Thank you mum and dad for teaching me to love vegetables

A new year is here. Happy new year!

I want to start this year with thankfulness, and so today i am writing a short message to my parents: thank you for teaching me to love vegetables!

The food i was given growing up is something that, at the time, i took for granted, or even resented. I distinctly remember everyone hiding the chocolate from their packed lunches under the table in my first year of school, because there was one dinner lady who used to pretend to steal it. I didn’t have a chocolate bar, so i was hiding my stick of cheddar cheese as if it was the same thing. Cheese? Why would i want to steal that? Said the dinner lady in question, and that was the end of that. My food wasn’t worth stealing. I went back to my sandwich which, although i don’t remember as clearly as the cheese, was certainly made with brown bread and definitely had no processed ham inside. Chewing on a carrot stick, i wished i had white bread and ham sandwiches, chocolate, a packet of crisps, and if absolutely necessary, one of those squeezy yoghurts that taste vaguely of lab-produced jam. But please, absolutely no greek yoghurt decanted into a mini reusable tupperware, thank you.

Despite both my parents working full time, one of them (usually my dad) would cook porridge with raisins and bananas for the whole family every morning, and one of them (usually my mum) would cook dinner for the whole family every evening. Every meal would be delicious, natural, and full of vegetables, except for the occasional fish fingers and waffles, which us children would always beg for. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the other food, but we had friends at school, and we visited their families; we knew what food was supposed to look like, and curry wasn’t it.

On saturdays, we would eat pizza in the living room and watch a film. Dad would make the pizza, dough, sauce, and all, and cover the top with vegetables. This kind of pizza would probably not pass the Italian authenticity test, but it was delicious and healthy.

Leaving home, i finally got to realise exactly how much of a hassle it is to cook every single day, especially when one pound frozen pizzas are available just a five minute walk from my house. Working in a factory with a bunch of people who have children, i got to hear about what they’d be eating for dinner, or the food they were preparing for their children in the evening. I don’t think that there is no justification to using frozen ready meals every day, because time is short, life is busy, and not everybody likes cooking. But i am immensely grateful to my parents for pushing through that busyness and making the time to cook good food every day, even when no gratitude was forthcoming from us children at the time. Even our tv dinner involves dad doing an hour or so of preparation.

When i started university, i gleefully stopped eating porridge, and mostly eschewing breakfast altogether. It took until my second year before i tried porridge again, and realised that it was cheap, easy, and gave me energy until lunchtime. I usually cook it with frozen fruits now, rather than banana, because i prefer that. But no matter banana, raisin, or raspberry, it is a much more fulfilling dish than cornflakes, or even instant porridge.

I also discovered the many benefits of the chillis, curries, and other stewish dishes that had made up my childhood, chief among which is that they are easy to make in bulk and then freeze in portions. And all of them have a huge amount of vegetables in them, so they are very cheap, very healthy and very filling. Even better, these dishes are all nostalgic dishes that remind me of home.

Being british, we of course also ate the classic british foods like shepherds pie, home-made of course, which are usually served with a vegetable. Broccoli, peas, and green beans were the ones we ate most often, and they were all cooked by steaming. Sometimes dad would add some salt to his, but salt wasn’t added during the cooking process, and we weren’t allowed to add it. And so i spent eighteen or so years eating totally unadorned vegetables. Now, peas and broccoli are still two of my favourites, although i admit that i never quite got on with the texture of green beans. Eating vegetables is so much easier when you add a lot of butter or salt or some other sauce, but of course then you’re smuggling in a lot of extras along with the indisputable health. If that’s what you’re used to, it can be difficult to cut that out and just eat the plain vegetables. So thank you to my parents for teaching me to appreciate the subtle natural flavour from the beginning.

That’s all that i want to say. As a child, it is so easy to feel pressured into eating a certain kind of food, if that’s what all your friends and classmates are doing. As a child, it is so easy to hate your parents for trying to raise you with healthy meals. As a parent, it’s so easy to want to relax after a day at work, and to go out and buy some frozen ready-meals instead of cooking something. It’s so difficult to listen to your children complaining that the food looks like vomit or some other such insensitive and ungrateful remark, and to keep putting in the effort; waking up a little earlier to cook porridge, staying up a little later to cook, shop, and do the washing up. But my parents cooked good food almost every day for the whole time i lived with them, and i grew up healthy, able to cook, and able to enjoy a variety of healthy foods.

So thank you, mum and dad, for teaching me to love vegetables.