Start Seeing Vegetables

I've hit the point of mid-winter ennui, when a snowfall is no longer novel and pretty, and I crave greenery and the scent of living soil. A trip to the conservatory is typically on my agenda this time of year. I walk through the doors and inhale the smell of palm trees and orchids then look around to see my fellow Minnesotans standing with their eyes shut in rapture, soaking in the sort of water-drenched air that makes us grumble in July.

Purty, Ain't It?

I haven't made it down to the conservatory yet this year, but I've found something closer to home to satisfy my need for green: the produce department.

Our grocery store has all the fruits and vegetables arranged in these neat, lovely little displays, complete with dramatic lighting and intermittent mist to keep the lettuce moist and lovely. Since the colors outside lately range from clean snow to dirty, seeing all those bright greens, reds, oranges, and yellows in the produce section lifts my spirits and makes me want to scoop it all up and take it home. And, since it is a store, that's actually an option.

I loaded up my cart this morning with a bunch of fresh fruits and vegetables, feeling quite proud of how well-behaved I was going to be after last week's Cupcakes as Medicine Festival - to alleviate my sore shoulder and depression about being the sort of old, feeble being who is sidelined for several days by a fall down the steps. 

Once home, I started the vegetable drawer ritual that is throwing away all the delicious, nutritious stuff I bought last week that has gone bad from neglect to make room for this week's bounty.  And that's when I had my epiphany. We throw away a crazy amount of fresh fruit and vegetables at our house. It's wasteful. It's a shame. We really ought to do something about that.

So I picked apart the problem and identified two barriers that keep us from eating the good stuff - and propel us to just order a pizza, stop at McD's, et cetera.

First Issue: Convenience. Neither of us is in the mood to clean and chop vegetables when we get home from work - isn't that what they make people do in the army for punishment, after all? It's super fast and convenient to shove a McSomething in your maw, so that's what we do. Too often.

Next Issue: Visual Signals. I realized that if I ever wanted to keep spouse and child from eating something - to hide it from them, as it were - I'd stick it in an opaque plastic bag and put it in the bottom drawer of the fridge, which is exactly what we do with every precious veggie we bring in our house. We hide them from ourselves until they go bad.

I put a good hour into the fridge make-over plan that we hope will alleviate our money-wasting, vegetable-tossing bad habits. One of the crisper drawers is now dedicated to grains - bread, bagels, and such; meanwhile, the other drawer is the dairy dept., filled with butter, cheese, cream cheese, et cetera. The vegetables are all cleaned up and put in clear plastic containers (on sale at Target this week) on the main shelf of the fridge. They are the first thing you see when you open the door. Soon we'll all be grabbing an apple or some carrots as a snack instead of opening the fridge, seeing "nothing", and mowing down a bag of chips. Right?

I'm hoping that we can keep this up and that it will prove to be one of those simple yet glorious things that wind up being life-changing and makes me lose twenty pounds, get a book deal, and eventually end up as a guest on Oprah, where she'll gush over me (and my svelte figure) and buy copies of my tome for the whole audience. And they'll cheer wildly at this. Indeed, they will.

Spinach is Beautiful...