“Vegetables as Food”

Abstract

Drs. Booth, Mapson and Moore¹ feel that in a recent article in Nature² I exaggerated when I made “an allusion, divorced from its context, to cooked cabbage as having only 17 per cent of the vitamin C of the fresh cabbage”. What I wrote was as follows. “A cabbage bought at the market may perhaps be expected to contain 60 per cent of its original vitamin C content, the housewife probably throws away no more than 20 per cent of the remainder in preparing the vegetable for the pot, leaving 40 per cent [more correctly 48 per cent] of the original vitamin. During boiling, however, about 65 per cent is extracted by the cooking water and usually thrown away. Thus 17 per cent of the vitamin C with which the cabbage left the field is all that remains when it reaches the table.”