I eat less fruit and vegetables than I should. This seems to mostly or entirely be because I don’t reliably alieve that they’re food.
This manifests in a few different ways: When shopping, most fruit or veggies or fruit- or veggie-containing things don’t register as things that I might consider buying. When choosing something to eat at home, those things don’t register as things that I might want to eat. For most fruit and a few veggies, once they’re actually in front of me in a ready-to-eat form (which does not include whole fruit), I’ll eat them, but getting to that point is unreliable. For most veggies and a few kinds of fruit—including several that I actually like—even when they’re in front of me in an edible form I’ll automatically eat around them unless I make a conscious effort to do otherwise, which is irritating to do. I would literally find it easier to eat a sheet of paper than a head of broccoli, even though I actually like the taste of broccoli in many contexts.
Adding fruit or veggies to things in such a way that they can’t be picked around is a partial solution at best—it doesn’t solve the problems of remembering to buy the supplies and actually use them, and if the result smells or tastes like something that registers strongly enough as not-food, I’ll have the same kind of hard time eating it. Further complications: I prefer not to put a lot of effort into my meals, and I have trouble swallowing rice, which means that things in the ‘frozen rice with broccoli bits and cheese’ genre are not good for me to rely on. (Tasty, though.)
I’m not actually sure that this is my true rejection. Even if it is, I’m prickly enough about taking advice that I might reject some on general principles, though I seem to have gotten better about that in the last few years.
Since you say you’re prickly about advice, I will try just giving you the reasons for my suggestions and omit the actual suggestions when possible. Please let me know if that way of phrasing is actually helpful, or just annoyingly indirect.
On buying more vegetables
I’ve heard that people buy more food if they shop while hungry. People also are more likely to interpret more things as edible if they are hungry.
I find I buy more vegetables when I am somewhere that sells primarily vegetables, like a farmer’s market. At the farmer’s market, there is also the illusion of scarcity since it’s a once-a-week stuff (even though I could buy similar things in the grocery store later), so I stock up a lot.
Some friends of mine subscribe to CSA or other vegetable-delivery programs, which takes pretty much all of the effort out of it.
On eating the vegetables you’ve bought
It is possible to make a meal or part of a meal that is nearly 100% vegetables.
After experimenting with a few methods of preparing them, I found that roasting works for me as a way of preparing solo vegetables; most vegetables taste good to me when coated with olive oil and some light seasoning (and sometimes some grated Romano or Parmagiano cheese), and roasted. It gives them a satisfying, almost meaty/buttery taste. It is also pretty easy and doesn’t require a lot of time once I got the timing right and stopped needing to keep peeking into the oven to determine doneness. If you want some more specific roasting suggestions I am happy to provide them. But you may find other preparations are more appealing.
Even if you prefer to mix veggies with non-veggies, I suspect you wouldn’t be able to eat around veggies in a smooth or fine-textured soup very easily (e.g. cream of broccoli, carrot soup, gazpacho). And you’d have to decompose a sandwich to avoid eating a cross-section of the ingredients.
Related question: Vegetables are more easily visually identifiable in some foods than others. For example, in something like pasta with broccoli, you can see the broccoli pieces and they are obviously separate from the pasta. On the other hand, in something like a curry or stew, it’s not always easy to see which lumps are meat, which lumps are something like potato or cheese, and which lumps are veggies, since they’re all covered in sauce. Do you find you eat around the veggies to a different extent in foods that differ along this dimension, or is it a pretty uniform phenomenon?
Since you say you’re prickly about advice, I will try just giving you the reasons for my suggestions and omit the actual suggestions when possible. Please let me know if that way of phrasing is actually helpful, or just annoyingly indirect.
Actually helpful. :)
I find I buy more vegetables when I am somewhere that sells primarily vegetables, like a farmer’s market.
There is a farmer’s market here, but it’s hard for me to get to—I don’t drive, and it’s on the other side of town. I will definitely see about getting a ride over there sometime soon, though—I’d actually forgotten that it’s that time of the year again. (Om nom nom blueberries. ^.^)
Some friends of mine subscribe to CSA or other vegetable-delivery programs, which takes pretty much all of the effort out of it.
Last I checked (over a year ago), there wasn’t one of those close enough to deliver to me. Also my impression is that they don’t allow their customers to customize their orders very much. I should probably check again, though, anyway.
I found that roasting works for me as a way of preparing solo vegetables...
I’ll consult Google about this later.
...smooth or fine-textured soup...
This would be hit or miss—there’s a very high chance that any soup like that would smell like not-food. (Cream of broccoli soup is one of the contexts in which broccoli smells like not-food, if I remember correctly.)
...sandwich...
The problem with this is that most traditional sandwich veggies have a short enough shelf life that it’d be silly for me to buy them—they’d go bad before I remembered to use them. Experimenting with non-traditional sandwich veggies might be useful, though.
Vegetables are more easily visually identifiable in some foods than others. Do you find you eat around the veggies to a different extent in foods that differ along this dimension, or is it a pretty uniform phenomenon?
