“Let food be your medicine.” Hippocrates
White mulberries are one of my favorite fruits. As long as I remember, one of the pleasures of the end of May and begining of June in Iran was picking big white mulberries either one by one by hand or by shaking the tree and collecting masses of them on a sheet that was spread under the tree. Also mulberies that I tried in Perth, Australia were much longer than those in anywhere in the world. After I came to the US, one day this time of the year I had to be in Manhattan. Walking along the Hudson River thinking about the white mulberries in Iran that were ripening now, I stepped on a few of them. I looked up and there was a mulberry tree dropping its sweetness on my head and onto the busy Manhattan street. People passing by viewed them with unpleasant looks, because they made the street dirty and sticky. When I moved to Virginia, the same thing happened when I was walking in a park close to my house. I started to pick and eat them from the tree, ignoring the looks of passersby, who probably thought I must be homeless to have to eat off the street tree. I was almost sure that they were not sprayed with pesticides and if they were, I didn’t die anyway. Plus you couldn’t buy them in grocey stores. They didn’t know that with each mulberry I tasted summer in my home country. When I was a child, my siblings and I grew silkworms in a shoebox, feeding them with white mulberry leaves (the only food that silkworms eat). The following year, those mulberry trees were cut down by the city, because their fruit made the streets messy. Years later in Pennsylvania I wanted to plant mulberry in our backyard, I couldn’t buy one, because all the nurseries were out of stock and everybody wanted them. Now in the West it is reconized as the latest superfood.
White mulberry has a lot of nutritional value and you can eat them fresh or dried. In Iran mulberry used to help balance the blood sugar in diabetics. Diabetics eat dried white mullberies with their tea as a natural sweetener. Mullberies are so delicious that I remember after eating a lot of them, we drank yogurt drink to stay balanced, because eating too much white mulberry can cause diarrhea and yogurt has the opposite effect. Mulberry is thought to reduce blood pressure, obesity, hair loss and graying, cholesterol, joint pain, dizziness, common cold with cough and sore throat and breathing problem like asthma.
“Let’s always eat and drink healthful food and beverages and do it in moderation.” Dr. Sii
Si'Mama Cafe 