As an avid healthy raw-vegan, you may wonder: how could he possibly think vegetables suck and have five reasons why!? I don’t think vegetables, nor fruit, suck, at least not anymore. Growing up with these naturally nutritious foods was another story though…
5 REASONS WHY VEGETABLES SUCK
(ALL HEALTHY FOOD)
This is a cyclical chain reaction…
ONE The Milk Jump
Jumping over the moon is an effortless undertaking when compared to the hole one digs oneself into when they officially convert from breast milk to the milk of the almighty cow. It doesn’t have to be milk, but milk is often the gateway. Many even skip ahead and feed their younglings some sweet, sweet formula. It is these early introductions of unnatural foods that essentially squander your child’s tastebuds, leaving a semi-permanent imprint upon their lives and thus affecting their future tendencies towards food.
TWO The Blanding of Taste
There is something about these foods, an addictive and domino-like quality, a quality we find ourselves inseparably bonded to. One manufactured flavor begets another manufactured flavor, then those two beget two more. Sooner or later, you are quite a few decimal point places away from the reality of taste.
THREE Parental Task Force
Mom and dad know that fruits and vegetables are healthy, will maybe they don’t know, but they have definitely heard it somewhere. Integrating healthy foods into the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners of their children is indeed a burden, a burden they nudged along, but a burden none the less. Good news though (Read with sarcasm), with ketchup becoming an official vegetable recently, parents are left with a slightly lighter load.
Some parents resort to creative behavior to slip in some real food and some resort to brute force. My mom sought the first option and began her campaign by literally turning vegetables into an after-preschool chore, then she eventually weaned it down to an employment opportunity whereby I could collect anywhere from a quarter to a dollar for trying a piece of the unpalatable food. As for my dad, he utilized mediocre brute force by making it known, house-wide, that I could not leave that kitchen table until my plate was empty—easy enough, I just emptied it deeper and deeper into the trashcan.
What I learned from this experience:
I hated chores, so in translation I hated fruits and vegetables too.
There were some things in life that just could not be bought (Man for All Seasons).
I was young and no one was going to force me to do anything, especially anything that I concluded long ago as being ‘icky.’
FOUR Category Lumping
Unlike meat which can be separated into white meat and dark meat, and further separated into beef, pork, chicken, turkey, etc…, and even further separated into how it is prepared, vegetables and fruits are all lumped into one category: healthy food. Your odds of liking healthy food is largely dependent on your first exposures to fruits and vegetables.
Let’s say your family is having a picnic and available before you is a wide assortment of meat platters, all for your tasting. Maybe your first attempt ends with you getting a little too intimate with the park trashcan, but does this mean meat is officially blacklisted now? No, meat has the ability fall back on its categories and maybe this event meant no more exotic birds, but this still leaves quite a few open options for you to chew on, including regular birds.
Fruits and veggies can often be separated as I just did, but even a simple split down the middle does not guarantee their success. As we age and become more involved in our foods, some do begin to make categories among fruits and vegetables, but many more do not. Lacking the ability to fall back on categories can swiftly eliminate all fruits and vegetables from one’s diet. One bad experience can be held indefinitely in the front of one’s mind, disallowing and even scaring one out of ever making advances in this territory again. If your subjective experience, knowingly or unknowingly, re-categorizes these items as threats, then who in their right mind would ever go back?
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman terms this behavior as the ‘halo effect.’ The halo effect explains how our first experience offsets our future experiences. If one healthy and natural food tastes bad, we might avoid them all, just as we might avoid an entire brand’s line of products because of an earlier experience that left you displeased or even disgusted.
I was able to categorize fruits and vegetables as I progressed in life:
Reliables: Consistently tasted great.
Unreliables: Sometimes tasted good and sometimes were just plain terrible.
Never Agains/Repeat Offenders: Left me thinking: how could something so healthy taste so bad?
Never Tried: Things I never tried were often eliminated altogether because of a few bad experiences in the past.