It can, though soup isn’t a good test case—if I know that there are veggies in soup, I’ll make a point of identifying any chunks of things before I eat them, and if I don’t know that there are veggies in the soup, I’ll notice in pretty short order in most cases. What does work is things like casseroles where there aren’t obvious chunks at all—and especially if it’s not obvious in the construction phase of the casserole that something non-food-ish is being added. Casserole is one of the few contexts where I’ll eat mushrooms, for example—they’re usually clearly not food, but one of my favorite casseroles involves canned cream of mushroom soup, which is fine so long as I don’t think about it too hard, even if I end up finding a mushroom chunk or two, because nothing that looks like mushrooms goes into it.
You may be out of CSA range, but if you’re willing to forgo freshness Amazon.com now lets you subscribe to consumable items like this and receive them on a regular basis, for a 15% discount.
The problem with this is that most traditional sandwich veggies have a short enough shelf life that it’d be silly for me to buy them—they’d go bad before I remembered to use them
Insofar as remembering is important, this might be relevant: I’m experimenting with actually writing up menus for myself in advance. So far it seems to be helping me remember to use up all my vegetables.
There are also veggie-intensive sandwiches. I don’t think it would take very many hummus and cucumber sandwiches to use up a small cucumber, for example. A whole red pepper can probably be used up by 2 sandwiches, especially when roasted. Same with avocado (minus the roasting). And wraps can materially increase the veggie-to-bread ratio; you could probably use a whole avocado in a single wrap.
Yay indeed. It makes we very happy to find out I’ve given advice someone finds usable. Make sure to also let me know if you tried something and it didn’t work.
What have you actually tried to train your brain to reclassify them?
Example training task: There is a deck containing images of various food items, vegetables/fruits, whatever you currently classify vegetables like (non edible plants maybe?), and completely random objects. Sort it into edible and non-edible piles as fast as possible, without thinking and while maybe listening to an interesting podcast or radio or somehting to distract you.
No idea if that’d work, but if you think up 20 exercises like that at least one of them should work.
Alternate direction: focus in on what’s in your mind when you avoid a vegetable. You may be able to discover what’s driving the alief that vegetables aren’t food.
It seems to be exactly the same mechanism that’s involved in not eating banana peels and bugs, as far as I can tell. It’s not that the mechanism itself is broken, it’s that it’s using a non-optimal data set that doesn’t seem inclined to update easily.
(Hmm… maybe the mechanism for updating the dataset is broken, or generating bad metadata—if it has vegetables tagged as ‘technically food, but not good to eat unless there’s a famine’, that could have the observed results...)
Are you medically able to fast? Consuming nothing but water for about, oh, 16 hours (including sleep time) tends to make whatever I eat next taste really good, without triggering nausea based on having discontinued my production of digestive enzymes.
I eat less fruit and vegetables than I should. This seems to mostly or entirely be because I don’t reliably alieve that they’re food.
This manifests in a few different ways: When shopping, most fruit or veggies or fruit- or veggie-containing things don’t register as things that I might consider buying. When choosing something to eat at home, those things don’t register as things that I might want to eat. For most fruit and a few veggies, once they’re actually in front of me in a ready-to-eat form (which does not include whole fruit), I’ll eat them, but getting to that point is unreliable. For most veggies and a few kinds of fruit—including several that I actually like—even when they’re in front of me in an edible form I’ll automatically eat around them unless I make a conscious effort to do otherwise, which is irritating to do. I would literally find it easier to eat a sheet of paper than a head of broccoli, even though I actually like the taste of broccoli in many contexts.
Adding fruit or veggies to things in such a way that they can’t be picked around is a partial solution at best—it doesn’t solve the problems of remembering to buy the supplies and actually use them, and if the result smells or tastes like something that registers strongly enough as not-food, I’ll have the same kind of hard time eating it. Further complications: I prefer not to put a lot of effort into my meals, and I have trouble swallowing rice, which means that things in the ‘frozen rice with broccoli bits and cheese’ genre are not good for me to rely on. (Tasty, though.)
I’m not actually sure that this is my true rejection. Even if it is, I’m prickly enough about taking advice that I might reject some on general principles, though I seem to have gotten better about that in the last few years.
Since you say you’re prickly about advice, I will try just giving you the reasons for my suggestions and omit the actual suggestions when possible. Please let me know if that way of phrasing is actually helpful, or just annoyingly indirect.
On buying more vegetables
I’ve heard that people buy more food if they shop while hungry. People also are more likely to interpret more things as edible if they are hungry.
I find I buy more vegetables when I am somewhere that sells primarily vegetables, like a farmer’s market. At the farmer’s market, there is also the illusion of scarcity since it’s a once-a-week stuff (even though I could buy similar things in the grocery store later), so I stock up a lot.
Some friends of mine subscribe to CSA or other vegetable-delivery programs, which takes pretty much all of the effort out of it.
