The fast growing and never ending vegetables seem to be the ones people don't like. Zucchini/courgette, squash, spinach I have piles of it but people don't want it not even friends and family. Root vegetables are not spurned as much things like carrots, potatoes, beets then again beets seem to be not as popular.
The problem with a home garden is you usually have nothing, then a few things, then inundated with too much.
I bet even now at a temp of 1C if I look there is a sneaky zucchini hiding under a leaf! One year spinach survived the winter (-20C ish and 1m snow) and popped up in April.
I've been very interested in the food industry, and I think the reason for this is multi-faceted.
First, a lot of English-speaking countries place lower importance on veggies. We got calcium from milk and cheese, so we didn't need to learn how to cook well with lots of dark leafy greens, as an example.
Second, European meals tend to focus heavily on a main and some side dishes, but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal. You're not trying to think of ways to cook squash, because the dinner is squash.
Finally (there are more, but I don't want to get too crazy in the comments), European cooking tends to focus more on using a wide variety of ingredients. In contrast, you'll find a lot of SE Asian cooking uses many of the same ingredients, but they prepare the food in vastly different ways, leading to some completely different dishes. This means that they naturally have a huge repertoire of ways to modify their veggies to fit any meal.
I have no real point, I just never get to talk about this stuff and I find it really interesting. If I was wrong about anything, please correct me below.
> but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal
Can you provide some examples? I can't think of any.
It's not Latin/South American, it's not European, it's not Chinese, it's not Japanese, it's not like anywhere I've been in Africa, and it doesn't match my knowledge of India or the Middle East.
Nor can I imagine any country where "dinner is squash" makes much sense. Squash has almost no calories, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to center a meal on.
Cuisines often have occasional meals that are complete enough to be eaten as a single dish -- some kind of protein-mixed-in-with-carbs like lasagna or paella or chicken stroganoff. But these seem to be exceptions in the cuisine, rather than the rule.
Could you elaborate with some specific countries where the one-dish pattern is the norm?
Not parent, but as an example zucchini boats are pretty popular in my area of the Midwest as are stuffed peppers.
A zucchini boat is basically just zucchini stuffed with meat, cheese, tomato, onions, and spices. That's the whole meal. Stuffed peppers is basically the same thing, but with peppers instead of zucchini.
Oh for sure. I guess I think of both of those as being ground beef dishes rather than zucchini/pepper dishes. They're kind of like hamburgers but swapping out the bun for a vegetable. Maybe it depends on your ratios?
Is the "center of the meal" the part that provides the most volume and mass, or is it the part with the most calories? My lunch today was a full pound of bok choy (raw weight), 2 Tbsp avocado oil, 4 oz of steak, and 1 oz of cheese. kulahan and bigtunacan might say bok choy was my meal, but consistent with your observation, it provided only 9% of the calorie content.
If you go to Ethiopia, for instance, it's very common to have one dish that everyone eats from. Also common in the Middle East. You'll see it in some Chinese communities, but it tends to be more rural - once a nation develops and they enter a more globalized market, this tendency seems to fall off.
To be clear, I didn't mean that it was literally a single dish, I meant that instead of trying to compliment your meal properly with a matching veggie, because you're only making one thing. As long as it all makes sense together in the bowl/plate/hand, it works.
I grew up on Lebanese food. While in a restaurant you may have many side dishes, at home it was more usual to have one dish. That said, going to a less fancy restaurant, it wouldn't be weird to grab a plate with nothing else, like at home.
Some examples of things we'd eat as the entire meal:
* Fatteh/tisi'yeh, a dish made with a layer of bread, then boiled chickpeas, then yoghurt, and topped with some toasted pine nuts, melted ghee, paprika. Sometimes in a restaurant, this is part of a larger spread of food.
* Any variety of kebbeh (there are many). We'd eat this with bread. In a restaurant, kebbeh would not be the singular dish.
* Various things referred "tabakh" (lit. cooking lol) which we'd usually eat with rice or burghal (crushed wheat) cooked with vermicelli noodles. You can then say that's multiple dishes, but it's kind of like bread. Examples: bazala (peas, carrots, maybe potatoes, coriander in a tomato sauce) on rice, fasulya (white beans in a tomato sauce) on rice or burghal, al-asiyeh (potatoes, carrots, corriander stew) on burghal, spanegh (spinach, minced meat, pine nuts) with rice, and many others. Most of this is sometimes cooked with diced lamb of shredded chicken.