As you can see, my lack of in depth categories failed me. Where I could eliminate fried ‘insert meat’ for grilled ‘insert meat’, I could do no such thing for fruits and vegetables.
FIVE Inorganic Shove
If you asked me about five months ago what my least favorite fruit was, the words that would proceed to come out of my mouth would mimic those that would have been triggered by a similar question: what is your favorite fruit today? That fruit is strawberries and before this rather recent one-eighty, I completely resented them whenever they were in my presence. They were that fruit that could take a perfectly splendid fruit salad and turn it into a mine field, a concern that has greatly improved my spoon dexterity over the years.
Then one day I had a strawberry that tasted strange, and then another, and then it became a daily habit. At the time, I was just beginning to eat mostly organic foods and I begin to notice subtle and then more emergent differences in the flavors I had known so well and for so long. Needless to say, those former flavors were never missed and never will be.
There is such a difference between organically grown foods and those exposed to chemicals, it is essentially the quality that beckons one to eat more, not a choring mother and not those squandering and addictive chemicals made by some scheming food industry. Organic foods have literally led me to transgress beyond the limitations of the categories that had held all naturally healthy foods captive.
I find pleasure in knowing that my apples, former members of the ‘unreliable’ clan, my strawberries, and the rest of the fruits and vegetables I eat will always have that naturally engaging flavor, a flavor that I did not have to grow to love but rather just love.
This article focuses mostly on fruits and vegetables, but it is meant to encompass all healthy foods. For instance, long ago, I lumped all nuts into one category: brownie ruiners. It was more or less a texture thing mixed with some squandered tasted buds. In short, I enjoy an ample variety of nuts each and everyday now.
In conclusion, we don’t actually hate these healthy foods, we have just become confused as to their true capacity.
Why do you hate vegetables, fruit, and naturally healthy foods?
When I was pregnant with my daughter 14 years ago, someone told me that when she starts eating solid food to only give her green vegetables for the first 3 months and she would love vegetables the rest of her life. Since I loved vegetables and wanted her to also, I did it, and it worked! Even as a teenager she loves vegetables and she actually decided to become vegan with me 4 years ago (we are 80% raw and eat a lot of salads). She gets comments from other family members and the kids at school, but it doesn’t deter her. She wants to be healthy and knows that her high standards just intimidate those on a less healthy path. I mention this little tidbit to other pregnant women but find out later that they have decided to live by the advice of their uneducated doctors who tell them to put apple sauce in the baby cereal “to sweeten it up”.
http://moreapplesaday.com Peter
My parents may have started a little too late with the vegetables and I always jokingly say that they should have just forced me to eat them during my tastebud resistant years.
It is great to see that you are taking your health seriously too… A vegan diet is for everyone, but most fail to recognize this, just as most fail to escape the intermingling of disease and ‘old’ age.
5 Reasons Why Vegetables Suck
As an avid healthy raw-vegan, you may wonder: how could he possibly think vegetables suck and have five reasons why!? I don’t think vegetables, nor fruit, suck, at least not anymore. Growing up with these naturally nutritious foods was another story though…
5 REASONS WHY VEGETABLES SUCK
(ALL HEALTHY FOOD)
This is a cyclical chain reaction…
ONE The Milk Jump
Jumping over the moon is an effortless undertaking when compared to the hole one digs oneself into when they officially convert from breast milk to the milk of the almighty cow. It doesn’t have to be milk, but milk is often the gateway. Many even skip ahead and feed their younglings some sweet, sweet formula. It is these early introductions of unnatural foods that essentially squander your child’s tastebuds, leaving a semi-permanent imprint upon their lives and thus affecting their future tendencies towards food.
TWO The Blanding of Taste
There is something about these foods, an addictive and domino-like quality, a quality we find ourselves inseparably bonded to. One manufactured flavor begets another manufactured flavor, then those two beget two more. Sooner or later, you are quite a few decimal point places away from the reality of taste.
