Ask Professor Produce

Dear Professor Produce: Help! I know I should eat more vegetables, but I feel shut out from vegetables - I grew up eating frozen peas and corn, and I don't know how to eat them unless they're mixed in with something else. I'm sick of salads and baby carrots. I am afraid I just don't have a taste for vegetables!

In this column I give a lot of lip service to the amazing, outrageous flavors of nature - the subtleties, the nuances, the delicate essences of things that grow. But I know it's often bordering on the esoteric - the truth is that you are not alone. In fact, I think there should be a support group for people who want to eat more vegetables but don't know how. "Hi, I'm Cathy, and I don't know how to eat vegetables," that kind of thing. Any time you are going to make a change in your self-care habits, it is a rocky road complete with backsliding and inevitable soul-searching. As is often the case though, the struggle is more than worth the results. If we boil down the basic points of weight-loss programs, longevity studies, all major cancer research and the innate wisdom of non-domesticated omnivorous mammals the world over, they all advocate the eating of vegetables - lots of them.

This time of year happens to be the easiest time of year to start doing just that. June is a tender month of things that are delicious raw, like radishes, lettuces, baby greens and snap peas. This turns into a summer full of the bounty of sun-drenched earth: string beans, corn on the cob, heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil, abundant summer squash. However, if this doesn't sound naturally good to you, or if you need to learn how to cook these things, then even these familiar veggies can provoke some anxiety.

Among the most successful and dedicated vegetable consumers I know, myself included, the love of vegetables came long after the determination to eat more of them, so rest assured that there is nothing special about people who have learned to love them. There isn't an easy road here - at first it appears to be a lot like flossing teeth - you do it because experts tell you it's good for you. But the best thing about a good habit, if it's worth its promise, is that it eventually self-perpetuates because of the way it makes you feel. Once you start craving that good feeling, you start tasting the symphony inherent in each edible plant - and that's the aesthetically rewarding part.

My own personal awareness of vegetables started in a funny way. I was working in a produce department, but hadn't really registered the value of what was surrounding me. I didn't know how to cook or why I should bother, but I ate a lot of produce incidentally, working with it every day. One spring I went on a road trip through the southern states, and by our eventual stop at the Krispy Kreme factory in Atlanta a couple weeks later, I was freaking out. Whatever was coming out of my pores felt like putty, I smelled, I had so little energy I actually craved sitting in the car motionless. I searched out Atlanta's Sevananda Co-op and found I bizarrely registered kale as mouth-watering. Seeing green stuff again was like coming home from Oz to see the family I forgot I had. I realized I was going through produce withdrawal and it wasn't pretty. From that moment on I was a believer - I began to tell people I was in love with produce. I promised produce I would never abandon it again. Produce and I have been having a really happy relationship ever since I realized just how good it makes me feel.

We can't all get jobs in produce departments, but there are fairly simple ways to start eating more vegetables - especially now in the summer months when produce is at its absolute freshest and finest. One thing I would suggest is start out easy and small - don't make it a big production and try to cook one fancy veggie-packed meal after another, that's bound for failure over time. Simply buy what looks good at the store (or ask your friendly produce employee what's freshest that week), and prepare it simply. Steaming and grilling are my favorite ways to enjoy most produce, and so fast and easy you can't use time or ineptitude as an excuse for not doing it.

When you've mastered some basic veggies, you can graduate to reading Deborah Madison's cookbook, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (I'm not a vegetarian, so if you're not either note that she does say everyone). It is a highly accessible, information packed tome that will teach you how to prepare almost any vegetable, and better, how to do it intuitively over time. I have Deborah to thank for teaching me how to easily and quickly enjoy all kinds of "high-maintenance" veggies - Fava beans, artichokes, kohlrabi, celery root, the list goes on. We sell this book in our HBC Department, or you can find it in most bookstores in the cookbook section.

Think of learning to eat vegetables as an adventure - one that will inevitably link you more firmly to the earth, and have the added benefit of working as preventative medicine against a wide range of illnesses. You never know - some day you just might find yourself waxing poetic about subtleties in the perfume of the leek. Stranger things have happened.