* Lahm bi ajeen (minced meat cooked with onions and molasses on dough with pinenuts) would be sufficient a meal, sometimes perhaps with a quick salad. Not a complete meal in a restaurant typically.
* We were more than happy to throw diced lamb (skewered with some onions), kafta, or chicken on the barbecue and eat with bread, maybe a garlic dip for chicken, occasionally with a salad, occasionally throwing some potatoes or similar vegetables on the barbecue. In a restaurant, a barbecue dish would have many sides.
* We'd pan fry some diced lamb in ghee, drizzle some pomegranate molasses and eat with bread.
* Pan fried potatoes with eggs on top, eaten with bread.
* Pasta cooked in yoghurt + coriander and garlic.
* A leafy green like spinach called sili', not sure what it is in english, cooked with black eye beans, then a squeeze of lemon and eaten with bread.
* Foule which is just fava beans stewed, we'd eat with bread. Squeeze of lemon. Maybe some pickles, olives, tomato, and cucumber on the side. In a restaurant, this'd probably be part of a wider breakfast spread.
All this is to say, it was normal to serve food from a single pot or tray and eat with utensils or bread, or from two pots placing rice/burghal on the plate then scooping the "tabakh" on top.
All said, my parents grew up poor, so that background could reflect our norms. (edit) We also did not grow up around much family, so large gatherings were uncommon for us, which differs from typical Lebanese culture.
All those look very familiar to me. There been a Lebanese community in my small Canadian city for years some as far back as 1900 others from 1970s, 1908s depending on what cause them to come here.
I knew a couple from south Lebanon "Si and Sue" Haddad. Si would make me cardamom flavoured coffee and some baklava. Sue made the food eggplant always seemed to be on the go.
Very friendly and a very wide range of food, a great culture to grow up in.
Because traditionally they were served "courses". However, it's all biryani in the belly. I think the old ways of serving a main with sides is still a tip to that era when it was plated separately. I'm ok with having it all mixed together so long as the flavors complement. I don't want a steak, cubed, mixed with my veggies and mashed potatoes, all in a bowl. Some things should be separate, some things are ok being together/combined. Western style cooking has been dominated by French Cuisine and traditional Countryside cooking. Only within the last 30-50 years have they started branching out into Asian or South American dishes.
Its way more approachable today than it ever has been with YouTube videos, online blog recipes, availability of supplies.
>I'm ok with having it all mixed together so long as the flavors complement. I don't want a steak, cubed, mixed with my veggies and mashed potatoes, all in a bowl.
> Second, European meals tend to focus heavily on a main and some side dishes, but a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal.
A ton of German cuisine, especially historically is either Soup or "Eintopf" (literally one-pot). You might add bread, but the dish stands by itself. Especially in the winter time, this is something people still do a lot. Still looking forward to kale (Grühnkohl, or where I'm from: Braunkohl). I still love stuff like Schmohrkohl and Grühnkohl. Not so much the carrot and potato soup and things like that.
PS: I'd consider "Auflauf" (casserole?) to be a one-pot dish as well.
> First, a lot of English-speaking countries place lower importance on veggies.
Which ones? In the US, we are told to eat our veggies because they are good for you. The problem in the US is that something forced women into the workplace and families are resorting to easy processed meals like microwave dinners, fast food, etc.
Conversely I found it way easier to eat "healthy" in the US due to the popularity of flash frozen vegetables.
In college I would buy a bag of pre-cut flash frozen vegetables suitable for a stir fry and just dump that into the wok and throw some sauce & protein.
Abroad where people eat fresh vegetables I had the habbit of ordering food delivery everyday because I'm not going to waste 1 hour of my life every day washing & cutting vegetables and the knife and the cutting board etc.
On the green leafy veggies - my mom cooks like 7/8 different varieties in as many different way. Each green tastes different and they’re cooked differently. The closest equivalent to spinach for example is steamed and made into a soup. I could just eat rice and that - even as a kid. There’s one that’s bitter and it’s cooked with a lentil. It actually tastes good. Another one that’s sour and is added to a spicy curry. And so on. (But afaik none of these are available any more)
> a TON of countries simply do one dish for the whole meal. You're not trying to think of ways to cook squash, because the dinner is squash.
