3/1/2009

Eat your Broccoli (Article in Bon Appetit)

When I was reasearching my book on salt, I had the good fortune to meet up with Zhenzhong Guo, a professor of salt history at Peking University. One day while having lunch with this charming, aging scholar, the conversation wandered to the new McDonald's restaurants in the capital. With shy embarrassment he confessed that he once went there for a meal. I asked him what he thought of it, and he shook his head and simply said, "No vegetables."

The professor and many millions of other Chinese do not eat vegetables because they are healthy. They eat them because it is unimaginable to have a meal, including breakfast, without vegetables. The Chinese do not cajole their children to eat their vegetables. A meal without vegetables would be a sad deprivation.

Of course, China is changing rapidly, and if Beijing families start raising their children on American fast food, they will have the same problems that Americans do. One of those is that children don't want to eat vegetables. The worst possible response to this problem is now becoming a food fad, thanks to a spate of books on the subject, the two best known of which are The Sneaky Chef by Missy Chase Lapine and Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld. The latter, when it came out in late 2007, received an enormous amount of publicity, likely because the author is the wife of a popular comedian. What remains unclear is why Seinfeld's recipes and ideas are so similar to those in the earlier book by Lapine. But from the consumer point of view, why worry about who had a bad idea first?

That idea goes like this: You can get your kids to eat the vegetables that they don't want to eat by pureeing or otherwise disguising them and slipping them into food they do like to eat. There is macaroni and cheese subtly laced with cauliflower or brownies concealing spinach.

But not vegetables. It teaches them nothing about the pleasure of vegetables, nor does it celebrate the beauty and magic of nature. It teaches them nothing except, perhaps, to be distrustful of food because cooks sneak things into it or to be distrustful of parents because they are deceptive.

That eating vegetables is good for you is one of the few health and nutrition facts that almost no one disagrees with. Even the ancients agreed. Vegetables were praised not only by the ancient Chinese, but also by Herodotus, the fifth-century-b.c. Greek said to be the first historian; by Hippocrates, the fifth-century-b.c. Greek said to be the father of medicine; by Pliny, the first-century Roman naturalist; and by Galen, the second-century doctor to Marcus Aurelius.

In modern times the good reports on vegetables continue. The Journal of Nutrition reported in 2006 that research in France indicated that each serving of vegetables and fruit added to a person's regular diet per day reduces the risk of heart disease by as much as four percent. Vegetables are rich in potassium, which helps the kidneys function normally. Excess sodium is corrected by well-functioning kidneys, so higher vegetable consumption helps maintain a healthy blood pressure. The fiber in vegetables helps control glucose, thereby reducing the risk of diabetes. There are many more benefits, some debated and some not completely understood. Still, it adds up to "Eat your vegetables."

The problem, as the case of china illustrates, is largely cultural. Among the many factors that shape cultures are geography and climate. Areas such as the Mediterranean, where vegetables are available all year, have a stronger tradition of eating them than places such as northern Europe and North America, where before the jet age, fresh vegetables were not available from November until April.

In 1611, the British ambassador to Venice rescued a man named Giacomo Castelvetro from the prisons of the Inquisition. But once in England, the ingrate was appalled to discover that nobody was eating their vegetables. Castelvetro wrote a book called A Brief Account of the Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy in the hopes that the English would start eating these things. But it never really did catch on, which is why the 19th-century poet Lord Byron noted:

But man is a carnivorous production...
Although his anatomical construction
Bears vegetables in a grumbling way...

In North America, it was the same. Though Thomas Jefferson promoted vegetables, Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, said to be the first American cookbook because it was published in 1796, after the American Revolution, contains just a few vegetable recipes, including one for preserving peas. North American parents long struggled to get vegetables for their children in the colder half of the year. Clarence Birdseye, a New Yorker who is credited with starting the frozen-food industry, began his experiments while working for a fur company in Labrador. He was concerned that there were no fresh vegetables available for many months to feed his young son, so he learned how to freeze them.

But culture and history are durable, so today—though fresh vegetables are available all year in most places-people who live in climates where they do not easily grow year-round do not have a strong tradition of eating them to pass on to their kids.

And what do children want? THEY ARE THE KIND OF completely unpredictable witnesses journalists love and lawyers hate. So when I asked my seven-year-old daughter, who does eat her vegetables, what she liked about them she said, "I like the way you can squeeze green beans and the bean shoots out, and you can take cauliflower and pretend they are small flying trees."

From this I extrapolated that she hasn't really thought about it. She just eats them because they are there—like the Chinese do. So that, the exact opposite of hiding them, is the first tip.

But the problem may not be entirely cultural. Of the four tastes, children seem to embrace salty and sweet first-look at the ingredients in formula—then sour, and lastly bitter. Vegetables are bitter. There have been a number of research projects on that taste and some scientists believe that certain people may be genetically disposed to an aversion to bitterness.

I was tested a number of years ago for sensitivity to bitter by a researcher at Yale University. I was found to have taste receptors that did not strongly perceive bitter. This was a low blow, because I like to think of myself as someone with keen taste receptors. But in the case of bitter, researchers find that the more strongly it is perceived the less it is liked. And this isn't necessarily true of other tastes, especially sweet, which may explain why there are a lot more children who won't eat vegetables than won't eat candy. A pleasant bitterness to one person can be an unbearable bitterness to another. My own insensitivity may explain why I happily ate my vegetables as a child and why today I consume numerous espressos every day.

Researchers now believe that bitter sensitivity is genetically determined. According to the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, variations of the bitter receptor gene TAS2R38 has the most impact on children. Furthermore, children with bitter sensitivity frequently have a far greater desire for sugar than other children. However, as the children grow up, factors such as ethnicity and culture appear more decisive.

For the parents of a vegetable resister, there are things that can be done. Celebrate vegetables for their place in nature. Children love to eat things they grow, which is why public-health authorities are making gardening spaces available in urban areas. The labor of cultivating fosters an appreciation for vegetables. It also affords the opportunity to experiment with eating vegetables at various sizes and maturities.

One more thing: Why do children like Chinese food even though it's full of vegetables? It may be because the vegetables are integral to the dish, which is a concept worth considering. But the success of the Chinese may also be derived from their careful balancing of basic flavors. The Chinese identify six basic tastes in a musical jingle: ma, la, tian, suan, xian, ku—spicy, hot, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. To the Chinese cook, the dominance of any single one would be bad cooking. So bitterness is balanced by sweet or salty, which can be accomplished by elaborate artifice or something as simple as soy sauce.

And remember: Children with a genetic repulsion to bitter have more than the usual attraction to sweet. Tubers are not bitter and are often sweet, especially when eaten with a bitter green. In medieval Europe, before sugar was readily available, parsnips were highly prized for the touch of sweetness they lent to a dish. Or try more sautéing. Many people, young and old, who say they do not like vegetables enjoy them sautéed. Why? Because it makes them less bitter.

Mark Kurlansky is the author of The Last Fish Tale, which comes out in June.