Eat Our Veggies

Penny Thoughts provides eleven tips for eating more and better vegetables.  Every one of them makes sense, but I remain skeptical.

Let me start with a sincere compliment:  We love good fresh vegetables and always are looking to eat more.  So I very much appreciate the impulse behind this post.

Yet while these suggestions makes sense in an abstract way, and may even work for a childless couple of a certain income range and living with access to good veggies, they break down somewhat in my life.  There are two major barriers to eating more good vegetables, and they are predictable: time and money.

1.  The bulk of these suggestions take time that we simply do not have.  With three children and two working parents – even when one blogs instead of doing more productive things – who has time (or space in the kitchen) to keep a dry board?  Menu planning?  Sounds like a great idea, but how much time does it take to do?

2.  Vegetable preparation is time consuming.  There is simply no way to get around this.  After a day at work the last thing I want to do is wash, peel, and chop enough great vegetables to feed five people.  Given that possibility or the option of opening a bag of frozen vegetables, guess which is often going to win.

3.  I’ve always been attracted to the idea of picking up great vegetables on the way home from work that I could then whip up that night – the European model.  But where?  I could keep track of which farmer’s market is where within striking distance locally on each day and precisely when (i.e., they are typically there only for a few hours), but that would require building my day’s schedule around vegetables.  Plus I would have to bring the car to work, which strikes me as a perverse way to live -  the cost for good organic vegetables is taking a car rather than a bike?

4.  That leaves Whole Foods, which is convenient although it does not solve the car problem.  The vegetables are reasonably good, but expensive!  It is one thing to buy enough designer greens for a salad for me and my wife, but to regularly feed our ravenous children at such a level would require further excursions into our sinking home equity.

5.  So now I’m at the fallback option, weekly trips to the supermarket.  Its convenient and relatively inexpensive.  The vegetables often largely suck, and carry a whiff of all the bad things that taint modern agriculture.  And yes, every week I throw out rotten produce.

I am not giving up.  I do stop at farmers’ markets when I can, and I try to minimize waste.  I would love to eat a fresh, local, ripe tomato everyday rather than that thing I get at the supermarket.  What I need, though, are real solutions for real people.

Little League, Pride, and Shame

Baseball season just ended. Thank God.

For 6-8 weeks each year, little league consumes us. With two children in different leagues, we often shuttle from one game to the next (they are on different fields in different parts of town), trying to show our support for both kids. For several weeks we need to abandon completely the very idea of family dinners, as we find ourselves at games or shuttling to and from practices every day of the week.

I am not knocking little league, although I approach and sit through the season with a degree of dread. The truth is that my kids love playing; it gets them outdoors and active (in a baseball kind of way); develops skills; and reinforces all the right values. The coaches in our league are dedicated and great with the kids, and I will not hesitate to send one back next year.

One, though, just finished his little league career. He managed to do so without a single hit over the past two years. He made plays (including some spectacular catches), walked on balls with some frequency, had a good positive attitude, and was generally an asset to his team. But he couldn’t hit. Maybe he made contact three or four times over two years.

I am proud of this son in so many ways, but whenever he got up to bat, and struck out, I felt a swell of emotions that I recognize as not particularly healthy or useful. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was ashamed. My son’s inability to hit shamed me. And sometimes after games I vented that shame on him with comments sharp enough that I would regret them later.

Nobody needs to tell me that I shouldn’t feel ashamed. I know, and I am ashamed of my own response. It is not that I am afraid of looking bad in front of all the other parents and the dads of kids who can hit, although there is a small degree of that – of course I want my son to excel so that I can stand a little taller in their eyes. Rather, his lack of ability here recalls for me for my own short experience playing organized baseball as a child.

I couldn’t hit either. Athletically, in fact, I was probably a good deal less gifted than my hitless son. And I suffered dearly for it. My teammates and coaches were not at all supportive, and the combination of failing at something (which rarely happened, except in sports) and being mocked and taunted for it, verged on traumatic for me. Part of me still hurts and seethes over that, and part of me wants my children to succeed in order to redeem my own failure. When my son strikes out, I do too. And although his teammates and coaches encourage him afterwards, I feel the blood rise as somewhere very deep in me I am being taunted.

My son ended his season feeling great. I, though, was ashamed, primarily at my own shame. And I look forward – with dread again – to his younger sibling’s games next year.