But even if the dinner is squash, you still want to think of different ways to prepare it, don't you?
This is how I, in the US, was fed while growing, and is how I do things to this day. I didn't realize that there was a cultural variation on this (or that my habit wasn't the common case in my own culture!)
What's your source for this? European countries are quite different from each other, and I'm wondering if your experience was only in restaurants while travelling (which is a very different experience to what most people eat every day at home).
You're so right about home gardens creating these brief windows of abundance, and then nothing.
Getting into gardening helped me understand how big of a role fermentation, drying, and canning played in our lived up until the spread of refrigeration.
Also, for stuff like lettuce, you can plant several series of seeds a week or two apart to get a "conveyor belt" of product instead of a bit glut if your season is long enough- but it is a lot of effort.
If you do your own starts, you can do what I do with peppers:
* overwinter a few plants in containers, they'll be ready quickly when you put htem back out just after last freeze.
* start some plants in mid jan, some in mid feb, and some in mid march, to fewer are ready at various times. Of course peppers will produce fruits over an extended period.
Tomatoes are similar, and you can also use vining varietals that produce fewer tomatoes continuously (rather than all at once).
For a lot of leafy plants (spinach, leaf lettuces) i plant them in with my bigger plants - they'll be done by the time the other plants are big enough to crowd/shade them out.
A lot of plants come out in mid to late summer. If your climate allows it, you can plant brassicas (like broccoli) when you pull those out an they'll thrive in the cool fall weather.
As another commenter mentioned, various cultivars can have different timings.
All of this is a little bit of extra work in the garden, and quite a bit more planning (but I like that part, and after a bit of practice it's not that much effort either, I'll do it over a few evenings in January. It helps to have other gardening friends over for dinner and garden planning/seed buying - more fun and less like work). The result is an extended period of available produce without as much of a "glut" at peak.
It annoys me to no end that a lot of garden plants are still designed around the home garden being a mini-farm rather than a continuing source of fresh produce. This made a lot more sense 100 years ago, but these days it seems counter-productive, most people don't grow gardens to preserve food over the winter, but rather to have fresh veggies while enjoying gardening (and maybe to cut out the produce bill in the summer)
> Zucchini/courgette, squash, spinach I have piles of it but people don't want it not even friends and family.
I used to hate zucchini. But then I started eating lower carb and found ways to enjoy it. A few simple tips made a big difference:
* Add lots of sodium. Not necessarily pure table salt; fish sauce or Better than Bouillon are really nice. These vegetables have very very little salt on their own. The mainstream public health advice still seems to be that Americans eat too much salt, but (a) I probably was eating less than most, and (b) the advice may be wrong for most people, and (c) it may be particularly wrong when eating low-carb and/or particularly active (I exercise about 1 hour per day). <https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/keto/supplements#sodium> has a nice section about this with references.
* Sautée chopped veggies (zucchini, eggplant, cabbage, whatever), again with sodium. Then make it into a shakshuka-esque dish (add canned tomato, spices, and egg then broil; maybe also cheese or canned fish) or add in some ground meat/sausage + cheese + spices + low-sugar ketchup + mustard. I use my cast iron skillet a lot now.
* Spiralize; use as pasta noodles with a thick sauce.
* Use neutral veggie puree to replace the bulk of sugar in baked desserts, combining with concentrated liquid sweetener (sucralose, stevia, monkfruit). Requires some recipe tweaks because you're replacing a dry ingredient with a wet one but I had pumpkin almond butter mousse brownies today that were good.
I eat lots of dark leafy greens too. I often steam them in a Pyrex in the microwave then enclose in cheesecloth and squeeze the water out with tongs. Salt and pepper, throw into almost any savory dish, use as a base for a modified juevos rancheros, etc.
Fish sauce? Unless it is a regular part of your diet, most people won't like it. The smell is incredibly off-putting. And, the reason you like it probably isn't the salt. It is the umami (savoriness) from the naturally occurring MSG. Japanese miso and soy sauce can do similar things to bland veggies.
My point is that the salt doesn't have to be just salt. Folks who don't like fish sauce can find something that works for them.
