Move over flat whites. A drink the color and consistency of Labyrinth’s Bog of Eternal Stench is emerging as the nation’s must-slurp beverage: green juice. Drinks made from leafy green vegetables are popping up on supermarket shelves, in juice bars such as Crussh, in recipe books (thanks Gwyneth Paltrow) and on Instagram, currently clogged with #greenjuice selfies. New York is undergoing a “juice bar brawl” as each brand claims its juice is the healthiest.
While vegetable juice is nothing new, with the likes of V8 having been around for years, green juicing uses large quantities of leafy veg and brassicas such as kale, spinach, chard and broccoli. The other main difference between (fresh) green juice and traditional vegetable drinks is the technique — cold-pressing, where the juice is extracted by crushing. Centrifugal juicers use fast-spinning blades that heat up, thus, cold-press converts say, oxidizing and destroying some of the nutrients in the juice. Clare Neill, co-founder of juice company Radiance Cleanse, says juice from a centrifugal machine “oxidizes faster because so much air has gone through the juice while it’s being made.”
Fresh green juice wins several health points over packaged fruit juice and smoothies. First, most fruit juices sold in shops are pasteurized. Nutritionist Vicki Edgson says: “They’re heat-treated so they have a longer shelf-life and no bacteria, but this means a lot of the nutritional value is knocked out.” Second, green juices contain much less sugar than their fruity counterparts. Third, there is a range of nutrients present in those dark green vegetables — kale is packed with beta-carotene, calcium, vitamin C and vitamin K.
Photo: Bloomberg
So is drinking a glass of green juice as good as eating the vegetables? Not quite. Registered dietician Iona Taylor says: “You’ll get the vitamins and minerals but not the fiber. And the soluble fiber in vegetables is really good for your cholesterol and blood pressure.” There is a potential way around this. Edgson suggests avoiding both standard centrifugal and cold-press juicers, and using a powerful blender instead: “When you pulverize or blend with a Vitamix or similar, you get the benefits of the fiber as well.”
Both Edgson and Taylor say there are some people who should approach green juice with caution. Edgson checks that clients aren’t on anti-depressants or blood-thinning medication, and is also “a little wary when women are in the first trimester of pregnancy”. This is because “many of the ingredients that go into a green juice speed up detoxification through the liver,” she says. She is concerned that the juice could increase the rate at which medication moves through the body.
For the rest of us, green juice seems an easy way to add more leafy veg to our diets. “You can put a lot more in a juice than you could sit and eat,” says Edgson. But how palatable is a big glass of cabbage? I spent a week finding out.
I kicked off with a mini juice fast from Radiance Cleanse, with six 500ml bottles for the day. The juices were delicious. Alka Green — courgette, spinach, broccoli, fennel, apple and lemon — tasted zesty and vital, with no hint of broccoli or spinach. I spent the day hovering between the sofa and loo, though, and missed solid food, so for the rest of the week I incorporated green juice into my regular diet instead. I made my own, following Paltrow’s tasty green juice recipe:
kale, mint and an all-important apple.
Green juice is surprisingly filling. I drank it mid-afternoon and found it alleviated snack cravings. I experimented with spinach, spring greens, cavolo nero. In juice form, none tasted like the vegetables in question. Most likely it was psychological, but I felt healthier and more energetic, too. The biggest stumbling block is the cost of the equipment. I borrowed a US$480 Lakeland juicer, but could a US$40 juicer be worth it, too? “Definitely — 100%,” says Neill. Just drink it straight away, rather than storing it in the fridge, and bear in mind “you’ll need to juice more to get the same volume.” So now I’ve found an affordable compromise, my new green juicing habit is here to stay. Kale and spinach to go, please.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby