A Common Tree With Rare Power

Scientifically speaking, Moringa sounds like magic. It can rebuild weak bones, enrich anemic blood and enable a malnourished mother to nurse her starving baby. Ounce for ounce, it has the calcium of four glasses of milk, the Vitamin C of seven oranges and the potassium of three bananas.

Sounds like your Power Bar, you say? Well, consider this: A dash of Moringa can make dirty water drinkable. Doctors use it to treat diabetes in West Africa and high blood pressure in India. Not only can it staunch a skin infection, Moringa makes an efficient fuel, fertilizer and livestock feed.

Memo to Popeye: Moringa has triple the iron of spinach and more impressive attributes than olive oil. And it's not only good for you, it's delicious. You can cook Moringa in Moringa oil and top it with Moringa sauce and still taste a spectrum of flavors.

And it's cheap enough to grow on trees. Which is what Moringa oleifera is: A tree, with a gnarly trunk and tousled head of foliage that make it look like a cypress that just rolled out of bed. It is a common tree that thrives in both the desert and the living room and produces leaves, pods, seeds and flowers that each do uncommon things.

• The National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and the Andrew Mellon Foundation are financing a scientist's hair-raising attempts to collect the world's 13 Moringa species.
• Both Moringa and the common carrot are diamonds in the roughage department, but Moringa has quadruple the beta carotene, which is good for the eyes and effective against cancer. The Bethesda, Md.-based International Eye Foundation is using Moringa in Malawi because it's loaded with Vitamin A, the lack of which causes 70% of childhood blindness.
• Wichita, Kan.-based Trees for Life, which has been planting food-bearing trees in impoverished places since 1984, is running Moringa cultivation programs in India after convincing a town of 40,000 to make the tree a structured part of the local diet.
• Britain's University of Leicester is studying the coagulating properties of the seeds in those tasty Moringa pods, which researchers believe work better than the common water purifier aluminum sulfate, which can be toxic. The school weaned a Malawi village off imported alum by building a simpler Moringa-based system.
• Hospitalized for prostate surgery in December, former United Nations ambassador and ex-Atlanta mayor Andrew Young told people not to send flowers, but buy Moringa seedlings for the malnourished. Young is the new president of theNational Council of Churches.