Yes, I like miso and soy sauce too. Salt + umami = yum. But the salt is the vital part for low carb eaters like me. The "keto flu" is no joke. I'm not even a keto person (not that strict) but I've had weakness, headaches, cramps, and heart palpitations when I had insufficient electrolytes. I don't want to repeat that!
Squash & Zucchini are amazing in so many recipes. Want a quick curry? Squash + veggies + spices & rice. Want to thicken up a big soup? Add zucchini and let it cook down into nothing but added flavor and thickness.
And if you want to go another route, you can make any vegetable into wine.
I blame cheap carbs and lack of education around cooking; we need to bring back Home Economics classes and teach the new generation.
Ferment them to give them richer flavour, improve their digestibility, and to extend their shelf life.
There are lots of resources available on lacto-fermentation, but basically you need some clean jars, salt, and clean water, plus some spices. Fermented vegetables do not spoil for many months, and are great soup bases for cream soups.
> The fast growing and never ending vegetables seem to be the ones people don't like. Zucchini/courgette, squash, spinach I have piles of it but people don't want it
TIL. I was under impression that Zucchini and spinach are popular. At least in stores it seems like they are selling quickly.
Sure if Zucchini is big one no-one wants to eat it but small ones?
I don't know squat about growing vegetables and my girlfriend wanted to plant a garden. I planted about 20 radish plants. In 2 weeks we had enough radish to supply the neighborhood for the entire summer.
I call my garden the “lucky garden” because only what survives my abuse and neglect survives.
Still end up with tons of tomatoes (from like mid-June and still eating the last to ripen indoors now), kale, peppers, parsley, basil, random squash & zucchini.
I don't disagree, but "too much" isn't really a thing. The trick there is understanding long duration storage preparation options. Zucchini for example can be incorporated into an excellent relish, tomatoes into a number of sauces, carrots and onions and leeks into soups. All of these things you can 'can' (put up on the shelf through the process of canning) and they will continue to be tasty for months, even years later.
Or, you can grow tomatoes, watch birds peck a single @#$%^@#$%^@$%^& bite out of each @#$^@#$%^$%^& one, despite any netting, fencing or anything else short of an enclosed green house, throw your hands up in disgust and never touch dirt again.
It's not for everyone, but it certainly worked in my case. ;)
This is me with an apple tree and worms. I just accepted that there will be at least one worm/bee/parasite in each apple, so I eat around it and throw the remainder to the horses.
With slugs, at least you can stomp a few of them into paste and gain a pyrrhic victory. Birds? You're the old man and his son in that Simpsons episode shaking your fist at the sky, upset because you can't shake harder.
That being said, 1000s of slugs is practically insurmountable unless you plan to salt the Earth (figurately and literally) or kill the entire neighborhood with fire. Both have...consequences beyond the initial issue. ;)
Besides the ones drowned in beer I collected about half a bucket every morning.
The solution would be for everyone in the neighborhood to grow food and get rid of their car so that the hedgehog population can grow to match the food supply.
yeah, I dug in cups that would fill up with slugs then the new slugs would eat the old ones. One or two would eat some broccoli per day until they all looked inedible.
4-5 bottles of beer per day could buy a lot of broccoli. It didn't add up.
Between cabbage moths and groundhogs, I have trouble growing much of anything except for mint and chard. Nothing touches that stuff for reasons uknown.
Seriously? Who doesn't like spinach and zucchini??? Spinach is really good wilted in a pan of olive oil that's been infused with garlic and red pepper flakes.
Zucchini is great steamed with yellow squash and vidalia onions and seasoned with fresh pepper.
In my and my partner's experience courgette is only bearable when you make it unhealthy (drown it in oil and salt). At that point why bother: everything tastes good roasted with oil.
I love zucchini, and one of my kids enjoys it, but my wife and other kid quite dislike it. The texture, apparently regardless of how it’s prepared, is the issue for them more than the taste. I’ve tried firmer (grilled) and softer (steamed) preparations but have received the same feedback, so it’s something innate to the fruit. To each their own.
Basically there are these cutters which cut the zucchini (raw) into very long "noodles". I think they are sometimes called "zoodles".