On eating the vegetables you’ve bought
It is possible to make a meal or part of a meal that is nearly 100% vegetables.
After experimenting with a few methods of preparing them, I found that roasting works for me as a way of preparing solo vegetables; most vegetables taste good to me when coated with olive oil and some light seasoning (and sometimes some grated Romano or Parmagiano cheese), and roasted. It gives them a satisfying, almost meaty/buttery taste. It is also pretty easy and doesn’t require a lot of time once I got the timing right and stopped needing to keep peeking into the oven to determine doneness. If you want some more specific roasting suggestions I am happy to provide them. But you may find other preparations are more appealing.
Even if you prefer to mix veggies with non-veggies, I suspect you wouldn’t be able to eat around veggies in a smooth or fine-textured soup very easily (e.g. cream of broccoli, carrot soup, gazpacho). And you’d have to decompose a sandwich to avoid eating a cross-section of the ingredients.
Related question: Vegetables are more easily visually identifiable in some foods than others. For example, in something like pasta with broccoli, you can see the broccoli pieces and they are obviously separate from the pasta. On the other hand, in something like a curry or stew, it’s not always easy to see which lumps are meat, which lumps are something like potato or cheese, and which lumps are veggies, since they’re all covered in sauce. Do you find you eat around the veggies to a different extent in foods that differ along this dimension, or is it a pretty uniform phenomenon?
Actually helpful. :)
There is a farmer’s market here, but it’s hard for me to get to—I don’t drive, and it’s on the other side of town. I will definitely see about getting a ride over there sometime soon, though—I’d actually forgotten that it’s that time of the year again. (Om nom nom blueberries. ^.^)
Last I checked (over a year ago), there wasn’t one of those close enough to deliver to me. Also my impression is that they don’t allow their customers to customize their orders very much. I should probably check again, though, anyway.
I’ll consult Google about this later.
This would be hit or miss—there’s a very high chance that any soup like that would smell like not-food. (Cream of broccoli soup is one of the contexts in which broccoli smells like not-food, if I remember correctly.)
The problem with this is that most traditional sandwich veggies have a short enough shelf life that it’d be silly for me to buy them—they’d go bad before I remembered to use them. Experimenting with non-traditional sandwich veggies might be useful, though.
It can, though soup isn’t a good test case—if I know that there are veggies in soup, I’ll make a point of identifying any chunks of things before I eat them, and if I don’t know that there are veggies in the soup, I’ll notice in pretty short order in most cases. What does work is things like casseroles where there aren’t obvious chunks at all—and especially if it’s not obvious in the construction phase of the casserole that something non-food-ish is being added. Casserole is one of the few contexts where I’ll eat mushrooms, for example—they’re usually clearly not food, but one of my favorite casseroles involves canned cream of mushroom soup, which is fine so long as I don’t think about it too hard, even if I end up finding a mushroom chunk or two, because nothing that looks like mushrooms goes into it.
You may be out of CSA range, but if you’re willing to forgo freshness Amazon.com now lets you subscribe to consumable items like this and receive them on a regular basis, for a 15% discount.
Insofar as remembering is important, this might be relevant: I’m experimenting with actually writing up menus for myself in advance. So far it seems to be helping me remember to use up all my vegetables.
There are also veggie-intensive sandwiches. I don’t think it would take very many hummus and cucumber sandwiches to use up a small cucumber, for example. A whole red pepper can probably be used up by 2 sandwiches, especially when roasted. Same with avocado (minus the roasting). And wraps can materially increase the veggie-to-bread ratio; you could probably use a whole avocado in a single wrap.
There is now a box that smells like the yummy bits of a farmer’s market sitting on my stove. Yay!
Yay indeed. It makes we very happy to find out I’ve given advice someone finds usable. Make sure to also let me know if you tried something and it didn’t work.
What have you actually tried to train your brain to reclassify them?
Example training task: There is a deck containing images of various food items, vegetables/fruits, whatever you currently classify vegetables like (non edible plants maybe?), and completely random objects. Sort it into edible and non-edible piles as fast as possible, without thinking and while maybe listening to an interesting podcast or radio or somehting to distract you.
No idea if that’d work, but if you think up 20 exercises like that at least one of them should work.
Alternate direction: focus in on what’s in your mind when you avoid a vegetable. You may be able to discover what’s driving the alief that vegetables aren’t food.
It seems to be exactly the same mechanism that’s involved in not eating banana peels and bugs, as far as I can tell. It’s not that the mechanism itself is broken, it’s that it’s using a non-optimal data set that doesn’t seem inclined to update easily.
(Hmm… maybe the mechanism for updating the dataset is broken, or generating bad metadata—if it has vegetables tagged as ‘technically food, but not good to eat unless there’s a famine’, that could have the observed results...)
Are you medically able to fast? Consuming nothing but water for about, oh, 16 hours (including sleep time) tends to make whatever I eat next taste really good, without triggering nausea based on having discontinued my production of digestive enzymes.