On Vegetables

It would be a lie to say that I tried to eat healthily. An attempt to do something requires at least a vague idea of what the task at hand might involve. To pluck an entirely random example from the ether, trying not to buy any more clothes before the New Year is just one such known entity; to me at any rate. The mornings peering into an evermore depressing wardrobe; the slightly nauseous, sweaty feeling whenever I get too close to the high street and temptation; the obscenely gratifying stolen moments with retailers’ websites (I know I’m safe there. Paying online is so much faff – I mean how many digits am I meant to type in? Thank goodness I’m incapable of memorising 16 digit sequences). Yes, the attempt to stave off end-of-year self-regulatory financial supernovae is, in my case, a well-known and well-trudged one.

But this here ‘healthy eating’ is somink else. Calorie counting, Regular exercise, and avoiding sugar, cream, fat, butter, joy, Carbs, Processed Things, Refined Things, Fast Food – these are the concerns, I believe, that do a healthy eater make. Always one to (over?)analyse, my questions about healthy eating all start with ‘yes, but…’. Yes, but what about Carbs before 6pm? What about one’s calcium intake? What about the poor cows that’ll go out of business if I stop buying cream for my coffee?

One of my bigger concerns is regarding vegetables. They are a Good Thing, verily. But when does a vegetable stop being a vegetable? You hear terrifying things about vegetables losing most of their vitamins within FIVE MINUTES of them leaving the safety of the vine/stem/root/earth/home. Then if you take off the skin, well then, you might as well buy yourself a bacon double cheesburger for all the good that be-picked, be-skinned ex-healthy article will do you. Add to that the inevitable loss of Good Things in the Good Vegetable that happens when you reheat or coat in a Bad substance like tomato passata that has some sugar in it or, no, please no, some salt (god forbid). I find myself at an impasse – often holding a packet of Maldon Sea Salt in one hand and five 100g packets of 85% chocolate in the other – stuck in aporia and thinking ‘Well What Is the Bloody Point?’.

This all came to a head, as is so often the case, as I was contemplating some carrot and celery soup.

Lots of carrots (skin on), lots of celery (most mud washed off), three or four onions, garlic and stock – surely this should be a Very Healthy Thing? Yet I can’t help feeling doubt. Is this bowl of soup one of The Five? Really?? And even then, aside from the health making properties inherent in a carrot-with-skin-on in a soup, it is a sad fact that said soup inevitably comes with hot buttered toast. Buttered toast probably cancels out whatever one of The Five there was in the skins of the carrots I so earnestly safeguarded in the soup-making. My brow was furrowed. I needed more evidence.

After a truly wicked evening with a Dominos Pizza, I approached the task of the following day’s dinner like a sinner after Confession, filled with the desire to lead a spotless and healthy culinary life henceforth. Stir-fry with All The Vegetables In The World.

But then, what with the soy sauce (it has so much SALT in it and SALT is BAD), oil (OIL IS BAD), and the excessive cooking in a wok (it was a stir-fry ended up being rather too big for a single wok and so dividing of the stir-fry had to occur – the necessary faff led to many a squidgy carrot and over-cooked French bean), surely all those lovely vitamins must have run away to join the Circus or something. 

 Foiled again.

More vegetables featured in this evening’s supper. I could swear the courgette with its back to us is giving me a reproachful look ("I mean WHITE Rice – what on earth was I Thinking??"), its soggy seeded interior collapsing in on itself in defeat as all the Good Things evaporate away.

With the Christmas season upon us and the weight of society telling me that binges on chocolate by the advent calendar is ‘just what happens this time of year’, what is to stop a poor unfortunate and uneducated soul like myself leaping from this veggie-ledge and plunging into chocolate-soaked, butter infused depravity?

I could ask for an appointment with a nutritionist for Christmas, I suppose. But I’ve heard they make it all up anyway.