With these "noodles" you can do anything you like. But I've only tried it as a salad. i.e. add oil, salt, pepper and whatever you like, mix it, and enjoy.
Make sure you're salting them to draw out the bitterness of the zucchini. You can blanch them for a few minutes then throw them in an ice bath, or sprinkle salt on them about half an hour ahead of time then rinse them off after. Either way, pat them dry and your zucchini should be much tastier.
Could it the linked to the age of the plant? When my dad allows the zucchini to grow too long, it’s bitter. At 20 cm it’s much sweeter, and we can easily eat it raw/blanched.
A few of my co-workers have gardens and around mid-season they'll bring in a bags and bags of vegetables they couldn't give away to friends and family.
Especially if they've been planting in the same plot for years.
Rotate your nightshades, people! If you keep planting tomatoes/potatoes/eggplants/etc in the same plot year after year, the Fusarium will build up and destroy your yield.
I grew one zucchini plant this year, it took up about 15 sqft and produced squash for weeks. I like zucchini but when you get a plant or two that is just prolific, there's just only so many ways to cook it and only so much of it you can eat.
My grandparents grew 30 tomato plants and had so many that even after canning over 100 quarts of tomato sauce they still couldn't keep up with all the tomatoes on the vines.
Idk, I see a lot of people here saying no one likes zucchini, or that it gets old fast -- but it's pretty versatile. Granted, it usually supplements other things. I personally could eat some version of summer veg nearly every day: kebobs, sautéed, baked. Straight zucchini fried or grilled or sautéed is also delicious. On top of that, there's zucchini bread, muffins and cakes. You can also pickle it.
When I lived in a climate that was a little more moderate I'd grow just a few plants, maybe 8 at most, in raised beds with deep soil and even watering. With that I'd have more tomatoes than I could ever eat or give away. Well taken care of plants in a good climate are massive producers.
> My grandparents grew 30 tomato plants and had so many that even after canning over 100 quarts of tomato sauce they still couldn't keep up with all the tomatoes on the vines.
We're (Oregon) drowning in Persimmons right now, and it also was a great apple year. I never grow zucchini or squash since my coworkers bully me to accept their excess every year.
I have an unusually large amount of freezer space. What I have done in the past with zucchini and swiss chard (another vegetable I usually grow a lot of) is (for the zuccini) shred it, squeeze out as much water as I can, then freeze it and use it to bulk up stews/soups/congee-ish dishes through the winter with vegetable. A suprisingly large amount of it can disappear into a dish so that it reduces caloric density (if that's a thing you are trying to do) and making a tasty dish create more servings.
For swiss chard, instead of the shred/squeeze step I just chop and cook before freezing.
The larger point is that I have been slowly moving to the bulk of my garden space being dedicated to vegetables that can, in one way or another be preserved (canned, tried, fermented, frozen, or just straight up stored like winter squash, onions, and garlic), with only relatively small amounts being dedicated to things that _must_ be eaten fresh.
I always thought of persimmons as a secret, special late-fall treat, and I had no idea how abundantly they grown until recently.
A family member let us pick pounds of them from one of his trees because he can’t get rid of them fast enough. I’ve been enjoying them diced with pumpkin seeds and manchego in salads, and even the very firm ones work great in the dehydrator, skin and all.
I mean, yes, you can... But summer squashes (zucchini, yellow squash, etc) and winter squashes (pumpkin, butternut, acorn, spaghetti, etc) are not the same. And it's usually the former that home gardeners are trying to foist off on others.
Can confirm. From eastern Iowa myself and there are places on our farms that had 15 to 20 feet deep black soils in places on the farm. Some sections would grow corn stalks as tall as the combine.
Corn and soybeans are the wrong comparison. Ignoring the huge industry focus on optimizations for corn/beans, a more true comparison would still be against a large-scale vegetable grower.
The standard 1-acre lot of corn or soybeans product goes into most anything other than a person’s mouth. It’s like comparing an acre of backyard garden to an acre of hay.
That's perhaps a bit misleading though, because isn't it true that a big part of the reason corn has grown in use (particularly field corn) is beacause you can push it to more density than most crops?
I've juiced Vegetables for 90 days as a diet/cleanse/experiment.
