Classification Essay My LIfe Without Veg-Canned, Frozen, or Fresh

I don't like vegetables, it is my least favorite food category. I blame my dislike for veg on my parents who made me eat them when I was younger. They would stack them on top of each other, boil them together, mash them, and serve them up like some prize winner dessert. I would always save them for last and never found a vegetable that I couldn't live without. As a matter of fact, the Sunday dinner staples was boiled dinner, all the vegetables in the pot with a corned beef. When it was served everything tasted like cabbage. Cabbage speaks to my gag reflexs and knows how to make it sing.

As I was bringing up my children, I knew my distaste for vegetables should remain my own. I wanted my children to form their own opinions of vegetables. So to not influence them, I became "allergic" to vegetables. I didn't even know how to cook or season them properly to make them taste appetizing. I do remember we didn't have a lot of money and the cheapest way to buy vegetables were in a can. As we became more established we would buy frozen veg, and finally right before they left home we discovered farm stands were a wonderful way to get fresh vegetables and my children seemed to love them!

Can vegetables have a lot of water and I remember I would dump it out and add my own. This was my attempt and making them healthier for my children. Surely the water in the can was processed with salt and by products that I wouldn't want them eating. I would rinse them off and place them in a small pan and heat with water. My children would eat them but I never got rave reviews. As long as they were eating them I thought I had it figured out!

Along about the time that the preteen years were hitting, my children started voicing their opinions about their meals in a pre-adult manner. They gently let me know that can vegetables tasted like the can.  We discovered that frozen vegetables came in more varieties and could be steamed rather than boiled and you didn't have to use the entire bag once it was opened. Money saving option, I'll take it. My daughter especially liked broccoli, she had it at a friends house. It wasn't available in a can. One of her favorite meals was rice with broccoli and cheese over it. Frozen vegetables became the new hit in our home. New varieties of vegetables were tried by both of them and one remark was "they are almost like Grampie made".

My dad had seven gardens or more when I was growing up. You can imagine when he found out that we were eating frozen vegetables instead of buying fresh he wasn't long in pointing out that fresh produce was much healthier than anything I could buy in a groceries freezer department. I explained I just didn't have an interest in fresh, they took a long time to cook and the preparation time was too much for my thirty minute or less dinner schedule. My children were old enough now to cook themselves and wanted to try Grampie's garden vegetables instead of frozen. Fresh produce became the new vegetable love in our home. My children would go to the grocery store and peruse the vegetable department like it was a NIKE store. They picked them up, they squeezed them, smelled them, and they bought them. They learned to bake zucchini, stuff eggplant, and whip squash, they made sweet potato pie, and corn chowder.

I lost 65 pounds and not from eating vegetables either but because I wasn't doing the cooking and therefore not eating as much. Both of my children are very good cooks to this day! As for my four granddaughters, they wonder why at Thanksgiving that Gam only eats turkey with a roll and some gravy, I find I have started telling them as well, "Oh, Gam is allergic to vegetables, but you eat up they're good for you!"