Vegetables Are Fun?

Dramatis Personae

Nezu — A nerdy, bear-shaped guy who would much rather write stories, watch anime, and surf Tumblr than cook or exercise.
DK — A taller, slenderer nerdy guy with similar preferences to Nezu. Nezu's housemate and close friend.
Ki — A fit and active woman, good friends with DK and Nezu, who despite her own fondness for writing and watching K-dramas and surfing Tumblr, manages to make time for and enjoy exercise and cooking. She generally despairs over the tragic bachelorness of Nezu and DK's daily diet.

[scene: a conversation]

Nezu: Ki, you will be so proud of me! I have eaten a large bowl of vegetables. Well, lettuce and cabbage and carrot and cilantro salad. Does that count as vegetables?

Ki: I'm very proud. Those are all vegetables.
Nezu: Yay! I wasn't sure if being in a salad invalidated them somehow.
Ki: Salad is generally composed of vegetables?
Nezu: I guess this is true!
DK: ... Nezu, what do you think salad is?
Nezu: Well, lettuces and stuff. I wasn't sure lettuce counted because it's not very nutrient-rich. And carrots taste nice, so they might not count, either.
Ki: Lettuce is like the preeminent vegetable.
DK: This explains much.
Ki: Although iceberg lettuce is not very nutrient-rich, it's true. Romaine is much better and much tastier.
Nezu: This was bibb lettuce, I think, and the salad did have cabbage. Cabbage is inarguably a vegetable. Maybe I need to rethink vegetables. I defined "vegetable" as "food that doesn't taste all that nice that you have to eat anyway" when I was a little kid, and never managed to redefine it.
Ki: Yeah, vegetables are fun!
Nezu: I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far, but at least if I am allowed to define salad as vegetables, I'll stop feeling like I never eat vegetables.

[end scene]

So really, what's my deal with vegetables? I was one of those kids who disliked most vegetables. In fact, I found out as an adult that I'm a supertaster with more tastebuds and a greater sensitivity to bitter flavors than the average person. Supertasters generally don't care for vegetables much. When I was a kid there were a limited number of plant-based foods that I liked, most of them sweet fruits and bland veggies.

(The exceptions were, strangely, spinach and broccoli. Ordinarily those two veggies are anathema to supertasters, but my mom allowed me unlimited lemon juice on those. Despite my aversion to bitter, I am an absolute fiend for sour, always have been. I'll delightedly eat lemons and limes out of hand, and used to beg for those little lemon-shaped squeeze bottles of juice as a treat.)

But in general the vegetables I liked as a kid, my mom explicitly told me didn't count. Corn? Not really a vegetable, but a grain. Celery? a snack, not a vegetable. Potato? Starch, not vegetable. Baked beans? Starch again. Only things like green beans and peas and squash (ewww squash) counted, and I detested them. (Still detest peas and squash - yuk!) Salad, when we had it, which was rarely, wasn't called a vegetable. It was salad, its own special class of food, and again, because it was made of lettuce, didn't really count.

So I've spent my life with the belief that I disliked vegetables, and that if it comes from a plant and I like it, it's not a vegetable. But recently I've encountered vegetables in several settings where I really enjoyed them. Edamame and oshitashi at a Japanese restaurant, baby bok choy in some Chinese takeout, roasted green beans with bacon at a friend's house, lightly steamed carrot coins mixed into mashed potatoes at home. (Ok, that was bachelor food again, but it was healthy bachelor food, and we made the mashed potatoes from scratch.)

So I'm trying to rethink vegetables. Also servings. The package of salad mix I used for the aforementioned meal claimed it had 3.5 servings. It made one meal for me. Add in the half-pint of raspberries I'm eating now, I'll have almost my whole five recommended servings for the day. If I made a smoothie with the strawberries in the freezer and a banana, I'd be over quota for the day, all on things I enjoyed eating.

This is revolutionary.