Juicing 10 lbs of vegetables a day still causes you to lose weight, but that's at a mix of sugary and non sugary vegetables. I think if you did beets, carrots, apples, 10 lbs a day would be enough for an adult male to have good energy and not lose weight.
So around 3000 lbs a year considering women would need less.
Can you sustain yourself eating only vegetables? Modern vegan diets work because we have heavily processed oils and grains, and a variety of supplements. I don't think a human could live long just munching vegetables that aren't cooked with oil.
The only supplement you can't get from a vegan diet is B12, because farming is too clean (it is in dirt, and eating dirt is how you'd get the B12 needed). Everything else you can get from eating plant based products.
You do not need heavily processed oils and grains nor do you need a variety of supplements. Beans and Rice contain all of the necessary proteins a human body needs for example.
B12 deficiency is an issue even for people that eat meat due to the cleaner practices and feeding where animals no longer graze but instead get their food delivered in a way that doesn't allow the animals to ingest the B12 from the dirt.
You can absolutely survive eating food that is not cooked with oil.
Rice is not a vegetable, the question was if you can live off vegetables. Thats why I said you would struggle to hit your caloric needs without processed grains and oils.
You could maybe make it if you ate a couple pounds of beans a day with dirt on them. I really think your digestive tract would struggle though.
So you are saying that vegetable oil is not a vegetable? How come that rice, which comes from a plant, is not a vegetable? I'm struggling to understand where you are drawing the line. Reminds me of those debates on whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables (the answer to that question is "yes").
We just need some cows to eat the vegan diet for us to digest and unlock these difficult to obtain nutrients. Then we can eat them to get the nutrients.
HN never ceases to amaze with the variety of posters. From guys smart and entrepreneurial enough to make it big in software to people who think beef is magically healthy despite ample evidence that it's at best a nutritionally average, expensive, mostly tasteless industrial product.
Nutritional yeast is a great source of B12. Also, it's a delicious addition to a great many recipes. I learned about it from a vegan, but I'm an omnivore.
How do you define vegetable here? A whole lot of (dis)agreement below seems to hinge on that.
The dictionary definition of vegetable (according to dictionary.com) is:
> any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food
Which would include grains, however you may be excluding those depending on if "heavily processed" modifies only the oil, or the grains as well.
Of course culinarily in western traditions, grains and a lot of tubers are excluded from that, as are some fruits (others, culinarily speaking, are considered vegetables like squashes, tomatoes, and so on).
Also, in your question, would olive oil count? Its literally the result of squishing olives.... does that count as heavily processed?
Do you count potatoes? They are pretty calorie dense. Beans? Plenty of calories and lots of protein.
What about seed foods - nuts and such? They are also calorie dense and have a lot of fats too.
Point being - it's really unclear what limitations you're placing on it... peanuts, beans, (sweet) potatoes, squashes and fruits are commonly grown in home gardens, widely considered vegetables, and calorie dense enough to sustain a person fairly easily without non-stop eating.
There are cultures across the world that are vegetarian or almost-vegans. For instance, Jainism [1] is a thousands of years old religion in India, and they are dairy-only vegetarians. Obviously, for most of its history, adherents ate only food that was locally grown.
I’m a vegan Hindu person. I do take a multi vitamin, but I’m not a body builder and not an athlete. I get maybe 100g protein a day which I think is fine. I eat dal daily for lunch and dinner is usually something fun with veggies like chili or tofu or curries etc. I also drink a loaded smoothie that’s got fruits and herbs and nuts and oats. Got enough energy to go up any hill in SF and not feel exhausted lol.
Honestly feels great and my blood test comes back okay each time.
The only issue is when I’m away from home my options is basically Chipotle.
There are/were groups eating near-vegan diets for non-ideological reasons also. For example, the pre-modern Okinawan diet was mostly vegetables, some grains and soy products, and very little (~2%) meat (including seafood). No dairy or oils, AFAIK. And those eating that way are/were a notably healthy population.
> Can you sustain yourself eating only vegetables? Modern vegan diets work because we have heavily processed oils and grains, and a variety of supplements. I don't think a human could live long just munching vegetables that aren't cooked with oil.
I think the "heavily processed oils and grains, and a variety of supplements" part was also important to their point, and that's what I was disputing and qualifying.
