Live Action: New Year’s Day with Two Roots

Kendo with burdock root as shinai (stick); lotus root background overlay. Video and photography by me. Kendo practitioner is my 16 year old.

Happy New Year! New You!

Here’s a laundry list of potential New Year’s Resolutions ready made for the taking:

  • weight loss/management
  • healthier eating/cooking,
  • improve mental health
  • better skin
  • better fluency in (fill in the blank)
  • learn how to (fill in the blank)

How about if you can chip away at four out of the six with just one resolution? This year, I’ve resolved to eat 30+ different plants per week to optimize my gut health for weight management, mental health, and skincare from the inside out. This will take some learning in the kitchen, which I’d like to share with you, my fellow self-improvement buffs. (I’ve also been seeking to exercise in moderation as I pile on a career pivot via online learning plus substitute teaching.)

Why 30+ plants?

Since having kids and initially to whittle down post-pregnancy girth, I became a dance fitness enthusiast. Even through quarantine, I willed myself to do 75 minute workouts per day. As I get older and take on a career pivot and parenting, this expectation feels unsustainable. Plus, my abdominal muscles have softened naturally with age, as I keep eating as though I’m in my twenties. I’ve always had sensitive skin and eczema since my teens. Further, in the past, I have tackled bouts of depression and anxiety around major life events, such as going to college, moving to a new city, working and living near the twin towers on 9-11, bartending overnight shifts, getting pregnant, toting around two tots. I resolved this through vitamin supplementation, exercise, and ensuring continuous social connection throughout the week. The final piece of the puzzle could be improving my gut. What does this entail?

According to the American Gut Project for optimal health, we need to consume 30+ different plants per week for a healthy, diverse gut microbiome. Plants do include grains, like rice, bread, and quinoa. The gut, or microbiome, plays a key role in building immunity, managing weight, as well as heart, skin, and mental health. If we liken the microbiome, or small life, to a garden, “good,” healthy bacteria are like beautiful flowers and disease-causing bacteria are like weeds. There needs to be a good balance between the two. Adding 30+ plants provide good “fertilizers” and “soil” for nutrients to grow. Maintaining a healthy gut prevents inflammation, which is connected to weight gain, depression, diabetes, skin issues, and heart disease.

Dietary fiber provided by plants further assists in weight loss and a healthy metabolism. Supplemented by good sleep and exercise, adding plants to one’s diet provides a multifaceted approach towards achieving equilibrium in mood and well-being.

Enter the tubers

To meet this challenge, each week, I dared myself to tackle a couple of novelty vegetables each week that’s clearly in season and has an easy and tasty way to cook it with the right seasoning and amount of prep time. This first week, my vegetables of choice are two root vegetables: burdock and lotus roots. It’s further baked into the Japanese New Years ritual.

This New Years, I split the work of preparing the traditional Japanese osechi with my mother. Osechi is prepared for days leading up to New Years by the women of the household so that they don’t have to cook for three days. Items have symbolic meaning, promoting for example, a long life, with long soba. I confess, osecchi is not my favorite annual course, but like a lot of Japanese food, there’s a balance of multiple components that include novel plants. In the past, I’ve not bothered to identify these plants since I’ve never prepared it myself. However, I’ve come to have an appreciation for the trendy delica (Japanese abridged word for delicatessen), upscale Japanese bento vendors both in San Francisco and Tokyo, which incorporates some of these traditional ingredients. Here’s my mother’s osecchi from last year:

I can see here the washoku (Japanese traditional cuisine and food philosophy) principle of goshiki, or five colors: red (pink/orange), yellow, green, black, and white. My mother emphasized using 3 different colors of bell peppers, much like Dr. Rossi, a Canadian gastroenterologist, referenced in Eating Well magazine’s Gut Health issue, “rather than just the red bell pepper, pick up the orange and green as well.” Rossi also supports adding plant-based foods that are totally new to your gut to help diversify gut microbes to train your immune system, vitamin production, and metabolism support (Abramson 19).

In the process, I learned how to prepare this long burdock root, known as gobo in Japanese, in the contemporary oral tradition of FaceTiming with my mother, who was recovering from COVID:

gobo (burdock root)

Osechi label key: kouya-dofu = dried tofu, iriko = dried anchovies, hijiki = sea vegetable, renkon = lotus root, kombu = kelp (maki = wrap or roll), kinusaya = snow peas, konyaku = jelly made from konjac, starchy plant, kuromame = sweet, black soybean, kinton = sweetened chestnut, ninjin = carrot, inarizushi = sweet deep fried tofu pockets (we stuffed these with chicken ketchup rice).

Next blog entry: Burdock + lotus roots in action (cooking videos).

Works Cited

Abramson, Ashley. “Understanding the Microbiome.” Eating Well: Special Edition Gut Health, 2023, pp. 12-19.

Andoh, Elizabeth. Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen. Ten Speed Press, 2014.