CABBAGES, STRAWBERRIES FOR LONG LIFE

June is strawberry month. Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle, French essayist, briefly a lawyer but an appreciator of good food, claimed his long life was due to strawberries. He died in January 1757, just failing to celebrate his 100th birthday. In his late nineties, on meeting the beauty Madame Helvétius, he exclaimed, “Ah Madame, if only I were eighty again!” However, Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato, known as Cato the Elder and Cato the Ancient, who lived to be an octogenarian, was an enthusiastic consumer of cabbage and credited the leafy veggie with his longevity, long enough to father 28 sons.