Why people don't eat more veggies
This is a post I made on my favorite forum, HomesteadingToday.com, when someone posted about people not eating enough produce.
I have a theory on why people don't eat more veggies.
If you live in a city (which an awful lot of people do), do you know how difficult it is to get produce that actually TASTES like what it's supposed to be? Any idea how hard it is to get tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, peaches that taste like peaches, strawberries that taste like strawberries? Finding produce that tastes like it's supposed to is incredibly difficult around here.
I had a pretty good stand of tomatoes this year; enough to dehydrate several lbs and freeze several more. We ate tomatoes with EVERYTHING. They tasted NOTHING like store bought; they tasted like TOMATOES. And now the season is over, and I can't bear the thought of eating the storebought ones. I don't care how close the farm is to the store, they still all taste the same; like textured water.
And that's pretty much what everything tastes like; textured water with varying levels of sweet or tart. Everything is raised to look pretty, be ready to pick at the right time (I refuse to use the term ripen) and ship well. Taste, I'm afraid, got lost somewhere along the way a long time ago when it comes to mass cultivation of produce for large markets. When produce tastes so... well... uninspired, why eat it? I remember fruits and veggies tasted a lot different when I was a kid. Heck, it tastes different now than it did 10-15 years ago, probably due to new, more productive/standardized crops being developed. How sad for people who never really get to taste truly ripe, flavorful produce. Can you really blame them for turning up their noses at the beautiful. flavorless stuff that is being passed off to us as "fresh fruits and vegetables"?
I met a woman who grew up in Florida, in a region where tropical fruits were grown but stone fruit was only available at the store. She said she could never understand how anyone could like peaches. She had only had the canned, frozen and grocery store-purchased ones. Someone invited her on a visit to a u-pick peach orchard and she accepted with some trepidation. When she took a bite from a ripe fruit picked right from the tree, the woman said she was absolutely shocked that peaches actually have a taste. They are now a favorite fruit, but only when she can get them fresh off the tree when they're ripe.
And there's the problem. An awful lot of people don't live where they can easily find a wide variety of locally grown produce that has been harvested at it's proper stage of ripeness. Farmers markets are a wonderful concept, but at least around here the produce offered often costs significantly more than the stuff in the grocery store. It's rather disheartening to want to eat locally, then find out the produce is going to cost more per lb than the meat of the meal.
Which brings me back to DH and I. We've decided that taste really DOES matter, and no matter how healthy it's supposed to be, we won't eat it if it tastes like little more than mildly flavored sawdust. Which is unfortunately what we generally have available to us.
I have a theory on why people don't eat more veggies.
If you live in a city (which an awful lot of people do), do you know how difficult it is to get produce that actually TASTES like what it's supposed to be? Any idea how hard it is to get tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, peaches that taste like peaches, strawberries that taste like strawberries? Finding produce that tastes like it's supposed to is incredibly difficult around here.
I had a pretty good stand of tomatoes this year; enough to dehydrate several lbs and freeze several more. We ate tomatoes with EVERYTHING. They tasted NOTHING like store bought; they tasted like TOMATOES. And now the season is over, and I can't bear the thought of eating the storebought ones. I don't care how close the farm is to the store, they still all taste the same; like textured water.
And that's pretty much what everything tastes like; textured water with varying levels of sweet or tart. Everything is raised to look pretty, be ready to pick at the right time (I refuse to use the term ripen) and ship well. Taste, I'm afraid, got lost somewhere along the way a long time ago when it comes to mass cultivation of produce for large markets. When produce tastes so... well... uninspired, why eat it? I remember fruits and veggies tasted a lot different when I was a kid. Heck, it tastes different now than it did 10-15 years ago, probably due to new, more productive/standardized crops being developed. How sad for people who never really get to taste truly ripe, flavorful produce. Can you really blame them for turning up their noses at the beautiful. flavorless stuff that is being passed off to us as "fresh fruits and vegetables"?
I met a woman who grew up in Florida, in a region where tropical fruits were grown but stone fruit was only available at the store. She said she could never understand how anyone could like peaches. She had only had the canned, frozen and grocery store-purchased ones. Someone invited her on a visit to a u-pick peach orchard and she accepted with some trepidation. When she took a bite from a ripe fruit picked right from the tree, the woman said she was absolutely shocked that peaches actually have a taste. They are now a favorite fruit, but only when she can get them fresh off the tree when they're ripe.
And there's the problem. An awful lot of people don't live where they can easily find a wide variety of locally grown produce that has been harvested at it's proper stage of ripeness. Farmers markets are a wonderful concept, but at least around here the produce offered often costs significantly more than the stuff in the grocery store. It's rather disheartening to want to eat locally, then find out the produce is going to cost more per lb than the meat of the meal.
Which brings me back to DH and I. We've decided that taste really DOES matter, and no matter how healthy it's supposed to be, we won't eat it if it tastes like little more than mildly flavored sawdust. Which is unfortunately what we generally have available to us.
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