THREE Parental Task Force
Mom and dad know that fruits and vegetables are healthy, will maybe they don’t know, but they have definitely heard it somewhere. Integrating healthy foods into the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners of their children is indeed a burden, a burden they nudged along, but a burden none the less. Good news though (Read with sarcasm), with ketchup becoming an official vegetable recently, parents are left with a slightly lighter load.
Some parents resort to creative behavior to slip in some real food and some resort to brute force. My mom sought the first option and began her campaign by literally turning vegetables into an after-preschool chore, then she eventually weaned it down to an employment opportunity whereby I could collect anywhere from a quarter to a dollar for trying a piece of the unpalatable food. As for my dad, he utilized mediocre brute force by making it known, house-wide, that I could not leave that kitchen table until my plate was empty—easy enough, I just emptied it deeper and deeper into the trashcan.
What I learned from this experience:
FOUR Category Lumping
Unlike meat which can be separated into white meat and dark meat, and further separated into beef, pork, chicken, turkey, etc…, and even further separated into how it is prepared, vegetables and fruits are all lumped into one category: healthy food. Your odds of liking healthy food is largely dependent on your first exposures to fruits and vegetables.
Let’s say your family is having a picnic and available before you is a wide assortment of meat platters, all for your tasting. Maybe your first attempt ends with you getting a little too intimate with the park trashcan, but does this mean meat is officially blacklisted now? No, meat has the ability fall back on its categories and maybe this event meant no more exotic birds, but this still leaves quite a few open options for you to chew on, including regular birds.
Fruits and veggies can often be separated as I just did, but even a simple split down the middle does not guarantee their success. As we age and become more involved in our foods, some do begin to make categories among fruits and vegetables, but many more do not. Lacking the ability to fall back on categories can swiftly eliminate all fruits and vegetables from one’s diet. One bad experience can be held indefinitely in the front of one’s mind, disallowing and even scaring one out of ever making advances in this territory again. If your subjective experience, knowingly or unknowingly, re-categorizes these items as threats, then who in their right mind would ever go back?
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman terms this behavior as the ‘halo effect.’ The halo effect explains how our first experience offsets our future experiences. If one healthy and natural food tastes bad, we might avoid them all, just as we might avoid an entire brand’s line of products because of an earlier experience that left you displeased or even disgusted.
I was able to categorize fruits and vegetables as I progressed in life:
As you can see, my lack of in depth categories failed me. Where I could eliminate fried ‘insert meat’ for grilled ‘insert meat’, I could do no such thing for fruits and vegetables.
FIVE Inorganic Shove
If you asked me about five months ago what my least favorite fruit was, the words that would proceed to come out of my mouth would mimic those that would have been triggered by a similar question: what is your favorite fruit today? That fruit is strawberries and before this rather recent one-eighty, I completely resented them whenever they were in my presence. They were that fruit that could take a perfectly splendid fruit salad and turn it into a mine field, a concern that has greatly improved my spoon dexterity over the years.
Then one day I had a strawberry that tasted strange, and then another, and then it became a daily habit. At the time, I was just beginning to eat mostly organic foods and I begin to notice subtle and then more emergent differences in the flavors I had known so well and for so long. Needless to say, those former flavors were never missed and never will be.
There is such a difference between organically grown foods and those exposed to chemicals, it is essentially the quality that beckons one to eat more, not a choring mother and not those squandering and addictive chemicals made by some scheming food industry. Organic foods have literally led me to transgress beyond the limitations of the categories that had held all naturally healthy foods captive.
I find pleasure in knowing that my apples, former members of the ‘unreliable’ clan, my strawberries, and the rest of the fruits and vegetables I eat will always have that naturally engaging flavor, a flavor that I did not have to grow to love but rather just love.
This article focuses mostly on fruits and vegetables, but it is meant to encompass all healthy foods. For instance, long ago, I lumped all nuts into one category: brownie ruiners. It was more or less a texture thing mixed with some squandered tasted buds. In short, I enjoy an ample variety of nuts each and everyday now.
In conclusion, we don’t actually hate these healthy foods, we have just become confused as to their true capacity.
Why do you hate vegetables, fruit, and naturally healthy foods?
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