I Hate Vegetables!
I hate vegetables! They make me sick. I hate to have them in my mouth, much less chew them. I can’t stand even to look at them, and their smell (cooked or not) nauseates me. Don’t even think of inviting me for dinner if there are vegetables within ten miles of your house. My hatred is so intense that I would rather die of beriberi or scurvy than eat a vegetable.
I do not know why I hate vegetables. I was born with this loathing so it may be something like being born left handed rather than right-handed. It may be that my taste buds were mis-arranged in the womb, I don’t know, but the fact remains they make me SICK! I do believe that they are “good” for you, but avoiding gagging and puking have a much higher priority for me over ingesting this “goodness.”
No matter how hard she tried, my dear mother failed miserably in her efforts to teach me to eat, much less enjoy, vegetables. Every dinner meal she brought forth a nice roasted serving of beef, pork, lamb, or chicken usually accompanied by some delicious form of potatoes – fries, oven roasted (my favorite), baked, or mashed. But then with these delights came the bowls of cauliflower, broccoli, lima beams, Brüssel sprouts, succotash, green beans, carrots, or worse, if possible, like asparagus, kale, beets, Swiss chard, and other noxious weeds. Fortunately, my mother didn’t do salads, thank God!
The training method used by my mother, Uberfraulein Clara von Turnipsky, was wrapped up in one simple rule: You cannot leave the table until everything has been eaten. No desserts unless rule one was obeyed to the letter! If the vegetable du jour was not eaten at the the meal, it would be there for me next- and the next – until it was finally eaten. Sieg Heil! Every fork load or spoonful of a vegetable for me was like someone sticking their finger down my throat, causing me to gag followed by a wave of nausea.
I used several tactics to survive without barfing on the spot. The one I used most frequently was “milking” – defined as swallowing the offending vegetable whole with a mouthful of milk. This technique allowed me to avoid actually tasting the fodder favored by the noisy righteous vegan and vegetarian fanatics and their ilk. You can imagine how much milk I drank at one dinner meal!
Another tactic I used to escape vegetable poisoning was “packing” where the offensive item was tucked under the edge of the plate giving the illusion that my plate was indeed “clean.” This tactic required that I got very involved in “clearing” the table so as to pull off the scam. Another site for “packing” were the many ledges found underneath our ornate dining table. You can imagine what a crusty, moldy area this was after a while.
The final but probably the most important help I received came from “Tippie,” our family’s faithful golden retriever. They say that man’s best friend is a dog; but in my case Tippie was much more than a friend – she saved my life by eating the vegetables I dropped to her under the table that I otherwise would have “milked” and then retched up later. (Footnote: No good deed goes unpunished as Tippie died prematurely from a strangulated bowel caused by eating too many green, fibrous vegetables. Sorry, old pal: it was either you or me.)
Fortunately, time does march on and somewhere around the age of twenty, I moved out of my mother’s jurisdiction and was liberated from her Vegetable Indoctrination Camp. The only green thing on my dining table thereafter has been the five dollar bill that I leave for a tip for the waitress.
As the years rolled by, however, with so many people ranging from dietary experts to faddists, hustlers, and quacks – all exclaiming and propagandizing the benefits of eating “right” – by first dumping the carbs, eschewing the sweets, going organic, and ridding the diet of gluten and lactose – and then to totally center on eating vegetables, I finally caved in!
But it was only by an act of God that my surrender came to be: one day I was reading the dietary laws in Leviticus and discovered that God brought forth the BLENDER! before he said, “Let there be vegetables on the earth!”
I am now able to eat- actually drink – any an all vegetables (except beets) by tossing them into a blender (Thank you , Lord!), then adding V-8 juice, an apple, and perhaps some fruity bottled orange- pomegranate juice, all working to mask all the hideous characteristics of the submerged, disintegrated vegetables swimming in my smoothie.
P.S. I still look and feel the same – which isn’t much to begin with anyway, so what did I accomplish?