#12 Wheatgrass

If you've ever been to a smoothie shop, you've probably seen this strangely visually unappetizing drink. Currently popularly consumed as a small shot for a morning boost, wheatgrass holds a strong place in our health debates, and many people across the world swear by its healing properties. I'd never ventured to try this ugly green little cocktail and thought this would be the perfect time for some green grassy energy!

Wheatgrass use can be traced back 5000 years to Mesopotamians and Egyptians who valued it similarly for its nutritional value: it was thought in Egypt that the goddess Isis brought it to the people from Lebanon and thus used in many religious medicines. In modern Western history, wheatgrass first became popular, and insanely so, during the 1930’s as a result of the work of Charles Schnabel, a kind of food evangelist who travelled the country with a powdered supplemental form of the plant and a soapbox spreading the word of wheatgrass but having done little research on its benefits himself. Quaker Oats and American Dairies funded much of his research at the time and both benefited from his speaking tours and the popularization of the plant.

The plant peaked again in popularity in the 1940’s due to the research and diet fad writing of Ann Wigmore, who proposed that the chlorphyll in the plant helped human digestion and that humans could benefit from ingesting often all 4700 varieties of grass. She eventually set up an institute that exists to this day for the research of the medicinal and nutritional properties of grass. Unfortunately, Wigmore wrote in of her works that wheatgrass could cure HIV, and was sued by the MA Attorney General for fraudulent claims. The suit lost her respect and her practice, thus quelling interest in wheatgrass as a nutritional supplement for a while.

Wheatgrass was one of the first “purifying foods” for America and helped establish an ideological trend in the country. This trend posits a food as the most nutritious of all (Schnabel stated that 15 pounds of wheatgrass nutritionally equated 350 pounds of other vegetables, or 32 servings of other vegetables for one shot of wheatgrass), capable of total bodily purification, and goes about promoting its use through popular writers and speakers. Although the plant has a greater diversity of nutrients than most vegetables and particularly high content of B vitamins, studies have not shown that it has a significantly better effect in fighting cancer, detoxifying the body, or preventing aging as these nutritionists claim.

To make this drink, I bought a container of frozen wheat grass cubes from Whole Foods and stirred two of them into warm water according to the directions. After an awful sip of the warm concoction, I decided to try again after I’d cooled the drink in the fridge for a bit. On the second go, my impression was a lot more favorable: cold made the drink taste more a like a refreshing summer juice than a hot vegetable mix. The drink tasted exactly as grass smells and had a slightly grainy consistency from the mulled blades of grass in the water. The taste was fine, refreshing even when cold, but the little blades of grass that got stuck in your teeth were annoying. I had always conceived this food in terms of the wheatgrass shots you can get in smoothie shops which look pretty disgusting and I can imagine that, concentrated, this drink could be unbearably grassy and strong. Nevertheless, I'm not adverse to having a larger more-diluted glass of the drink every once in a while, especially since I still have 22 cubes of the grass left chilling in my freezer.

Sources:

http://www.wheatgrass.me/history-wheat-grass

http://altmed.creighton.edu/wheatgrass/history.htm

http://aciddiet.net/2009/10/06/green-alkaline-wheatgrass-shot/