A couple recent pieces in the New York Times have people talking about why we don’t eat our vegetables, despite reams of evidence about how good they are for us. One of my favorite bloggers, Crunchy Domestic Goddess blogged her thoughts here: http://crunchydomesticgoddess.com/2010/10/19/americans-still-arent-eating-their-veggies/ and the original articles are Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries and Even Benefits Don’t Tempt Us to Vegetables.
Now there are all sorts of “push” solutions involving more education and more convenience to vegetables – to the point of literally putting them in convenience machines, but I’m not sure that in the storied past when everyone did eat their vegetables that it was simply a matter of being more educated about vegetables and that vegetables were more convenient in the past. What could be more convenient than all the pre-packaged solutions we have now? How could we have known more about the health benefits in the past and just forgotten what we knew and ignored the newer information as more and more reasons to eat enough vegetables are found? Can we find some “pull” solutions where we actually are intrinsically motivated to eat our vegetables and don’t just do it because we manage to muster the willpower to make ourselves do it?
What are the root causes, then, if not ignorance and some inherent inconvenience of vegetables? My theories? We are lacking:
Cheaper Vegetables
#1 Economics have a strong sway over us – our food budget would tilt more towards vegetables if they weren’t competing with heavily subsidized commodity products like corn and wheat and all the processed foods made therefrom.
#2 Growing our own vegetables can be cheaper than buying from a store, but here’s an area where a little education can help, and access to materials… and time!
Tastier Vegetables
#1 Organic, local, homegrown, healthy soils, etc, etc. make for healthier, tastier vegetables – it’s no surprise people are not rushing to eat lettuce shipped from 3000 miles away
#2 And here’s what really inspired me to write my thoughts down on the vegetable conundrum - I blame the low-fat diets of the last 30 years for reducing vegetables to something boring and bland. Sure you can try to spice them up, but you can tire of that, too. What’s really satisfies and appeals to your tastebuds again and again is fat – a nice pat of butter on top of your beans, bacon with your brussel sprouts, root vegetables tossed in olive oil and roasted. There’s a yummy video over on the 180 Degree Health blog about butter-poached carrots that I’m dying to try!
More Time in our Lives
Oh, this would solve so many of our problems in this culture! Why do we have higher productivity than other nations and less satisfaction with life? Why despite our advanced health care facilities do we struggle with lifestyle diseases? With some more time to call our own, we will have the energy to tend and harvest a garden, to spend those 90 minutes butter-poaching carrots, to chop fresh veggies for a salad, to go for a walk after dinner with the family… Why is our response to the lack of time in American lives to sell pre-peeled and pre-cubed butternut squash, and baby carrots, and pre-washed greens? These things need industrial processing, and centralized production, so we get corporate food from somewhere else in the country, wrapped in a bunch of extra packaging that may be impossible to recycle, and this is a convenience? And tastes good??
How hugely more successful is our household with veggie eating now that we belong to a CSA & can really enjoy/appreciate fresh fresh fresh veggies we also admire before we take them.
time is so often the issue! & the $$ of it too, depressing.
have you seen the bushel of what blog? another local food/cooking one to see.
Hear, hear for more time and tastier vegetables. Having spent so much time with family in Italy, where it is a cultural imperative to a) take one’s time and b) eat well, I can say with confidence that life really is better that way. The conundrum for me is not so much the tastiness as the time aspect– no matter how much I resist the culture of manic running around, it still has an effect. (And the fact that I keep volunteering for massive commitments.) But it’s possible to invest relatively little time and still have tasty vegetables, I’ve found. In the past week or so, for example, I’ve made roasted root veggies (heaven), kale sauteed with garlic and olive oil, many salads, quick stir fries, and my beloved squash/coconut milk/lemon balm soup. And I’ve still run around waaay too much.
I believe people can do it, they just need to make eating healthier a priority in their lives. Sure we ALL live busy lives and we could ALL use more money to spend on food, but even if you had all the time in the world and all the money in the world, eating healthy still needs to be something you hold intrinsically important in your own life and you need to make it a priority. And the priority should be to eat tasty vegetables. Of course no one wants to eat canned green beans and consider eating vegeatbles a chore because of this. They taste bad!! Once we make it a priority in our lives and take the time to prepare the vegetables in a tasty way will our ways change.
Jess – thanks for stopping by! My concern is that our time is not uniquely lacking in willpower, but that there are structural factors such as commodity agriculture subsidies and high work productivity that contribute to our low vegetable intake. Think about all the people who need to work at a job with benefits to get the health care access they need to treat the lifestyle diseases that come from a life of stress and constant work. Could I be as radical as to say that making a healthy lifestyle a priority involves dropping out of “the system?”
There are other factors I didn’t mention, too, such as the saturation of advertising for processed food and the flavor engineering that makes processed food appeal so strongly to our tastebuds – though I think both of those can be ultimately drawn back to agriculture subsidies and the artificially cheap price of oil as well.
Rosemary,
Right on! I like the two articles you linked to. I’m considering taking a job with AmeriCorp (via grad school) that would have me running a YMCA after school program with teenagers. The focus would be fitness, but I’d want to include food, too. I’m trying to wrap my head around the veggie/eat healthy issue. I’m even considering taking them to their local grocery store…and helping them pick out healthy food on a budget! Any wisdom you want to swing my way?
Keep the articles coming! The food ones are esp. good for me, as it’s my wellness-weak-spot. ( :
~Kiah