Unique Health Benefits
Herbs and spices add valuable benefits and seasoning. Knowing how to use them well is essential in culinary art. They are used in every cooking style and method to arrange taste, color, and fragrance, while melding tastes into savory delights without the need of extra salt, sweetener, or fat. Their abundance of phytonutrients soothe, comfort, energize, cleanse, and heal. The aroma of herbs, spices, and seasonings stimulates appetite. Many of them aid with digestion. World trade of herbs and spices has spirited cultural interaction and expanded understanding over eons. The impact of herbs and spices on history has been enormous.
Examples of spice health benefits include Turmeric being a widely known liver tonic, and cayenne peppers known to burn fat. Intelligent and eventual intuitive use of herbs, spices, and their combinations can greatly expand the potential efficacy of food. Using pure, real organic, non-irradiated EDEN Herbs & Spices will increase appeal and benefits. Spices and herbs contribute critically valuable phytonutrients that increase utilization of food. Their antioxidants and volatile oils are beneficial. Herbs and spices have also been shown to help ease stress and anxiety. Dating back over 5,000 years, in Ayurvedic health systems herbs and spices play a crucial role in a balanced well-being of body, mind, and spirit.
Spice or Herb?
Many people use the words spice and herb interchangeably for plants used to season food. However, herbs are from aromatic plants grown in temperate climates, while spices are from tropical plants. Culinary herbs are usually the leaves and stems. Spices generally come from seeds, buds, berries, bark, or roots of tropical plants.
Herb and spices are used individually, but they are commonly combined in harmonious blends like basil, oregano, garlic, and thyme. Some have strong taste, others are mild. Mixing two strong spices or herbs together is usually avoided, as combining a strong one with a mild one is most often best.
Learning how to pleasingly season a meal or dish is culinary art. Arranging food to produce a particular efficacy is another level attainable by a culinary master.
Useful Tips
Herbs and spices tend to be low in fat and sodium. Those that do contain more sodium, such as parsley and celery, need to be used so they do not unbalance overall taste. In reduced salt dishes, seasonings such as black pepper, garlic powder, minced garlic, cumin, basil, coriander, and oregano can be used to offset a lack of salt. Many herbs and spices such as bay leaf, cardamom, ginger, pepper, mustard, rosemary, and sage have strong tastes. Those with a milder taste include basil, cumin, tarragon, garlic, marjoram, mint, oregano, thyme, and turmeric. Some are also savory, like oregano. Parsley and chives have delicate tastes. Sweeter seasonings are cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger, cardamom, anise, fennel, and mint. The spicey ones, cayenne pepper, chili pepper, black pepper, mustard, and hot paprika add ‘heat’ to a dish. Some spices and herbs also add color to a dish, like paprika’s red and turmeric’s bright yellow/orange.
Dried herbs, generally being more concentrated, have a stronger taste than fresh herbs. Powdered herbs and spices taste stronger than flaked or crumbled because their volatile oils mix more readily with food. In general, 1/4 teaspoon of powdered herb or spice is equal to 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of dried crumbled, and the dried crumbled is equal to 2 to 3 teaspoons of fresh.
Spices can require longer cooking time to infuse their flavors into food and they can tolerate higher cooking temperatures. Herbs tend to lose their taste with longer cooking. In most uses, herbs season food better when added in the last half hour of cooking, or added partly in the beginning and partly toward the end of cooking. Be conservative when adding herbs and spices as you become familiar with the taste and strength of each. Adding too much can ruin an otherwise good dish. Add a little at a time with the judicious use of a tasting spoon as it cooks. Time and practice is needed to develop the art of seasoning food. When using EDEN Herbs & Spices it will become gradually easier to create uniquely delicious, satisfying dishes.
EDEN Selection
EDEN Herbs & Spices are real organic, grown with no toxic chemicals in healthy soil. Organic regulations for spices result in safer methods for handling and processing of seasonings, and do not allow the common use of anti-clumping or flowing additives. Commercial spice and herb manufacturers are not required to list chemical additives as part of the ingredient list. To lower ingredient and production cost, and to artificially boost flavor, non-organic spice and seasoning makers commonly add flavor enhancers like MSG, fillers, and anti-caking agents. The FDA does not require the manufacturers to declare other ingredients such as artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, and fillers, nor do they require spices to be free of contaminants. EDEN Herbs & Spices are organic and free of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fillers, and flavor enhancing chemicals.
Non-Irradiated
Irradiation of herbs and spices has long been the commercial norm to ‘sterilize’ them. EDEN Herb & Spices are never irradiated. This assurance is based on knowing exactly where all of the ingredients are grown, handled, and prepared. EDEN Herb & Spices are non-irradiated and contain no added chemicals. 
kosher, pareve.
Eden Foods offers 24 Herbs & Spices available only at edenfoods.com and our small store in Clinton, Michigan. They are from the organic spices, herbs, and dried vegetables we use to prepare EDEN Chili, Rice & Beans, Refried Beans, etc. They are the ‘best of the best’ that Eden can find.
Amber Glass Protected
The way herbs and spices are stored matters. Best is in a cool, dark place in closed glass jars. Better tasting dishes is one result, as is the length of time they will remain good.
Stocking a selection of herbs and spices at home can be overwhelming. Eden Foods makes this easier with 24 real organic EDEN Herbs & Spices. They make it easy to prepare delicious spice and herb blends, and are available individually or as a complete collection.
EDEN Herbs & Spices are packaged in amber glass jars, which helps protect their taste by preventing photooxidation. Amber glass best protects their volatile oils, nutrients, color, and aroma. Light damage of food is systemic in stores where fluorescent lighting, in particular, degrades food quality. Most plastics adulterate and off-flavor food. Amber glass is difficult to get and more costly, but it is the best choice to protect food integrity and taste.
A Principled Natural Food Company
Eden Foods
What principles? Macrobiotic principles have guided Eden Foods since its beginning in 1968. Understanding and appreciation of them have grown over the 54 years. Those principles continue here as a test of the validity of ideas, thinking, and in the evaluation of their likely soundness.
Summing up, distilling these principles into dietary choices leads to a simple conclusion that pure whole grain becoming the majority of one’s diet is the goal. That done, everything else will take care of itself very nicely at all levels; personal, mental, physical, emotional, societal, economic, political, spiritual, environmental, and interpersonal.
Good judgement gradually improves.
Personal transition from American fare to a healthy diet based around whole grain is no simple task, but fundamentally necessary in order to accomplish freedom, harmony, and intuition. Considerable experience and knowledge about food, its uses, and benefits are available as help to those pursuing such a transition.