Boyle McCauley News

Since 1979 • April-May 2024 • Circulation 5000

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Simply Good For You

Food can be a complex aspect in our lives. We spend a great deal of our time throughout the day preparing and consuming it. It’s almost as important to remember to bring my lunch to work as it is to wear pants. Without either I won’t accomplish much.

The type of food I can comfortably digest has changed throughout the years. I can tell I’m getting older because my digestive system is getting cranky. I can no longer binge on junk food the way I used to a couple of decades ago. Chocolate bars and potato chips no longer satisfy me the way they did once a long time ago. I’ve discovered a preference for simple, unprocessed food. Don’t get me wrong – I still enjoy a bag of salty chips, but that can no longer be the epitome of what I ingest, unless I feel like keeling over from gastrointestinal pain.

I have developed an appreciation for vegetables in these last few years. This began in earnest when I discovered smoothies. Never before have vegetables been so easy to prepare and ingest. Just throw it all into the blender! What an awesome solution. I’m not much of a chef and have no great appreciation of being in the kitchen for hours, so the discovery of smoothies radically changed my diet and my taste for food overall.

I found out that raw vegetables actually taste good. As I was growing up, it was difficult to talk me into eating those soggy, diced, frozen carrot bits. Even frozen peas didn’t taste right. God help me if someone opened a can of beans. Yuck. Overcooked, tasteless, bleached vegetables. It was more likely to find me in our garden or a neighbour’s, depending on who was growing snap peas that year. I loved plucking them straight from the vine, under the sun and crunching them right there.

A quarter century later, I found out I was right. Snap peas are best raw, as are carrots, cucumbers, peppers, broccoli, and any number of edible plants. Don’t bother with the salt or pepper, no need to sauté – heck, I’m lucky if I get the dirt off of them. Just have your vegetables. It’s a simple thing in a complex world.

Keri lives and eats her veggies in Boyle Street.

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