Bad Good Decisions

I've been trying to eat my 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, and I've hit a horrible snag: I hate vegetables. Well, I don't really hate all vegetables, but I resent the fact that most of them take adding on salt or butter or cheese or dressing or oil before they taste good. I think there's a spectrum of vegetable value that ranges from carrots, at one end, to eggplant at the other. Carrots are great--full of vitamins, they're portable and not juicy, they store pretty well, and they taste fine, even if you don't put anything on them. You can even mix them with other vegetables to make them all go down better. Eggplants suck. They're a great color on the outside and they look like alien pods, but that's the only thing they have going for them because the best way to eat them is probably eggplant parmesan, which is probably the nutritional equivalent of sticking an eighth of a multivitamin inside the molten filling of a chocolate lava cake, sucking the whole thing down and then patting yourself on the back for eating a health food. AND, if you try to stick eggplant in with other vegetables to mask its horrible taste, all the others become tainted by its awfulness. 

The point is, if I'm going to eat vegetables, which I think I should, I can't take myself seriously if I dip them in fat. So I eat them plain. Even if it sort of kills my soul. As my cousin Jamee once said, "Pain is beauty." 

I've been trying to increase the amount of vegetables I eat relative to fruit. Ideally, I'd eat more vegetables than fruit each day. But that's gross, so for right now, I'm just trying to do the best I can and break even--which results in an overall higher amount of fruit/vegetable intake. 

Wednesday was a rough day for this plan. I ate carrots and celery and a banana and an apple, but I didn't want any more vegetables. I toyed with whether a tomato was a fruit or vegetable for a while, and I couldn't fathom trying to choke down radishes without any dressing. Finally, the answer came when my husband told me about work that day. I had packed him leftover chinese food with a big handful of green beans on top. I was hoping that in microwaving the food, the beans would get sort of steamed by virtue of being in there with the rice. (I was totally right, by the way). He said, though, that a co-worker saw him with his lunch and was adamant that my husband was doing it wrong--that uncooked green beans were poisonous. For some reason, this inspired me to eat the rest of the green beans. In fact, I ate one raw, but it was gross and awful. I'm pretty sure (well, now I'm really sure, because I didn't die) that raw green beans aren't poisonous, but they definitely taste like they are. 

As my husband watched my face contort in agony at the horrible flavor, he kindly volunteered to steam the beans for me. He's so nice. 

When they were done, I dumped them out onto a plate. There were so many. I looked on the bag to see what a serving size was because I thought it had to be fairly small--certainly less than was on the plate. To my horror, I learned that a full serving of green beans is 3/4 of a cup. I steeled myself for the painful process of crunching one bean after another, over and over, until green bean poisoning really did kick in and I died. But I found I couldn't hack it. There's no way I could eat all those beans one at a time. So I didn't....

they still tasted awful, but on the plus-side, I finally found my long-lost pearl earrings!

...and I made it to 5 servings after all!