In Pursuit of Garlic Read Free

It’s undergoing a renaissance in the kitchen, the garden, and the medical laboratory. It’s identified as one of the foods that provide that indefinable umami flavor, now widely accepted as the fifth taste, after sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. A high-priced fermented garlic with a pristine exterior and sweet, chewy black cloves has made its way into the best gourmet food shops, to be used on pastas, in salsas, with seafood—any way you can dream up. In the garden, growers are trying out dozens of new garlic varieties in varying shades and stripes of purple, red, white, and brown. There’s even a pink one. The new cultivars don’t taste like “just garlic” either—nuances abound from hot to mild, nutty to sort of sweet, though it’s hard to describe garlic as sweet, because its strong essential flavor is always present. In late summer garlic lovers flock to fairs all over the continent offering the new varieties for sale, as well as lectures on raising and storing garlic and talks on its value for health.
    There’s a simple, though offbeat, explanation for all this interest: the falling of the Berlin Wall. “When it came down in ’89, scientists were allowed into Russia and brought back literally hundreds of unnamed garlic varieties to North America for study,” says Paul Pospisil, who owns Beaver Pond Estates in Maberly, Ontario, and is the largest trial grower of organic garlic in Canada, evaluating strains from all garlic groups for their performance on many levels before they’re selected for further propagation. He’s also the editor of the Garlic News, a publication much loved by garlic aficionados. “A large number of these Russian varieties have become the basis of the many new cultivars we see now,” Pospisil continues.
    Scientists’ interest goes far beyond developing new garlic varieties, however, and their experimental work is bringing new respect to garlic’s medicinal qualities. “Every university I know of is doing some kind of research into garlic,” says Pospisil. “They’re looking into its history and studying its taxonomy, of course, but most of all they’re interested in its medicinal aspects.”
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    With its selenium, germanium, allicin too
It can fight all kinds of disease
So if you’ve got arthritis, TB , or the flu
Just say, “Peel me a garlic clove please!”
    RUTHIE GORTON, “The Garlic Song,” from the documentary Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, by LES BLANK
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    FOR AS long as people have been writing things down, garlic has been considered a healer of a long list of ailments, even as its culinary popularity waxed and waned. In 3000 BC the Babylonians used it to treat many ailments, including intestinal worms; so did the ancient Chinese—the Chiu Huang Pen-ts’ao, an important book of medicine from the Ming Dynasty, recommends garlic as a treatment for parasites, ringworm, and dysentery; a poultice for infections; an insect repellent; an expectorant; and a diuretic. In Ayurvedic medicine, Hindus considered garlic a general tonic and a digestive, and crushed and sweetened it with honey to relieve coughs and mucus, fevers, swellings, and worms. Sanskrit texts describe garlic as a remedy for skin and abdominal diseases, rheumatism, and hemorrhoids.
    GARLIC WAS a wonder drug in ancient Rome and Greece, the kind of snake oil that charlatans might have peddled at carnivals in the early 1900s, recommended for baldness, cancer, and pale skin. Dioscorides, a discriminating Greek physician who served the Roman emperor Nero, warned that although garlic expelled flatulence, it could disturb the belly and cause thirst or boils on the skin if applied too heavily. But Dioscorides wasn’t completely negative. He considered garlic valuable for many ailments. “It draws away the urine,” he wrote in De Materia Medica, his five-volume study of the properties and preparation of contemporary drugs. He highly recommended garlic as an antidote for many poisons, to treat intestinal