Sandy Spring CSA

October 21, 2009: This week’s featured fruits and vegetables are: apples, Winter squash, radish, sweet potatoes, peppers, carrots, broccoli, and Swiss chard.

Recipes: Radishes and Friends

Who knew that radishes pair with so many of this week’s vegetables?

To pair with peppers, try this Pineapple-Radish Salsa, good with chicken, turkey, or pork chops. There’s also this Orange, Red Pepper, and Red Onion Salad, which looks like fun.

With Swiss chard, this clever recipe for Spicy Stir-Fried Radish Greens and/or Swiss Chard makes use of the green part of the radishes.

Broccoli teams up with radishes in this Broccoli and Radish Salad with Gorgonzola. And still in the salad vein, carrots tag in with Radish, Carrot, and Ginger Salad, or with Lemony Rice Salad with Carrots and Radishes, for a more substantial side dish.

For a vegetable team-up bonanza, try Rainbow Chopped Salad, where peppers, broccoli, carrots, and radishes all play their part.

Happy chopping!

Food For Thought: Nanoparticles in Your Food - Surprise!

Nanotechnology - it’s what’s for dinner. Or if it’s not now, it may be soon.

We know that nanoparticles - ultra-tiny particles that are manufactured on the scale of atoms and molecules - can do a lot of useful things. Nano-silver has antibacterial properties (which is why they put it in odor-eating socks); nano-titanium dioxide blocks UV rays while remaining colorless (which is why they put it in sunscreen).

The problem is not with what we know nanoparticles do - it’s with what we don’t know that they do. When nano-silver washes out of odor-eating socks, does the wash water carry the particles to sewage treatment plants, where they may kill the bacteria that treat the sewage? When nano-titanium dioxide permeates the skin (which it can easily do), is it carcinogenic? And if I choose not to use products with nanoparticles, will the ones in the products that you use migrate over and affect me anyway?

I was amazed when I read an introductory article about nanoparticles that the Organic Consumers Association had reprinted on their website. Nanoparticles are already in more than 800 commercially available products. According to another recent article on the OCA website, “there are 150-600 nano food and 400-500 nano food packaging applications on store shelves.” Still another article talked about possible uses of nanoparticles in fertilizer.

What amazed me most was that I had no idea this was going on. It seemed that overnight, science fiction had become reality and was affecting my food and my environment in ways that I did not understand - and that no one may fully understand.

I don’t mean to go scaremongering here. Nanotechnology, I’m learning, offers fantastic possibilities, particularly in the field of medicine - and I’m far too ignorant of this whole field to advocate throwing the teeny tiny baby out with the potentially contaminated bathwater. But if you, like me, had no idea that this was going on - well, now you do. You, like me, now have the chance to go and educate yourself.