VEGETABLES

“It’s broccoli, dear.”
 “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

Back in the olden times, in the 1920s, the New Yorker published a cartoon that became a classic showing a Mother telling her young daughter to eat her broccoli.

Before we knew a carb from a calorie, you had to like vegetables. Today Paleo or Atkins or even the new HIGH FAT diets decrying carbs, you have to like vegetables. Weight Watchers invented the diet biz, doesn’t count vegetables in one’s daily Points allotment. Vegetables are a must because they are points-free, it’s practically a dieting law. Dig in and load up your plate — stuff yourself with veggies. Stretch your stomach, but only with veggies. Mess up your ghrelin/leptin levels in your stretched out stomach, but only with veggies. Eat too many veggies and raise your insulin. Doesn’t matter if they are veggies. LOVE them, consume them, buy them.

The problem is that American vegetables are a hard to love, they rarely have the robust taste they naturally should. With your eyes closed you can’t taste the difference between a string bean and a lima bean. You can’t easily fix this issue. Some have tried. William Alexander wrote a funny book on the subject, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden. Realistically, the issues resulting from soil depletion, GMOs, pesticides and sped up growth cycles and hormones are not going to be solved anytime soon. And that means that you also need to eat a bushel of broccoli to get the nutrients you used to get from a portion. Read about our dirt poor vegetables and don’t feel bad for not loving them. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/