Healing with Food Article

Amaranth

Accompanying recipes: Amaranth and Amaranth-Sesame Crisp Bread

Even more flamboyant than the dahlias and hibiscus that flourish in my garden, is magenta amaranth. Also known as love-lies-bleeding, amaranth is an astounding plant that can reach a stately 6-feet in height on sturdy, fuchsia colored stems. It’s one of the most nutritious grains and it boasts remarkable medicinal properties.

Amaranth seeds are one of my favorite hot breakfast cereals and I toss its soft purple leaves into salads. The immature fleshy seed heads, when steamed, are in texture rather like a Technicolor broccoli and very tasty. Beauty aside, there is no other comparably versatile plant in my garden.

You’ll find whole amaranth seed in the grain section of natural food stores, well supplied supermarkets and on line. The greens, available in Asian greengrocers in late spring and early summer, look like extra large basil leaves without serration.

A relative of spinach and chard, amaranth was doesticated about seven thousand years ago by the Aztecs who regarded it as their sacred grain and esteemed it over corn. Until, that is the conquering Spaniard, Hernando Cortes, forbade amaranth’s cultivation. It suffered the same fate as did the Inca’s revered grain, quinoa. In both cases conquistadors eliminated the hallowed in their efficient destruction of native culture. Further north, Zuni legends relate that amaranth was one of their plants brought up from the underworld at the time of their emergence.

The amaranth family is one of the world’s most successful weeds. It includes over sixty different species—most of which are wild—on five of seven continents.

Small as poppy seeds, amaranth seeds are typically golden, cream-colored, or sometimes they may be pink-hued.  One plant yields a massive number of seeds, up to 50,000, enough seed to plant two acres. Which brings to mind another positive feature of amaranth, it so effectively reseeds itself that I’ve only ever had to plant it in a garden once.

Amaranth plants are members of an elite group of photosynthetic super-performers which botanists call the C4 group. C4 plants utilize a photosynthetic process or “pathway” that has super-normal efficiency in converting soil, sunlight, and water into plant tissue. Thus, amaranth has enhanced environmental adaptation and is extraordinarily nutritious.

Indeed, it’s with good reason that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has fostered amaranth’s use since 1967 because wherever amaranth is consumed there is no malnutrition. Amaranth is higher than milk in protein and calcium (including the supporting calcium cofactors--magnesium and silicon) making it an especially helpful food for nursing or pregnant women, infants, children, people who do heavy physical labor, and those with deficient energy or weight. The seed is appreciated for its remarkable vitality.

Amaranth is a cooling, astringent food, beneficial to congested lungs. It helps build body tissues and is an excellent convalescent food.

Several packaged health foods contain an insignificant percentage of amaranth flour but are promoted as amaranth products. They’re a scam. Likewise, don’t look to a cold breakfast cereal—amaranth or otherwise—as healthful because the extreme pressure and heat they’re processed at denatures them.

May you be well nourished,

Rebecca Wood