I've got enough gazpacho for everyone!
Jun. 17th, 2010 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kleenexwomanSo I'm playing D&D at a friend's house, and he is courteous enough to cook a meal for everyone coming over--broiled steaks, pasta with pesto, and pizza rolls for appetizers. After dinner, everyone is sitting around preparing their characters, and he asks, "Does anyone want more? Steak? Pasta? ...Salad, perhaps?"
Everyone murmurs that they'd like more pasta and pizza rolls, and I say, "Salad sounds great. Let me do something?" He looks slightly flummoxed, so I decide that I will go ahead and make my own salad, because he has the pizza rolls and pasta covered, and they are fairly simple, but assembling a salad can be labor-intenstive. While he does that, I go rummage around in the vegetable drawer. I find some big fat sugar snap peapods, baby tomatoes, baby bell peppers, and cucumbers, and slice up a few things and arrange them on a plate, like so:
He was impressed. "Very orderly!"
"Do you want me to make you one?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I don't eat vegetables."
"No...vegetables? Ever?" I munched. The peas were delicious, the cucumbers okay. The tomatoes had suffered somewhat from being in the fridge (tomatoes do NOT go in the fridge, they lose flavor), but the peppers were tasty and really cool.
"Here's how I think of it," he explained, as we went back into the living room. "Meat...is good. Vegetables are the opposite of meat. Therefore, vegetables are bad."
I was going to argue that his premise AND reasoning AND conclusion was all wrong, because it would have been one of the few times I would have been able to out-argue this particular friend, but then we started the game and outwitting Daleks was more of a priority than discussing nutrition.
But what the fuck? We are not talking about someone who lives in a food desert and has no access to fresh foods or time to cook; we are talking about an upper-middle-class person who clearly knows how to cook and has been doing so for a while, whose parents had a wide range of ingredients and pre-packaged foods in their fridge and pantry. The sad thing is that this is not the first friend I have had who has utterly despised vegetables and refused to eat them on what appears to be general principle. (And it's usually geeks, and it's usually geek guys, at least in terms of people who've actually announced this as though it's something to be proud of.)
I don't get it. Not all vegetables taste the same, not all of them have the same texture. A bell pepper feels and tastes different from a cucumber from a carrot from romaine lettuce. Why all vegetables? Does anyone have any insight on this phenomenon? Some sort of food-related rebellion or trauma? Unusual sensitivity to fiber? Misguided machismo?
Everyone murmurs that they'd like more pasta and pizza rolls, and I say, "Salad sounds great. Let me do something?" He looks slightly flummoxed, so I decide that I will go ahead and make my own salad, because he has the pizza rolls and pasta covered, and they are fairly simple, but assembling a salad can be labor-intenstive. While he does that, I go rummage around in the vegetable drawer. I find some big fat sugar snap peapods, baby tomatoes, baby bell peppers, and cucumbers, and slice up a few things and arrange them on a plate, like so:
He was impressed. "Very orderly!"
"Do you want me to make you one?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I don't eat vegetables."
"No...vegetables? Ever?" I munched. The peas were delicious, the cucumbers okay. The tomatoes had suffered somewhat from being in the fridge (tomatoes do NOT go in the fridge, they lose flavor), but the peppers were tasty and really cool.
"Here's how I think of it," he explained, as we went back into the living room. "Meat...is good. Vegetables are the opposite of meat. Therefore, vegetables are bad."
I was going to argue that his premise AND reasoning AND conclusion was all wrong, because it would have been one of the few times I would have been able to out-argue this particular friend, but then we started the game and outwitting Daleks was more of a priority than discussing nutrition.
But what the fuck? We are not talking about someone who lives in a food desert and has no access to fresh foods or time to cook; we are talking about an upper-middle-class person who clearly knows how to cook and has been doing so for a while, whose parents had a wide range of ingredients and pre-packaged foods in their fridge and pantry. The sad thing is that this is not the first friend I have had who has utterly despised vegetables and refused to eat them on what appears to be general principle. (And it's usually geeks, and it's usually geek guys, at least in terms of people who've actually announced this as though it's something to be proud of.)
I don't get it. Not all vegetables taste the same, not all of them have the same texture. A bell pepper feels and tastes different from a cucumber from a carrot from romaine lettuce. Why all vegetables? Does anyone have any insight on this phenomenon? Some sort of food-related rebellion or trauma? Unusual sensitivity to fiber? Misguided machismo?
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Date: 2010-06-17 09:11 am (UTC)omg, spinach is my vegetable frenemy. I love it and it's so good for you, but it goes bad so fast that I always have to eat a whole bag in two days and then suffer amazing digestion issues. I really need to learn to make good creamed spinach. Oh, and red bell peppers and beets--they're both so sweet. Nature's candy.
I know guys who are very proud of their prowess with steaks or their ability to down a zillion Nuclear Death Chicken Wings, but geek guys are the only dudes I know who actively eschew vegetables. Perhaps it is overcompensation!
It's so weird that our ideas about gendering food basically haven't changed for a hundred years, though. Even Popeye couldn't make vegetables cool for dudes. I would imagine that dark green, strong-tasting vegetables like kale or broccoli or spinach would be gendered masculine, but no.