Well hello August! Where did you come from? I totally didn’t see you coming.

Pemberton’s fabulous Slow Food Cycle Sunday approaches quickly. On August 17th, I’ll be at Helmer’s Organic Farm on the Meadows Road once again trying to stimulate community dialogue on the concept of sustainable medicine.

“Leave your drugs in the chemist’s pot if you can heal your patient with food,” Hippocrates is believed to exhorted his 3rd century BC medical students. While the drugs being referred to are not likely to be Nexium and Prozac, they did use chemical elements such as mercury, lead and arsenic as medicines that were probably best left in the chemist’s pot.

But what was considered food and how did it qualify as medicine? Culinary herbs such as parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme were valuable food sources as well as medicine and continue to be so to this day.

Plants need to defend themselves against predators, viruses, and bacteria just as we do. Those plants that are not doused with pesticides produce their own defense chemicals specific to the prevailing environmental conditions. Plants that are not regularly weeded produce chemicals that help them to defend their space against or co-operate with invaders. Plants that stand out in the hot sun all day and are only watered by nature’s rain manufacture chemicals that help them to resist stress. Plants are, in fact, relentless chemists.

Many of these chemicals produce similar actions in humans but eating food that has not had to produce survival molecules can be devoid of these beneficial constituents. By choosing an organic diet, we can benefit greatly from their full range of chemical actions. In this way, our food also qualifies as preventive medicine.

In the case of illness we can use extracts of these defense chemicals in larger and more frequent doses. For example, not many of us could eat 3-6 tablespoons of chopped oregano a day for 7-10 days but most of us could manage a few drops of oil of oregano.

Come out and see me on August 17th and we’ll talk more about this.

I am offering free guided tours of Jeanette Helmer’s organic herb garden at 9:30am, 11:30 am and 2:00 pm and you are cordially invited to attend.