Suzy Says

Parents, I hate to break it to you, but your kids are probably always going to hate veggies. You may think you’ve convinced little Timmy to eat his greens, but as soon as he hits the dorm room, it’ll be pizza and beer until he has to start pretending to be a real grown-up, too.

Maybe it’s because my mental age hovers anywhere from 12 to 18, but I’m still not that crazy about them. Potatoes are good, but apparently they aren’t vegetables. Disqualified by yumminess, is my guess. Artichokes and asparagus are good, too, especially with melted butter or hollandaise sauce, though that negates the “good for you” thing. Roasted heirloom beets with clementines and mint are nice, and Brussels sprouts roasted with extra-virgin olive oil and dressed with capers and lemon are also good, though you can see where I’m going with this. The yum factor is solely based on the disguise, rather than the actual vegetable.

I mean, who says, “I’d just love a carrot stick?” Who gets as excited about, say, steamed spinach, as they do about a freshly-baked baguette or croissant? The truth is, if it’s good for you, it’s not delicious.

I kind of hate salads, too, to tell you the truth, unless they’re heavily disguised with dressing and/or things that are bad for you, like croutons and cheese. Again, these negate the “good for you” factor, and you’re totally starving an hour later, just like Chinese food, only way less yummy.

Before you start mailing me vitamins and emailing me about scurvy and such-like, I’ll put your minds at ease by telling you I do eat my vegetables, and mostly unadorned at that. But I always eat them first, to get them out of the way, unless I’m in a social situation where I don’t want to display or explain my quirks.

When we were kids, our parents made us drink milk at dinner. We all hated it, and still do, to this day. Pretty much everything we didn’t like back then, we don’t like now, but then, we are a remarkably picky bunch. My method of dealing with the lactic grossness was to drink it down as fast as humanly possible and then eat something to remove the resulting milk slime from my tongue. This backfired on me once, when I was halfway through before realizing the milk was past its prime, but to this day, I still get the worst things out of the way first, whether it’s work or vegetables.