Not boring veggies!
If what we read in social media is true, much of the world’s population has an aversion to eating vegetables. Books are written on how to encourage children to eat more than potatoes in the form of chips, and how making aeroplane noises will make a baby open wide for a spoonful of unseasoned butternut. I can’t say I ever had a problem with vegetables when growing up. Mom cooked the food and we ate it. Maybe my body just loves vegetables and maybe it is part of the home culture. Are the parents of children who won’t eat vegetables piling their own plates with carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, peas, beans and squash to set an example?
I always like to hark back to the days of the caveman (as I imagine life to have been) when the diet would have been limited to what was available in the area. This meant that it was impossible to find the wide variety of minerals and vitamins that we are led to believe is essential to a healthy life today. Perhaps as the early people moved around the globe they found new foods that gave them an extra boost in the evolutionary journey, and spread the availability further and further through accidental seeding. Their bodies would have become stronger and more able to resist disease, and the average lifespan increased. This would be the basis for fruit and vegetables being an essential part of the human diet. At least, this is how I imagine it happened.
Fast forward to today, and fast food is the norm. The effort of preparing each vegetable seems to be beyond our capabilities and different methods of cooking mean a pile of pots to wash after dinner. For many, the memory of childhood meals in the bad old days when it was thought that cabbage should be boiled for an hour and form the basis of an institutional dinner was enough to put them off vegetables for life, and we have the gradual adoption of the Asian way of cooking to thank for the blessed alternative – stir fries! Nothing appeals more to the senses, and particularly the taste buds, than a plate of glistening, multi-coloured and just fractionally crisp vegetables, seasoned with a range of sweet or savoury herbs and spices – a double whammy of health-giving nutrition cooked in one pan and in a flash.
It has become a regular way of serving vegetables, even if eating a pie, and certainly beats a pile of mashed potato or chips as an accompaniment. With virtually every edible vegetable known to Man now being available in supermarkets, there is no reason to go without your daily 5 with barely a repeat in a week. The best benefit is obtained from an adventurous diet and even the most outlandish vegetable has its own unique health-giving properties. So dig out that wok from the back of the pot cupboard, splash in a good amount of olive oil and fire up the gas!
