LETTUCE

Introduction

The lettuce that we cultivate on a mass scale today is descended from a once wild vegetable originally found in the Near East and the Mediterranean. Its name is derived from the Latin word ‘lac’ which means ‘milk’, which the French then changed to ‘laitue’ (‘lait’ being the French word for milk), and the English later altered to ‘lettuce’. The name refers to the milky juice exuded by the vegetable.

Lettuce has been around for a long time. It is reported that Persian kings would eat lettuce around 550 BC and Hippocrates spoke of its nutritional values only a century later. The Greeks and Romans consumed much lettuce and knew of all the different varieties, but we do not hear of it in Britain until much later, around the late 14th century in Chaucer’s prologue to the ‘Canterbury Tales’.

There are a number of different lettuces today and many have been hybridised to withstand the rigours of large-scale harvesting and long-distance transportation, but there are two main distinctive categories available:

1.      Cabbage lettuce: these have football-shaped heads of soft leaves that damage easily. Varieties include Dutch lettuce (the softest sorts) and ;Webb’s Wonder’.

2.      Cos lettuce: known by the Americans as ‘Romaine’ lettuce, after the Romany region in Italy where they are believed to have originated. They have longer leaves and elongated heads and are coarser and crisper than cabbage lettuces.

Medicinal Value

Lettuce tops the lists of foods eaten most by people with the lowest incidence of serious disease, along with other green and orange vegetables. Lettuces, especially the dark green varieties, contain large amounts of vitamin A and C. These two vitamins are vital in the body’s fight against cancer as they work on many levels to prevent and cure, or fight against all sorts of serious disease.

Firstly, vitamin C, abundant in lettuce and other dark green vegetables, helps to strengthen the immune system against infection. A healthy immune system will be far more resilient to infections like colds and coughs. Vitamin C is also an antioxidant. An antioxidant is something that will neutralise oxygen free radicals in the body’s cells by reacting chemically with them. The more antioxidants in the cells the more likely these chemical reactions are to occur, decreasing the likelihood of oxygen free radicals causing mutations of cells. Oxygen free radicals are mutagenic, and get into the body in numerous ways, including smoking, pesticides on food and air-borne pollutants. This nutritional defence is essential for people exposed to such chemicals in order to avoid illness.

The pro-vitamin A in lettuce, which is a yellow/red colour, would normally change the colour of the vegetable to dark orange, however, the green-coloured chlorophyll in the leaves masks this, making the plant green. There are still massive quantities of pro-vitamin A in lettuce, however, in the form of beta carotene, another antioxidant.

Lettuce is also high in fibre - the stringy, indigestible veins in the leaves and stems. These are taken into the stomach, but are not broken down, so the body excretes them through the rectum. Eating constant amounts of fibre encourages regular excretion of harmful chemicals from the stomach, reducing the likelihood of serious disease of the stomach, colon and rectum. Cos lettuce contains much more fibre than cabbage lettuce, although both are high in fibre.

Cooking Lettuce

Cooking lettuce in water will tend to decrease its nutritional value, as chemical reactions in the water and vegetable break down such compounds as vitamin C. The best way to cook it is to steam it quickly over a small amount of water. This happens too quickly for any real reactions to occur. When serving raw in salad it is counter-productive to nullify the nutritional value by dowsing in high-fat dressing. Instead try just a little oil and lemon juice dressing.