Eat Your Vegetables

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden?” — Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Force Feeding Broccoli — The Office

“Eating is an agricultural act,’ as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it.” — Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I’ve been eating plant-based for the last five weeks. I warned you this is a Lifestyle Blog, so I’ll skip any type of The Monster at the End of This Book suspense to tell you…#YouveBeenInfluenced. Going from 21 meals-with-meat a week (not counting fourth or fifth meal appetizers from the Quik Trip roller grill) to 2 or 3 — and with a lot more vegetables — has been viridescently delicious.

When I was running cross country in college and averaging 60–70 miles running a week, I mainly subsisted on green tea, black beans straight from the can, pizza, and bagels from the giant trash bag of unwanted sweetbreads my pal Marshall would bring over to the dorms from his Sunday night shift at Panera. During this time I also attempted a stretches of eating while not paying for any food, which contained a couple experiences dumpster diving. Coincidentally, the best successes were at the artist-sometimes-known-as St. Louis Bread Company— which makes me wonder if they need to reassess the quantity of scones they prepare each day.

If you had told an 19-year-old me that one day I’d fill my plate with bell peppers and lentils and okra, I’d hit you over the head with a stale Cinnamon Crunch Bagel.

Three of my favorite underrated vegetables.

Radishes
Radishes are like The Boxcar Children — no one knows where they came from. Literally, there are not records of their early history or domestication. Pickled or fresh, radishes are an incredibly zesty and crisp accouterments to mainstays like tacos or any type of grain bowl or salad. Sometimes I like to thinly slice a piece of radish and chew on it like it’s Orbit gum just to feel something.

Okra
Fried okra, grilled okra, sauteed okra…hell, I don’t mind eating okra raw like a large carrot. When cooking okra, here’s a tip: add acid. Some lemon juice or vinegar will, in the words of Southern Living, “lower your slime quotient.”

Red Onion
In high school, we dared my friend Marshall (yes, Panera Marshall) to eat an entire Vidalia onion. He bit into that thing like it was a Honeycrisp apple, and, with tears in his eyes, downed the whole thing. We were stupid in high school — because of stunts like that, and because it wasn’t until later in life I came to appreciate the red onion. In a salad, guacamole or salsa, grilled up in a combo of summer vegetables…I cannot stress this enough. I love red onion.

I’ve been thinking about vegetables because our neighbor, Cliff, has been bringing over zucchini and cucumbers a couple days a week. We’ve transformed the literal fruits of his labor (he and his wife have a garden on their farm) into delectable items: zucchini bread, grilled zucchini, cucumber dill salad, zoodles, and more zucchini bread. On Monday he brought over a cantaloupe, and while it and honeydew aren’t my favorite type of melons, it was the best cantaloupe I’ve ever eaten. If this cantaloupe were a brand of essential oil, it’d be Young Living. If it were a shoe, the Jordan 11.Along with our neighbor’s gift, we’re back at it again in visiting the local farmer’s market on Saturday mornings, bringing home reusable sacks full of heirloom tomatoes and sweet corn and mint.

In the last month or so of eating more plants and receiving them from the hands that prepared them, I’ve taken more time to consider the magic it is that we can plant, grow, harvest and creatively prepare and consume our own food. I say magic quite literally, because the planting of seeds leading to cabbages and blackberry bushes seems to me much like supernatural manipulation of something natural.

Just because science explains it doesn’t mean it’s not a miracle —I think most miracles are backed up by science. If you doubt me, slice into a fresh, ripe peach from Lane’s Orchard in Fort Valley, Georgia. Your taste buds will be slain in the spirit.

When’s the first time you remember eating a vegetable you found absolutely delicious?

What’s a vegetable you couldn’t stand as a kid, and still despise now? Sometimes, even in fried rice, my wife will pick out the peas.

Have you ever picked and eaten fruit off a tree or plant in the wild? My Grandmama used to have a cherry tree in her yard, and we’d use an old wooden ladder to pluck bright red ones from the top — it was a race to get them before the squirrels did.

I wish it didn’t take the trendy wrapping paper of “a plant-based diet” to get me procuring and kitchen-experimenting and eating more things that just grew from the earth — bits of magic people sowed and hoped and prayed the best for, then plucked for another human like me. But really, I don’t care how I got here.

Plants are witchcraft, and I like the crunch.