Eating baby animals will get you stink-eye from vegetarians and the healthy-heart police. But munch on baby plants, and you're the picture of virtue.
Almost everyone knows sprouts are good for you: All those nutrients bundled into the seed to help it begin life is made available to sprout-eaters just by giving them a quick daily shower for a few days.
Asian cooks have long relied on sprouts' crisp texture to balance heavy meats and oils. And if you move beyond the supermarket standards to growing your own, you'll be rewarded with an intriguing range of flavors, from peppery to grassy to nutty to sweet.
Enormous changes take place when you add water to a seed, not all of them well understood. Never again in the life of the plant does it hold as much nutrition as in the short period from when the seed first cracks to when the shoot grows its first joint or leaves.
Carbohydrates, proteins and fats that have been stored in the seed are now broken down and used to manufacture nutrients, such as vitamins C and B, calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus. As the plant grows, the concentration of nutrients dissipates--and declines even more rapidly once the plant is picked and begins to die. But sprouts are still growing when you eat them.
Take the soybean sprout: Its vitamin C content increases sixfold in the three days after the first shoot appears, and continues to grow for up to seven days in the refrigerator. A cup of mature soybean or mung sprouts tossed into your stir-fry provides one-fifth the day's requirement of vitamin C. Compared to the bean, mung sprouts have eight times more riboflavin, two and a half times more niacin, and five times more biotin per dry weight. And sprouts are low in fat, and have very few calories.
Sprouts also have a high degree of enzyme activity, which aids human digestion. Many of the protein and carbohydrates have been partially "digested," which is why some people sprout their beans slightly before cooking--not only do they get more vitamins and minerals, but less gas!
It doesn't take much more effort to grow sprouts than to soak beans once you understand the principles. You can start with a sprouter purchased at the garden store--usually some kind of jar with a strainer lid--although half the fun is experimenting with different containers around the house and devising your own method.
Start with one of the easy beans or seeds, like mung, lentil or alfalfa. Stick with it awhile, and soon you'll be growing fresh sprouts in your car, boat, backpack, school locker or desk drawer. Get the kids involved, and chances are they'll be willing to eat their harvest. You'll never have to go without the recommended five-a-day servings of produce--even during a hurricane--if you keep a supply of seeds around.