Heart and Mind

Why I Ate My Vegetables

When I was a young kid—we're talking, maybe, seven years old and younger—I used to really like vegetables. I mean, I continued to like them beyond seven, too, but back then I was a really, really good vegetable eater.

That's kind of funny, isn't it? After all, isn't it the universal adult complaint that children don't eat their vegetables? At the very least, it was back then. These days, with some kids getting McDonald's-type food as a major staple in thier diets—and parents who are equally take-out oriented—the concept of anyone eating vegetables at all is more the issue.

But back then, there was this whole ordeal about how kids didn't eat their vegetables and I was some kind of anomoly, because I used to suck mine down with gusto. We didn't have all that many different kinds (and cetainly no exotic ones), but I used to love chowing down on things like string beans, peas and/or carrots (together or separately), and the ever popular "mixed" vegetables.

My family thought it was odd, too, and there was a common joke they used to make back then. It's a remark that has become a piece of lore within my family and still is mentioned now and then when looking back:

"We used to tell Steven, 'You can't have more vegetables until you eat all of your dessert.'"

That was the kind of mildly-amusing-but-mostly-pretty-unoriginal-and-uninspired remark that parental types and (even more so) grandparental types used to just eat up.

And it's probably greatly exaggerated, too. It makes it sound like I was some kind of weird veggie-junkie or something, some crazed, precocious pint-sized rascal who horded handfuls of lima beans in the pockets of my "doungarees." (What my parents used to call jeans back then.)

The truth, though, was that I just kind of liked them and usually found them to be the most pleasing thing on my plate.

But I think I know why, and there's one important piece of information I've left out so far: we were a canned vegetable family.

I guess we sometimes had frozen vegetables or (probably even rarer) fresh vegetables, but mostly Mom bought and prepared cans. Not surprisingly, when I was in college and started shopping for myself, I bought cans, too. By the time I was that old, of course, I had discovered that I loved many things way more than vegetables, and they were usually things that weren't considered "health foods." Still, I ate some vegetables and I used to get the cans.

When my wife-to-be came into the picture a little later, everything changed. She had come from a frozen vegetable family. She lectured me about the things her mother had taught her, which was that the canned ones are less fresh tasting and not as nutritious as the frozen variety. If you're going to buy vegetables from anywhere but the produce aisle, she said, you're better off with frozen. I told her of my preference, but didn't care that much either way to make an issue of it. I became part of a frozen vegetable family, and I found them boring-but-satisfactory. For years, I never ate any canned vegetables, with rare exception.

A couple years back, I told her that I wanted some canned vegetables. She, at this stage of the game, was similarly indifferent enough to not make issue and said, "You want to get them canned? That's fine." I think after all this time, the rationale was, as long as we're eating vegetables, that's got to be better than not eating them.

And, can I tell you? Damn, those canned vegetables were good. (For vegetables, anyway.) Oh, I admit, they didn't taste fresh. They tasted processed, mushy, and...of course...salty! Sodium! Damn! Sodium is the cusine evil I never knew about. I never salt my food, so (until a few years back) I always figured I probably had a diet low in sodium. Then I decided to start looking at how much sodium is in the foods that I eat...like ketchup. My diets wasn't quite as low in salt as I thought it was.

Those canned vegetables are a little like processed junk food. Granted, they're better than most processed junk foods because they are, after all, vegetables. But the long and the short of it is, I wasn't some freakazoid or noble healthy eater when I was a young tyke. I was eating junk-ish food all along. It's just that nobody knew it.

These days, we are buying more canned vegetables than ever, because they're easy mush for the tots to eat without having to chew too much. They're processed, over cooked, melt-in-your-mouth mush. But I still eat them without guilt. There are worse things in life to eat than salty peas, right?

Canned veggies are my compromise. I'm probably worse off than the guy who eats fresh veggies several times a week, but I'm way better off than the guy who's only vegetable is french fries.

posted by Steve @ 9:28 PM