Veggies Are Easy

[talon]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/health/policy/25vegetables.html?_r=1&hpw

" ...vegetables are a little intimidating" says David Bernstein of Brooklyn.

Really? Grains. I could see grains being intimidating, but veggies? When you can eat tomatoes, carrots, celery, lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, bell peppers, scallions, sugar pod peas, spinach, sprouts, cabbage, and cucumbers raw, with little more than a wash and maybe cutting or breaking it into smaller pieces, what's so intimidating about that? That's 13 vegetables people can eat as is, slap between bread for a sandwich without cooking, pop into a bag and carry off to work to nibble on, dunk into a dip as a snack. They can eat just one kind or mix and match. They can eat them plain, add salt, or dressing or dips, spread crackers with cream cheese and top with chopped raw vegetables, mix chopped raw vegetables into cream cheese and spread on bread, or crackers, or use as a dip for chips. They can be pureed for with yogurt for a creamy gazpacho or cold soup or, with added ice, to make a veggie slushie or smoothie.

This is all without cooking! There are more veggies people can eat raw, too, these are just the 13 most commonly available ones.

If you add in simple cooking - steaming, dropping into broth with some meat for a stew or soup, boiling and mashing, grilling, roasting, frying...veggies are the easiest things to eat and to cook.

There's a lot of color and flavor in veggies, and crunch, too.

I sort of blame ads - for too many years too many commercials have disparaged vegetables, showing kids as hating them, shoveling them off onto pets or younger siblings, so that people grow up thinking vegetables are terrible things.

TV shows and magazine articles all show kids hating on vegetables, and books are published on how to sneak vegetables into kids meals, all convinced that vegetables are so awful that the only way to get anyone to eat them is to trick them into it. Talk about teaching people to hate vegetables!

In my own personal experience, garnered in more than 50 years of feeding other people - lots of whom were kids at the time - kids love vegetables - sturdy, portable, crunchy, colorful, flavorful, great as building blocks in games of all sorts when they're raw, and the possibilities simply expand when cooked.

I've seen recommendations to fill half your plate with vegetables, but when I serve meals, usually the whole plate is vegetables with meat added as a garnish, or perhaps the veggies have been infused with meat broth.

The variety and ease of preparing vegetables just hasn't been properly shared around. I blame the vegetarians for this - they make eating vegetables into a chore and an act of politics and share very little of the sheer ease and joy of vegetables. The recipes they publish are often complex and offered with huge doses of guilt.

Between the commercials and the vegetarians, the only wonder is that anyone eats vegetables at all!

When I was growing up, we had Bugs Bunny and Popeye teaching us the joys of carrots and spinach, and from there, all kinds of other delicious vegetables. Most of the commercials and cartoons and shows I saw as a child casually included vegetables or made vegetables seem fun, so of course we ate them and loved them. Modern cartoons show kids pushing away vegetables and making yucky faces at vegetables.

To reclaim vegetables, cartoons should show kids casually snacking on them or eating them on their plate along with other food without commenting. If they have to comment, make it a casual, positive one, like "yum, peas!" or asking for seconds on the squash. When sit com kids raid the fridge, have them haul out carrots or celery or cauliflorets or something to sit and munch. It's just as easy to make vegetables loved, champions that save the day, or as a casual normal part of life as it is to make them hated, vilified, and the enemy to kids everywhere. And this can be done without disrupting the storyline. It may even improve the plots or enhance the storyline to make vegetables the hero.

Vegetables are the sluts of the plant kingdom, with their gaudy come-hither colors and their enticing perfume and their promise of delicious pleasures in just one bite.

Vegetables - the pick-up food.