We all are tempted to buy those little plastic containers of beautiful red rasberries and
blackberries at Kroger, Marsh, Bloomingfoods, and O'Malia's. They're good, and they're good for you. But out of season you can pay up to $4.99, probably more at times.
Here's an idea: start eating mulberries. They're all over campus and plentiful in Bloomington this time of year. What's good about them? Well, for one thing they're free. Next, nobody's putting them in little plastic containers, then into crates, then into a truck that needs fuel in order to get to these local loading docks, then finally into the produce section, and maybe they're even cooled...all of this requires energy. I mean plastic is great and everything, but when you look at it, you should think oil. Crude oil contains many of the molecules that are used to synthesize plastics (see bottom of this post).
Next, mulberries are going to add some fiber and color to your diet.
Color isn't trivial. Mulberries also contain resveratrol, its chemical structure seen here.
Big deal, what's so great about resveratrol? Resveratrol
proved effective "against three major stages of cancer development: initiation (DNA in a cell is mutated), promotion (the affected cell becomes a cancer cell) and progression (cancer cells form a tumor and spread)."
There are various mulberry species on most continents, and North American red mulberries are pretty flavorful comparatively speaking, so we're lucky there. Here's a shot of one of the older trees on campus...
there are thousands of berries on this tree, and if I had to guess, tens of thousands of ripe berries are produced in June, July, maybe into August on this tree alone. Maybe more, I don't know...it's hard to estimate this kind of thing. This is facing south and the Education building is about 100 yards southeast of this tree.
Finally, mulberries are loaded with
anthocyanins. In 2005 the journal "
Cancer Letters" published the paper "Mulberry anthocyanins, cyanidin 3-rutinoside and cyanidin 3-glucoside, exhibited an inhibitory effect on the migration and invasion of a human lung cancer cell line." by Chen, Chu, Chiou and others.
[We actually don't have the online or print in Bloomington of this, which kind of surprises me]...anyway, from the abstract of this paper: "these results suggested that anthocyanins from mulberry could decrease the in vitro invasiveness of cancer cells and therefore, may be of great value in developing a potential cancer therapy."
What do you know? Robins and flies seem to be aware that mulberries are pretty good (flies sometimes swarm around the thousands of ripe berries that fall to the ground and decay)- next
time you walk by one of these trees, try a few dark ones from the tree. Here's a shot of a few that I picked from a smaller tree next to the Jordan River, and you see the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center in the background.
"Plastics, also called polymers, are produced by the conversion of natural products or by the synthesis from primary chemicals generally coming from oil, natural gas, or coal. "