And their assertion about "modern" vegan diets and my reference to "pre-modern" Okinawan diets is not really a contradiction either. You can easily eat the "pre-modern" Okinawan diet in Okinawa today (and in other places with grocery stores). I'm using pre-modern very loosely to indicate it is not the most common contemporary diet. Many dietary patterns across the world have Westernized/"modernized" (and as a result, many, though by no means all, have become less healthy).
Historically there have been similar diets for ages before there were modern supplements (as we think of them), and per-industrialized seed/olive oils etc. I don't know how effective or ineffective they were relative to other contemporary diets.
For anyone who (like me) doesn't love zucchini, try this soup recipe. [1] It is surprisingly filling, very tasty (even to non-zucchini-lovers), and very healthy.
The Thomas Keller method was on Instagram all summer and I tried it really liked it. Sprinkle with salt 20 minutes before cooking and a lot of the water content will come to the top, wipe it off. Then you can carmelize a lot more with butter or high-temp oil (avocado for example). Tastes a lot better this way
Sad but true. It's hard to find much positivity in news these days.
That's one of the reasons I like tech news. We have some positivity in the form of "Check out this cool new tool!" or "I did this weird thing with a 1,000 Rasberry Pi units." Tech news can be educational and entertaining without reporting on everything awful in the world, though there's some of that too.
Iowa soil and climate is amazing for growing stuff. Some years it's not necessary to water at all, the rain provides and the soil stays naturally moist much longer than other places. Most farms in Iowa have no irrigation at all. As my farmer friend with 750+ acres says, "God provides".
American wire gauge is better. They defined zero as 8.251 mm diameter so for thicker wires they had to use multiple zeros. And for some reason many Americans write it as (1/0) which looks like one divided by zero. And its pronounced "one aught." It also has no resemblence to barrel gauge for firearms even though they follow a similar principle of increasing gauge leading to decreasing diameter. For example a 12 gauge shotgun barrel is much larger than a zero gauge wire. Interestingly firearm gauges never hit zero. Total disaster.
Sure you can use metric, but only if you’re going to be reporting something like the number of kg of individuals covered by universal healthcare. Otherwise it’s best to stick to freedom units.
On the contrary, as a stupid American, I'm grateful for the imperial system because it doesn't require much thinking at all.
The intuitiveness of the imperial units actually don't demand much thinking from my American pea brain: an inch is about the width of my thumb, a pound is about the weight of how much meat/grain I can fit in my hands, a mile is about a thousand paces - it's actually quite simple and intuitive, which is perfect for a dumb stupid American like me.
I can't imagine doing something like woodworking without my brainlet system. Inches are a nice "bite-size" unit that fractionates quite nicely for cutting wood. They don't make me think too much. In metric, my thumb would be about 2.53 centimeters, the kerf of my saw is 1/8 an inch, and that's like 253/800cm as a fraction - yikes! An inch is a good whole number to start working from.
And then like - what's a centimeter even? It's one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator passing through Paris. Woah - get me outta here! That's just too much numerology for me. And my brain can't relate to or conceptualize that. Again, because I'm just so stupid, and American. I have to stick to the simple stuff: thumb -> inch, pound -> fits in my hands, mile -> thousand paces, gallon -> 10 pounds of water.
A gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds, so your estimate of 10 pounds is about 20% too high. To add to what someone else posted in terms of metric to “intutive” equivalences, 1 km is about 600 paces (for me, it’s also the distance from my house to the Asian market)
People living in metric countries have these sorts of “intuitive” relationships figured out. If you ever go to Europe, you will not see people anxiously furrowing their brows over their calculators to figure out how much things weigh or how far it is to the end of the block.
It's easy enough to skip on the exercise if you wish. All my measuring tools support metric right next to imperial. All the food on the shelf at the market is measured both ways. I can live a metric life if I want to.
Speaking as someone who grew up with the metric system before moving to America: Because growing up, we never had to convert between different measuring systems.
Everything was easy to do in your head:
5cm + 15cm = 20cm
0.5kg + 0.15kg = 0.65kg
2900mm / 2 = 1450mm.
Now I'm forced to do mental gymnastics like:
5/8" + 7/16" = ???
2'9 1/4" + 14" = ???
11'4"1/4 / 2 = ???
1lb9oz / 2 = ???
