In her book in which she writes of her family’s experiment to try and grow enough vegetables and meat to support them, Barbara Kingsolver addresses a prevalent resistance among children and adults:“I used to take my children’s friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they’d back away slowly saying, ‘Oh, man, those things touched dirt!’”
“Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We’re like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her but ee-ew.”
Source: Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L Hopp & Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), 29.
A review of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, is at Reviewing Books and Movies.
Image: Dirty veges.