Soiled: The Vegetable as Nemesis

“Mother Earth provides and we are blessed to receive her bounty as nourishment. But watch out! That which grows from soil tastes like soil.” – Starfire Dickinson

The above quote is wholly invented, but Starfire Dickinson is a real person. In other words Starfire Dickinson is also completely made up. But you’ll agree the opening sentiment is familiar. The main problem as I see it is that vegetables taste like soil. There is a lot of sympathetic vegetable talk, sometimes even in the pages of this otherwise sensible publication. But we all know that Shakespearean revulsion of eating  a vegetable. “No more spinach, mom. My gorge rises at it!” Culinary fabulists write with great aplomb on the glory of the vegetable. It is all a terrible ruse, as any of the area’s master chefs will confirm. What follows is a needed dose of remedial honesty. 

Turnips

Horses eat turnips with abandon. Big scary horse teeth seek the dirt-covered turnip as repulsive horse lips grasp and roll the thing around. Yuck! The turnip may be a holdover from the earliest days of “agriculture” when we felt obliged to eat whatever popped up out the dirt. We’ve largely transcended this foolishness. Let’s celebrate our triumph with SPAM and an Otter Pop.

Beets

Beets are one of those unnerving veggies that has a queasy sweetness to it. The deep red ochre color doesn’t help, either. It’s like looking into the very center of your most repulsive organ. There are not a lot of things humans agree on these days, so it is heartening to know that a steaming plate of beet discs in the middle of the table is enough to make our collective flesh crawl. 

Artichoke

There is an old joke whose laborious payoff is “Arty chokes three for a dollar.” As awful as that punchline is, the “vegetable” itself is awfuler. The cursed artichoke says all that need be said about the human race’s determination to make use of every terrible thing made available to us by a frankly mischievous Mother Nature. “Let’s see if they’ll eat THIS thing.” The artichoke is beautiful to look at. Then you get down to business and you have to scrape this idiot thistle with your incisors to get anything off it at all. 

Radish

Here is a root vegetable that tastes like a root. Not good. Sometimes the radish provider will hand a bunch of these things to you and the hairy little secondary roots are still attached. They are like cobwebs, but fibrous and alien. And this goes in the mouth? Another favorite of horse teeth.

Brussels Sprouts

It’s like a pea grown in Chernobyl. Radiant with the stuff that makes the pea so frightening, you pop the travel brochure-inspired “Brussels sprout”into your mouth and it’s a mish-mash of lawn clipping, forest floor, and some unidentifiable, pungent other flavor it’s best not to dwell on. Worst of all? Look closely at these things and you see that they are clenched leaves. Get it away from me.

Butternut Squash

Butter. Nut. Squash. Two nouns and a violent verb, like that makes any sense. These things look like the sci-fi movie set decorator’s prop pods found lying around the crashed spaceship on Planet X. Pass the butternut squash. Just not to me.

Eggplant

Also inexplicably called the aubergine (?!), this unreasonably purple monstrosity is all show and no Go. Spongy, bitter, and mushy; eggplant is the gag-reflex trifecta. Impossible to eat and too big and unwieldy to throw with any accuracy. 

Mushrooms

Not satisfied to be frightened by them as they sprout like pale hellish invaders from the compost-carpeted forest floor, we want to bring these fungi right onto the dinner table. “No, don’t put your feet up there, Billy. We’ve reserved this space for fungus.” These beige freaks have gills. THEY HAVE GILLS.  And what are they anyway? Plant? Animal? YES. Eat hearty.

Veggie Fever

Whether it’s the weather, the movie stars and swimming pools, the placard-pumping activist army, or that patchouli-scented species of spirituality typified by drum circles, hula hoops and chiffon, we Californians are fussy, eccentric, and confused. We’ll gently rescue a kitchen spider and free him in the garden then retire for a lunch of bone broth. Our enlightened nature is not yet fully formed.  

Nor will it be as long as we pretend the Vegetable is meant to be eaten. The day our hotshot scientists figure out how to infuse gravy with the Stuff of Life is the day they start earning their keep around here. I won’t hold my breath.