Tortured Teddy Bears and Other Valentine Evils

Happy Valentine’s Day. Just in case you don’t know what this day is all about, Texas A&M; University has announced that according to one of its scientists, exchanging gifts and kisses is a popular tradition. But there’s a dark side, warns another A&M; expert: Eating too much chocolate can make you fat.

Perhaps, instead of chocolate, your beloved bought you one of those cute teddy bears cradling a heart in its paws? There is a dark side even to this. According to Materials World, a trade magazine, before Teddy gets to you, he and his pals--at least in Europe--pass through “teddy torturing” facilities where they “are strapped into a testing rig and have their body parts [such as glass eyes and plastic noses] mechanically pulled from them at forces of up to 90 Newtons (about 20 pounds of force)” by sinister, multijawed grips, to make sure they’re safe for tots.

Talking of torture, we were recently sent promotional information about an item we don’t recommend as a love gift for your sweetie: a “nasal douche” called the Neti pot. It’s a kind of ceramic watering can that you use to pour saline solution into one nostril until the fluid comes out of the other one.

This, among other things, “removes excess mucus . . . naturally,” and while it sounds somewhat better than the squeeze-juice-of-20-lemons-up-your-nose cold cure a friend tried a few years back (he’d seen it on a public-access cable show), it is not about to become a new, daily routine for me, as Neti’s makers suggest. (I’m still working on brushing my hair every day.)

Relish Your Whole Radish

Meanwhile, one of our readers called in with a question. “I buy radishes, and it bugs me to cut the tops off and toss them in the trash,” said Orange County resident Myrna Follender. “I was a Depression baby. You never throw anything away. But are they safe? Are they nutritious?” We leaped to the phone to find out.

First thing we learned: Follender wouldn’t have this dilemma if a Russian geneticist’s experiment in the 1920s had worked. He bred a radish with a cabbage in the hope of getting a plant with a radish root and a cabbage head. (Unfortunately, he got a cabbage root and a radish head.) Finding the answer to Follender’s question was tougher.

We tried the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s fabulous Nutrient Data Laboratory (which lists the nutrient content of thousands of foods) with no luck, though it certainly has many radishy entries, such as “Horseradish-tree, leafy tips, cooked, boiled, drained, with salt,” and “Radishes, Oriental, dried.” Next, we called the folks at UCLA’s Center for Human Nutrition, but they couldn’t help us right then because someone had absconded with their book on “Asian food composition.”

So we spoke to Arnold Bloom, chairman of the department of vegetable crops at UC Davis. He told us that radish tops can be eaten, and their taste and nutritional value should be similar to that of kale or mustard greens, two radish relatives. These plants, we finally report, are rich sources of calcium, vitamins C and A. (Whew.)

We’ve since learned on the Web that you can spend $25 a pound for mail-order, organically grown radish leaves. But though we dipped into a favorite Indian cookbook of ours--”Tasty Dishes From Waste Items,” just filled with thrifty recipes for banana peels and bad milk--we failed to come up with a radish-greens recipe. You’re on your own, Ms. Follender.