It's not impossible, but it takes me a lot more time to think through these things, and often they are impossible to even punch into a calculator. Adding fractions of an inch in my head was not something I learned in school (honestly, my experience since moving to the US is that most adult Americans also struggle to add fractions of an inch).
There's give and take. A unit based on 1/12th makes one third, one half, and one quarter all even divisions.
It's just not that big a deal in my experience. And if I want to use millimeters, every ruler and tape measure has those too. For all the bitching about the US not using metric, we in fact use it for many things. But it's customary to use imperial for discussion, and I don't get why that hurts people's feelings. I don't care about the UK weighing people in stones...
Yeah, ability to employ both systems and translate between them is quite useful. It might be similar to native bilingualism.
Even outside of the legacy imperial unit systems, there will always be units not nicely expressed in metric units that are handy nevertheless and good to know and use. Like electron-volts.
Now that you're mentioning that, why doesn't the default calculator app on a phone have prominent functionality for that, it's so useful in everyday life.
Sure. But it's the constant bitching about it. We know, we know, you [metaphorically, not you personally necessarily] like metric better. The US uses metric for all kinds of things, in fact! And the UK still uses imperial for some things. Conversions are not hard, and hearing people bitch about it in every thread is tedious.
Aside from some internet memery, no one cares too much if you use metric or imperial, but mixing the two is a special kind of accursed.
Metric is more clean. Example: you have a cube of 1 meter, filled halfway with water. You can calculate the volume of water as being 1 * 1 * 0.5 cubic meter. 1 cubic meter is 1000 liter (ho ho, the magic already manifests), so 0.5 cubic meter is 500 liter. I even know the approximate weight is 500kg, as 1 liter of water ≈ 1 kilo.
Doing this in cubic yards/feet + fluidic ounce + pounds is not even in the same universe in terms of elegance or ease-of-use. Swapping the fluidic ounce to liter does not solve that and probably introduces whackier ratios.
That does not mean you are a bad person for using imperial, but stating that "its easy to convert" isn't wholly fair either.
Part of the marketing strategy in getting the U.S. and other minorities to adopt the metric system has been to attach a morality component to it, which results in any dissent being met with shaming and emotional appeals, as the morality component supersedes the logical component.
The way to go: basil. You never have too much basil! And if you somehow manage to, a couple nice batches of pesto can use up basically any quantity of basil, the pesto can be frozen and keeps forever, and it's radically better than store-bought.
I also recommend cherry tomatoes. More snackable, easier to use them up.
I don't know where you live, but where I am, the various food banks compete to pick up unsellable groceries from the stores and then give them away to whomever asks. "Unsellable" often means "a day or more old."
Some parts of Iowa are weird when it comes to vegetables. For a place that's 90% covered with crops, I've heard more people reject eating greens and other tuber plants (beets, carrots, etc.) The food banks are constantly asking for pasta and canned food donations.
I was going to grow a bunch of hydroponic greens (spinach, lettuces) and donate them to the local food bank in the Seattle area. It would have been 284 plants at a time. I talked to them about it and they said they couldn't take it because they couldn't store it. I was like, it's hydroponic and I can just cut it on the days you distribute and that would work. They still refused and only wanted to give out dry and canned food. I was disgusted.
I don’t think you should fault the food bank. They have limited space, labor, and money.
You were asking them to take on a labor and space intensive project they didn’t ask for, that might require additional food production safety training to maintain legal compliance. Do they have enough fridge space? Do they have access to a commissary kitchen to process it? Do their customers want it?
If you offered them ready to distribute bags of veg from your plants I’m guessing they might take it.
Charities often run into this problem of someone offering something they didn’t ask for or need, and having to deal with it.
Externally it can seem like an obvious thing: of course the food bank wants greens!
Internally it looks more like: this guy wants to give us an indeterminate amount of his garden veggies, which we might have to process, and aren’t produced in a facility that we can guaranty is safe. we normally only accept donations of dry and canned goods and source our own fresh food for these reasons. Is it worth our time to make an exception?
The problem with a home garden is you usually have nothing, then a few things, then inundated with too much.
I bet even now at a temp of 1C if I look there is a sneaky zucchini hiding under a leaf! One year spinach survived the winter (-20C ish and 1m snow) and popped up in April.