Eat Your Veggies!

You too can change years of bad habits

This picture kind of makes you want to eat your vegetables, doesn’t it?

I’ve spent the better part of my life ignoring what may be the most common advice in our culture:

Eat your veggies.

Our moms tell us to do it.

There are children’s books about it.

There are songs about it and an app dedicated to it. 

The U.S. government’s plate …

… and Harvard’s plate.

Veggies play a starring role in the U.S. government’s dietary guidance on MyPlate.gov, and on Harvard’s, and there’s not a single diet that doesn’t try to give vegetables a starring role. Hell, the Instagram hashtag has nearly three-million posts.

(I was a little disappointed that the URL EatYourVeggies.com redirects to organic-farming giant Duncan Family Farms.)

You get my point: the advice to eat your vegetables is everywhere. 

I haven’t heeded much of this advice.

In fact, I always treated it with the same respect I offer speed limit signs. I mean, I get why they’re there. But they’re not really for me. I go the speed I want.

But this year, everything changed (at least when it came to vegetables).

This year, I started eating vegetables like mad, and it’s all because of Petrina, Jennifer, and the fabulous (and often purple) vegetables coming out of Skylight Farms. But I’m getting ahead of myself ...

Following the advice of

Michael Pollan

—who has written so eloquently about eating locally and gets credited with the simplest diet advice ever, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”—I started keeping my eye out for options to get more of my food here in the Snohomish Valley where I live. The Snohomish River that flows through my verdant valley helps feed a thriving agricultural sector and its regular floods keep the suburban sprawl from Seattle in check. So it’s not hard to get a wide variety of my food within a few miles of my house: I get my eggs from “The Egg Car,” and, starting this year, I get my veggies from a CSA (that stands for Community Supported Agriculture) subscription offered by Skylight Farms. (I’ve put a lot of this stuff on a web page that I built here.)

My veggie love started with Skylight’s spring CSA: 8 weeks of veggies that Sara and I picked up every Saturday out at the farm. Jennifer greeted us when we arrived and handed us our first box, filled with the most luscious vegetables we could imagine (I wish I had photographed the first box.) Within just a few weeks, we realized that every Saturday we’d come home with a selection of fresh veggies that put to shame the stuff we got from the grocery store. It wasn’t long before we started planning all our meals around our weekly box of veggies.

After that spectacular spring haul it was a no-brainer to subscribe to the summer and fall offerings, which kept us in veggies right up until November 19th, not long before I wrote this.

Veggies from Skylight Farms

Getting veggies this way transformed our meal prep. Presented with vegetables we’d never used before—misome, escarole, garlic scapes, treviso, purple cauliflower, dragon beans, celeriac—we’d scout for new recipes that featured vegetables and make those the center of the meal. Whatever else was on the plate—meat or grains—was an afterthought. Vegetables were the star attraction.

Meals where the veggies are the starring attraction

The week after Thanksgiving was our first without a big box of veggies to spark our meal planning. We walked around the grocery store and eyed the veggies there with suspicion: Where was the charm? Where was the romance? We missed our Skylight Farms veggies. We’re still wondering quite how to deal with it.

Do you have any tips for falling in love with grocery store veggies? How do you make veggies the star of the show during the dark months?