"Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness."
--Michael Pollan, The New York Times Magazine, Unhappy Meals, 01/28/07
The health benefits of gardening are legion, including but not limited to an increase in exercise and a decrease in stress, but the chief and foremost thing we think of when the subject is vegetable gardening is vegetables.
Even without our mothers’ voices in the back of our heads telling us to eat all our vegetables, we know instinctively they are good for us. And gardening is, quite frankly, all about growing as many of them as we can, and subsisting off of them as much 
as possible.
Yet most people do not eat vegetables in sufficient quantities, often by orders of magnitude. This fact was brought home in a scandalously obvious way recently when Mr. Myrtle Maintenance skipped his lunchtime jog due to soreness in his knees (getting old is a bad idea –we recommend not doing it), and ate lunch with several co-workers.
The lunchtime topic of conversation? Vegetarianism. Mr. Myrtle Maintenance and one of his coworkers are vegetarians; the vast majority of the table, as is true of the vast majority of the population of Texas, comprised not just omnivores, but practical carnivores, whose only nonmeat intake consists of potatoes and processed white flour products, with heavy doses of dairy fat and processed sugars. Throw in a few pickles and onions, maybe a slice or two of tomato, and some ketchup.
You know the kind of meal we are talking about.
“I could never be a vegetarian,” one person said. “It’s not so much that I have to eat meat. It’s just that I don’t like vegetables.”
The kicker? Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s vegetarian co-worker replied: “I don’t like vegetables either. I don’t really eat that many of them.”
Now, we are hardly fundamentalists on this question. Obviously, as prominently as chickens feature in our homescape, you can reckon right off the top of your head that we are, at a minimum, oviverous. And we really, really like cheese. So, call us lacto-ovo vegetarians, just as a starting point. Throw in the fact that we will eat fish on occasion, and we are already all the way out to the realm of pescetarian, so we are a long way from your dyed-in-the-wool raw food vegan purist. We are only “vegetarian” in the sense that, unlike your typical denizen of Texas, we don’t actually have raw, bloody red meat dripping from our slack-jawed maws at the present time.
That having been said… we find it incomprehensible that you can be a “vegetarian” without eating vegetables.
How in the world is that supposed to work?
When you stop to think about it, though, this bizarre concept is more than possible. Not healthy, sure, but perfectly plausible. The amount of prepackaged food out there comprised almost entirely of processed flours and sugars is almost limitless. Throw in a few soy-based meat substitutes, some tomato paste, and some high-fructose corn syrup, and you’ve got yourself a McVegetarian feast.
You also haven’t solved much in the way of health problems, which brings us back to the garden….
We have not invested a lot of time in research on the “Slow Food” movement, but that is not for a lack of sympathy. The idea that a revolt against fast food – started almost as a joke in an Italian community fed up with McDonald’s attempt to ‘feed them up’ – should be named “Slow Food” is too delicious for a couple of English majors to pass up. It’s just that the time spent reading about it would tend to detract from the time involved in actually living it. We don’t do the whole scrapbooking thing for similar reasons.
Still, a brief perusal of slow food articles turned up the Michael Pollan quote we started with, and since he is one of our favorite food and garden writers, we’re running with the idea he has so ably expressed: healthy eating is not about marketing or packaging. Healthy eating is about healthy food, and healthy food is best harvested from healthy plants, which are found in healthy gardens.
This idea is not limited to vegetarian food, of course. Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma describes the difficulties involved in choosing to eat meat – and led to harsh and, we believe unwarranted, criticism of Pollan from vegetarian purists – but those difficulties are not excessively onerous, if you are so inclined to overcome them. The bottom line, though, is that whether animal, vegetable or mineral (well, maybe not mineral…), the good stuff is produced at home. Barring that, it is produced close to home.
Our 2012 New Year's resolutions, like many folks’, deal in great measure with personal health. We are looking into all sorts of unexplored corners of our personal dietary habits to ferret out the improvements we know we need to make. Among those things Myrtle Maintenance Personnel will be doing more of this year:
- Getting off of sugar. As much as possible, we aim to use stevia and honey instead. To that end, we will be planting stevia in the herb garden a little over a month from now, and the minute our tax refund was deposited, we built a top bar beehive.
- Maximizing veggies-shot-in-the-yard in our diets. We currently have spinach, arrugula and chard in harvest, but this is as barren as we plan on being for… oh, the rest of our lives. We had tomatoes ripening on the vine as recently as the week before Christmas, and this next fall we intend to start making use of a low tunnel to keep right on going straight through the moderate freezes which are the worst we can expect in our garden.
- We will be harvesting broccoli, carrots and kohlrabi in few weeks, with fava beans coming maybe a week or two after that, and then pretty much a full menu of produce for the foreseeable future.
- Eating as much fruit as we can lift. We have not yet solved our winter needs, though some potted citrus that we can move in and out when we have sub-freezing temperatures are on the “to do” list; otherwise, we have various berries or fruit coming in from late April through October. Blackberries, peaches, plums, pomegranates, and several varieties of melon all fit into any dietician’s list of “yes, you can have as much of that as you want” and, apart from the labor involved in planting and harvesting, they are all free.
There are a ton of other items on our respective health checklists, but none strike us as being quite so easy – and enjoyable – as those related to food we raise ourselves. As a caveat, that food which we cannot grow on our own, we plan to purchase in increasing quantities from local sources. Where local varieties of food are not available, local distributors will be our vendors of choice (ex. The Farm Patch on College Ave. in Bryan carries items which are not always local – like pineapple, for instance – but is a preferable source of produce when compared to the large chain grocery stores).
Whatever your food preferences, we urge you to be as deliberate as possible in the new year in making them as good for you as you can envision. Happy eating, and…
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