.
It’s a completely new structure.” Fermenting a
food, he explained, was like turbocharging it.
This is the process, of course, that turns
grapes into wine, milk into cheese. Essentially
you’re letting food go bad in a good way,
page 10
by creating an oxygen-free environment around
it. During fermentation, benevolent armies of
bacteria break down starches to sugars; those
are converted to health-enhancing alcohols and
acids. Whole new vitamins, enzymes, and amino
acids can spring up. The result is a food with
alchemical potency. This technique is so ancient
that we don’t have any records of its origin,
but historians believe it goes back at least
9,000 years, to China.
“If you look at the history of food, there’s
been this tribalism,” William Li had pointed
out. “Things are passed down-and there’s so much
we don’t know. Space is a frontier. Oceans are a
frontier. I think food is a whole other
frontier,” he said. “And it’s not something you
have to train with NASA for, or put on scuba
gear for. It’s sitting in front of us every
single day.”
Ambo
The Yacon farm was perched at the top of a road
that zigzagged up the mountainside in a series
of hairpin turns. The road was narrow and
crumbly with scree, its thin ribbon of shoulder
edged by sheer cliffs. There were no guardrails.
I watched the bus driver hunch over the wheel in
tense concentration, muttering under his breath.
The view at the top, however, was worth the
white-knuckle ride. The farm was tucked in a
pristine valley glowing with more shades of
green than the spectrum seemed able to hold,
ringed by majestic peaks.
“Have I talked to you about yacon?” Olien asked,
describing the potato-shaped vegetable that was,
improbably, a cousin of the sunflower. “It’s an
amazing food, a tuber that has a bunch of
different sugars in it.” The most important of
these sugars is a rare type known as
fructooligosaccharide (FOS), and yacon is the
richest known source of it. Although FOS tastes
beautifully sweet, it’s not processed in the
body like other sugars because we lack the
enzymes to digest it (making it perfect for
diabetics-and dieters, because few calories are
absorbed). But rather than being expelled like
some alien substance, on its way through your
body yacon does a number of helpful things. It
acts as a prebiotic, encouraging healthy
bacteria in your intestines and colon, and aids
in fat metabolism, cholesterol management,
vitamin absorption, blood sugar regulation, even
bone density. “It could be a sweetener solution
for the entire planet,” Olien said.
The farm’s owner was a local man named Luis
Alva, known to his friends as Lucho. He was
burly, in his 30s with a wide face that looked
both tough and kind. Alva had a quiet gravitas,
which made sense when you learned what he’d been
through on his family land. Twenty years ago, at
a house only a mile away, his father was killed
by the Shining Path, the leftist guerrillas who
brutalized Peru during the ’80s and ’90s (and
remain on the U.S. State Department’s list of
terrorist groups). It was not a tragedy that
anyone around here had forgotten. But today
Lucho was buoyant, glad to see Olien and Berumen
again, and to meet the rest of us.
In 2006 Berumen had been trolling the Internet
and came across an arcane reference to yacon. He
sent it to Olien, who was astonished by the
“perfect storm of health benefits” the plant
seemed to provide. “I thought, ‘This is an
amazing product,’” Olien recalled. “You can’t
get it anywhere, not even online. And then I was
like a pit bull. I just kept saying, ‘We gotta
bring it here.’ And maybe I got ahead of myself.
” He laughed, then added: “But that inspired all
of what’s growing here.”
The next morning we headed to the fields in
Alva’s truck, driving up a red dirt road that
also served as a thoroughfare for Andean
shepherdesses and their flocks. The women wore
bright shirts and shawls in magenta, canary,
emerald, tangerine, turquoise, along with the
traditional pleated wool skirts and black
flat-brimmed hats, which they decorated with
bits of tinsel. We passed a group of alpacas,
shaggy white beasts with unicorn faces and
cranky dispositions, and a cow with long
eyelashes that was mowing some bushes.
Yacon produces large green leaves that gave
Alva’s fields a lush appearance, like a vast
carpet of salad. “Historically, yacon was called
the apple of the Earth,” Berumen noted. After
sitting in the sun, apparently, it literally
tastes like an apple, though the tuber itself
resembles a yam. “You can dehydrate it, extract
juice, or make a syrup out of it,” Berumen said.
I watched as a field hand pulled up a plant, its
roots caked with soil. Alva peeled the brown
skin with a knife. Inside, the yacon was crystal
white with tiny violet dots around its
perimeter. It had an icy, juicy look and a crisp
texture and it tasted fresh and light, like
highly delicious air or a ghost carrot. I could
have eaten it all day. “No applicacion de
herbicida,” Lucho said. “Nada, nada, nada.” He
used only organic fertilizer in his fields, no
chemicals at all.
page 12
The spectacular valley, the happy workers, the
mountain air, the bountiful crops-no one could
argue against this as an ideal. Earlier I’d
asked Olien what I thought was a key question:
Is it possible to mass-produce this kind of
quality? “I think we’re proving that you can,”
he answered without hesitation. He added, “If
you get the highest nutritional value from your
food, you need less of it. The vacant foods-we
need more of them, because they’re posers.
They’re empty.”
He was right. It was really that simple: The
body with its unknown galaxies of cells, its
unseen cogs and wheels, its ropes and coils of
DNA, needs to be nourished, and it doesn’t
thrive on red dye #40 or propylene glycol or
butylated hydroxyanisole with a ciprofloxacin
chaser. “These plants you’re writing about have
powers that are sacred,” Oz had stressed. “That
word belongs in your story.” And these sacred
foods do not have to remain in backcountry Peru.
They could be available to all if we were
willing to think and farm and eat differently.
Alva pulled his truck over to the side of the
road and pointed to a field where eight
varieties of yacon were growing. He wanted to
see which type would do best in this
environment, and produce the most FOS. The
winner would be a kind of superyacon, a
super-superfood. Olien opened the passenger door
and got out, walking to the edge of the field.
Below he could see the blue rooftops of a tiny
school, kids playing soccer in front of it. The
workers moved among more yacon, small figures
bent in the furrows, and the Arischaca River
rushed in the background while the Andean women
tended their sheep in the peacefulness and
fullness that was now here. The valley stretched
out before him, green and red, the vertiginous
perfection of it all, the terraced fields, the
veins of soil. In the gold afternoon light Olien
sat down in the yacon field, among the floppy
leaves. And then he lay back and closed his
eyes, smiling.
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