The first thing we learn about vegetables is that they are disgusting. Arthur the aardvark's younger sister DW gags at the sight of them, especially spinach. Angelica from Rugrats sues her parents over broccoli. SpongeBob SquarePants can’t even pronounce the word salad. This rejection of greens is baked into our brains early. Vegetables are a gross obligation to either be pushed to the side of a plate or, at the very least, scarfed down before you get to the good stuff.
Unfortunately, that mentality is doing a lot of harm. Not only because vegetables can be mind-blowingly delicious, as evidenced by the cuisines of some of our favourite restaurateurs, but also because meat consumption is an enormous contributor to global climate change. As we think critically about how we should be eating in 2020, one of the first priorities is a diet that's more plant-based.
But how do you go from being a person who launches a bowl of spinach across a room to being a person who will happily order a big salad? To answer the question, we spoke with three of our favourite chefs that operate vegetarian, vegan, or vegetable-forward restaurants. They include Allison Montana, the vegan head chef of Izzy Rose in Brooklyn; Brooks Headley, the vegetarian chef and owner of Superiority Burger in Manhattan; and Jessica Koslow, chef and owner of Sqirl in Los Angeles and co-executive chef of Onda in Santa Monica. With their advice, and help from a few excellent cookbooks, we put together a guide. This is how to eat more vegetables.
Before you start trying to boost your veggie intake and reduce your meat consumption, it’s helpful to keep in mind why you should. That way when you’re in that weekly standoff with the Domino’s app, you have the firepower to choose something different. A panel of researchers advising the US Department Of Health And Human Services made the case pretty clearly in a 2015 report: “Consistent evidence indicates that, in general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods... and lower in animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact... than is the current average US diet,” the panel wrote.
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The first part of this statement might seem surprising, especially given the association between protein and strength training. But according to recent research, a lot of the meat we eat, particularly red and processed meat, puts us at an increased risk of heart risk, stroke, or diabetes. A cup of cooked lentils has about half the protein of a (tiny!) 4 oz steak, but only about 1/20th the sodium. What’s stopping you from eating your lentils with a decadent wine sauce?
The more pressing reason, societally speaking, is the earth is, uh, on fire... At this moment, that’s just barely hyperbole – the wildfires still raging in Australia have killed a few dozen people and more than one billion animals, threatening to wipe out entire species. Climate change, due to rising greenhouse gas emissions, continues to threaten every aspect of our lives. The food system creates about a quarter of these Greenhouse gases, with meat and dairy production accounting for 14.5 per cent alone. Your individual choice to replace the meat from your diet with foods that have a smaller footprint isn't going to solve climate change, the issue is more systemic. But collective changes to how we eat add up. And we have to do something, right?
Once you’ve decided to start incorporating more vegetables into your diet, you’re going to have to start getting them into your house. Presuming you live in an area with access to grocery stores, this will likely start there. Prioritise the produce section! When you can, buy veggies that are loose, rather than bagged or in plastic boxes. Use a smattering of cookbooks, magazines (s/o Bon Appétit and Epicurious), YouTube videos, to inspire your quests. But this isn’t your only option.
Each of the three chefs we spoke to for this story extolled the virtues of the farmer’s market, which are stationed with stalls by farmers (or close representatives of farmers) themselves. Often, farmer’s markets get painted as a cosmopolitan luxury, filled with self-righteous shoppers that take pictures of more food than they eat. The kind who’ll spend $6 for arugula that will rot in their fridge. The criticism misses the fact that there are farmer’s markets all over the country – in fact, the USDA maintains a searchable list of active ones that currently counts 8,790.
The other point is more valid: farmer’s markets can be expensive. But according to our chef’s, what you get is genuinely worth it. Jessica Koslow, chef and owner of Sqirl in Los Angeles and co-executive chef of Onda in Santa Monica, sources everything she can for her restaurants at farmer’s markets. “There are certain varieties of produce that farmers grow that are really just unique, heirloom things that won't ever be able to sit on a shelf and be shelf stable in a grocery store,” she said. “And also, you know that the farmer is picking it for the market, so the things you are getting are really fresh.”
Koslow says you should prioritise purchasing from farmers who specialise in particular types of produce and develop relationships with them when you can. “I have a lettuce guy, you can see that [he has] some sort of neurotic passion for lettuce,” she said. “Those are going to be unique and beautiful.”
Brooks Headley, chef and owner of Superiority Burger in New York, also thinks you should develop relationships with the farmers at your local market. “Go to the market and learn the farmers names, like talk to them, and ask them questions,” he said. “They all want to talk about what they have ... And then, once you become a regular they'll be like ‘Hey, check this out I've got this crazy shit. I've only got a little bit of it over here.’”
This might take some work, but probably less work than you think. If you already go to the grocery store once or twice a week, you can probably make time for a quick jaunt to the market. And once you start to do it, you might find that you actually enjoy getting to know all the farmers, like Headley, who says he’d go to the Union Square Green Market in Manhattan every day if he could.
Allison Montana, chef at Izzy Roze in Brooklyn, is also pro-farmers market, but suggests that there might be a slightly lower-effort way to buy vegetables: join a CSA.
