As a kid, I had a tremendous advantage. My parents had already raised seven kids so they didn’t have much willpower by the time I came around.
I didn’t grow up without discipline, but it seems as if they simply gave up trying to maintain an advantage in certain areas of life.
One of these was certainly vegetables. I really had no fear of having to eat my vegetables if I didn’t want to. I don’t really know how all of this developed. It just did. I said I didn’t want to eat peas or corn or anything like that. They didn’t have the energy to fight it. My siblings protested.
As far as I’m concerned, I was merely getting some sort of karmic payback for all the torture I endured from my older brothers. They may have had to eat lima beans, but I got wedgies. Lots of them.
Anyway, over the years, I have developed a reputation for hating vegetables. Mainly because I make fun of vegetables. In reality, I talk a good game.
I eat more vegetables than ever before now. Granted, the list is not that long, but the situation has greatly improved since my childhood. I willingly add certain veggies to my plate when we have them for dinner. I might even go for seconds of sometimes. I sometimes eat a salad as my whole meal.
My wife jokingly tries to get me to eat some her favorites which are not on my list. Just recently, she took the joke a little further and snuck some spinach – which I don’t dislike that much – into a soup she made and tried to pass it off as something else. I totally busted her on that.
I enjoy the veggies I enjoy. Let’s just leave it at that. Then, something happened recently.
A friend gave Maria a rutabaga. She had to tell me it was a rutabaga because I had never seen a rutabaga. In fact, you could probably have convinced me that no such vegetable existed and the word was just a piece of nonsense.
But we had a big honking rutabaga in the house and had to do something with it. In a moment of weakness, I agreed to eat rutabaga. Maria promised me that she would find a recipe which I would enjoy, and she did. I even took leftovers with me to work one day.
Like a good gambler in Vegas, she decided to press her luck. That’s how I ended up eating a dinner built around cabbage.
Sure, it had some meat and rice and a few other things, but I sat down and actually ate almost all of my serving. I didn’t even have to choke it down. It didn’t taste that bad.
I don’t even know who I am anymore. Especially since I will probably try rutabaga and cabbage again at some point. At some point, I’m going to have to go eat a big plate of chicken wings to restore the balance in my blood stream.