Take care of your vegetables and they will take care of you

Take care of your vegetables, and they will take care of you.

What do I mean by this?

People acquire vegetables and then take them home and put them in a refrigerator. I you only have one vegetable in your refrigerator – maybe a head of lettuce or a bunch of broccoli – there isn’t that much to take care of. But this is sad: Not having an array of vegetables, all different varieties of which are wonderful and good to have, is sad. Even more sad is avoiding having vegetables out of some misplaced desire to be clean, or else to be lazy because it means less to take care of.

But the healthy option is to have many vegetables. But having many vegetables means having to care for them all.

“Care for vegetables? What is that?”

Yes, vegetables need to be cared for. If they are not cared for then they will go bad. Vegetables require the proper containment – for example I like to use multiple bags for vegetables because they last much longer when double-, triple-, or even quadruple-bagged. Sometimes in a container you might have to put in a paper towel to absorb moisture, or a moistened paper towel to retain moisture and prevent drying.

When I come home from the farmers market it is a process I have to go through to properly bag each vegetable. I can easily spend a good 20 minutes carefully bagging and tying each vegetable in preparation for storing in the refrigerator.

Not only that, but after coming from the farmers market is a good time to use up older vegetables which have been in the refrigerator for a while. Thus I tend to eat more veggies on farmers market days not only because I was actually at the market, but because I have extra incentive to use up existing vegetables to make room for new ones.

More than anything, vegetables like to be taken out of the refrigerator and used every day. Again, out of laziness or sloth people may avoid the work of taking out all their vegetables, opening all the bags, and taking pieces to use in a salad or other dishes. This is very sad. Time spent handling your vegetables is time invested in life itself.

All of these things make up what can be considered good vegetable hygiene, which is a process of discipline and devotion towards vegetables, which is also of course a process of discipline and devotion of one’s own self and also of Earth.

Take care of your vegetables, and they will take care of you. Love it!