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CSA stands for community-supported agriculture. It’s a locally organised food system that connects people with farmers in their area. You pay for a “share” of a farm and get a portion of its harvest throughout the year. The USDA maintains a directory of them that currently includes 865 listings throughout the country. Some CSAs distribute every week (usually at some sort of drop-off point), some a few times a month. Some only operate in the spring, summer, and fall, others deliver all year. Some only provide veggies and fruits, others provide sustainably-raised meat and eggs.
Whatever your CSA delivers, it’s likely to be some of the freshest foods you’ll ever be able to get from anywhere. That’s even more true for vegetables. “It is the absolute gold standard of vegetables,” said Montana. “You’re just so close to the farms that are supplying them…it’s also going to be pretty much the cheapest produce you're going to get by far. You have to go pick it up, but especially if you live in a city there’s definitely one in your neighbourhood. It’s not that big of a deal.”
The thing that Montana likes most about CSAs though, is the opportunity to directly support farmers. “It's community supported agriculture. [Everything you eat] comes from small farms. You are actually supporting the small farmers in your area and eating local food. It really reduces the supply chain that food passes through.” Replacing some of your meat consumption with that of vegetables and roots from CSAs, then, will make a big impact on your carbon footprint. Just as it’s saving you money.
However you decide to get your vegetables, it’s time to start actually cooking them. If you’ve never really cooked with vegetables you don't need to jump right into using them as your meal centrepieces. “It's okay if you're not chowing down raw kale like the day after you're like, 'I should eat more vegetables,'” said Montana.
When you’re just starting out with vegetables, even after looking at a lot of different recipes, you’ll find that most of what you’re doing with them falls into three different categories: steaming, frying, and roasting.
Steaming is the one probably the most associated with the worst taste, evoking that rubbery broccoli of your grade school cafeteria. But it doesn’t take much effort to do better. One of our favorite non-stick pans, made by Our Place, actually includes a steamer basket. Fill it with water, set it to boil and put your cut vegetables on top of the basket. As long as you make sure you don’t leave them in for too long, and season your food with at least salt and pepper, you’ll get something pretty good.
You’re probably not that likely to deep fry any of the vegetables you pick up, though you totally could! If you’re cooking vegetables, you’re going to have to get familiar with sautee-ing, which is basically frying in a very small amount of fat. Headley suggests using this technique to make a sofrito, which is a kind of a powerful flavour base that you can use in other things, like beans. After cutting them up into small pieces with a chef’s knife, “you cook down celery, and onions, and carrots, none of which are expensive or particularly hard to find, into this beautiful mush basically, and I mean mush in the most positive sense.” It’ll take a few hours to do properly, since you really have to let it go, but Headley says you can make a bunch at once and then store it in the freezer in a deli container.
The third technique, the one you’ll probably end up using the most, is roasting. “When I’m cooking [at home], I like to think, ‘how do you lazy cook?’ How do you come home from work after being so burnt out from the day and still decide to cook? Really the best thing you can do is take a whole cauliflower head, toss it with olive oil, add salt and pepper, and roast the whole thing on a sheet pan in the oven at 350°F. That’s it.” You can apply this technique to pretty much any vegetable, though they’ll all require different amounts of time to cook. As long as you keep them in separate pans or separated in the same pan, you should be good.
The one thing that might happen as you start to cook more vegetables, especially if you cut out meat entirely, is that your meals will start to look a lot different than they did before. This happens to Brooks Headley at Superiority Burger. “Sometimes people are like, ‘Well then, what am I, just eating sides?’ They’re like, ‘It’s just a bunch of sides!’ To which I say, ‘Yeah, so what!’ Everything you eat doesn't have to be like a chunk of protein and a pile of vegetables.” Getting comfortable with that will make your journey a lot easier, especially while you’re getting adjusted to a bunch of new ingredients.
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Once you’ve started to get familiar with these techniques, you can start to expand your palate. In fact, if you’ve decided to get a CSA, you might be forced to. Crates from CSAs will often have a lot of vegetables that you might have never heard of before.“One thing that’s so cool about a CSA is the fact they give you a thing that you don't know what to do with,” said Koslow. “Something you would never buy for yourself, like kohlrabi.”
Even if you do get kohlrabi, which Montana also mentioned in our conversation, there's no reason to panic. Keep calm, she said. “Figuring out how to cook all of these vegetables is literally just a Google search away.”
And once you’ve gotten the hand of the basics, our chefs suggested getting your hang of making some basic sauces. “It's not as hard as people think it is,” said Montana. “You just need an acid, like balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, lime juice, rice vinegar, anything. A fat, so this can be olive oil or if you're looking for more lower calorie option you can mash up an avocado. Some kind of herb, like mustard is the easiest one. And then salt.”
Eventually, as you develop more experience, you'll stop having to ask yourself how to eat more vegetables – you'll just do it. But don't stop trying new things. There is a whole wide world of vegetable-forward food out there, including cuisines that you might not have cooked before, like Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Ethiopian. And don’t be afraid to get weird! “When you're cooking at home your food can be as fusioney as you want,” said Headley. “There's no food critics about to tell you that your version of whatever salad you're making is inauthentic. You can do whatever you want you're just cooking for yourself.”
The key here is that you should like whatever you make. You should think it tastes delicious and you should be excited whenever you sit down to eat it. Oh, and you should learn how to make hummus. Hummus is great.
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