Living with a Food As Medicine Mindset can be as simple as looking at your spice cabinet. Spices are so much more than just flavouring for our food. They hold many varied medicinal properties that, together, can greatly assist a life of balance, vitality and disease prevention.
Ground Spices VS. Whole Spices — A Herbalist's Perspective
My simple tip for getting the most nutritional, and medicinal potency out of your cooking is to buy whole spices instead of ground spices, and grind them up yourself at home as needed!
Store bought ground spices are a handy convenience, that is for sure — but the truth is that many of them lack serious vitality. This is because the moment a dried spice is ground into powdered form, the process of oxidation is sped up tenfold.
What is oxidation?
Specifically talking about food, oxidation is the process by which food molecules are exposed to oxygen (air), and as a result begin to deteriorate. Aspects of deterioration include altered taste, smell, colour and texture, as well as loss of nutrients and medicinal properties.
So why are ground spices more susceptible to oxidation?
Powdered spices oxidise faster than whole spices because there is more surface area of the spice exposed to air. When a spice is powdered, the cellular walls of the spice are shattered into a zillion particles, and every single one of those particles is attacked by air at all angles.
By simply keeping spices in their whole form, the cellular walls of the spice remain intact and air has less nooks and crannies to wriggle its destructive way into. Yes, with time, air will also deteriorate a whole spice — oxidation is just a fact of life on this earthly plane. However, when embracing a Food As Medicine approach to living, opting to grind your own spices freshly at home allows you to milk the most nutritional and medicinal benefits out of them.
The LONG journey of powdered spices to get to your plate
So now we know that pre-ground spices start to disintegrate the moment they are processed into powdered form, let's imagine just how long it then takes for the spices to actually get to your plate!
"A spice plant is grown, harvested, dried and sent to a factory for processing. From there it is ground into powder, bottled, sent to a warehouse from which it is sold on to the buyer's warehouse, and from there transported and distributed both nationally and/or internationally to supermarkets. It then sits on the supermarket shelf for a mysterious amount of time until you buy it. And from there, takes up residence in your pantry for a year or more (let's be real). So the question is, just how vital and nutritious is that pre-ground spice that is going into your cooking?
*I just want to insert a disclaimer before internet sleuths come at me (ha). And that is — I recognise that food manufacturers do their best to keep air out of their packaged products (hence the little freshness seals we have to peel off new spice shakers). But even time will catch up to this packaging process, and if an unopened ground spice sits there long enough, its vitality will still inevitably break down.
What you need to start grinding your culinary spices at home
All you need is a coffee/spice grinder and some lidded jars or tupperware containers to store your ground spice supply. To make it even easier, I collect my empty store-bought spice shakers and re-fill them with the same spice that was originally in them, so they are already labelled and ready to go! Too easy.
You can of course use a traditional mortar and pestle to grind your spices, but if you are looking to save time, grinding spices in an electric coffee/spice grinder takes mere seconds.
*If you actually use your coffee/spice grinder to grind coffee beans, you may want to invest in an additional grinder that you can use solely for herbs and spices. This reduces the risk of imparting the taste of cumin to your coffee beans! However, I have also heard that running some raw, uncooked rice granules through your grinder can assist with cleaning and deodorising the grinding chamber.
Watch my Youtube video and do the Spice Challenge!
My Youtube video below covers most of what is discussed here, with a little spice challenge to take on for yourself at home! And be sure to subscribe to my channel if you'd like to learn more tips and recipes for living a life of vitality by connecting with our food as everyday medicine for balance and disease reduction.
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