Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Have To Be Like Chewing On Floss And Sadness

Six ways to improve your diet without compromising taste

I would have drunk toilet water before eating the salads of my youth. Iceberg lettuce, shredded carrot, sliced cucumber, whole cherry tomatoes, and some shitty ranch dressing in a glob on top. It was the salad that came on the side of a 16oz steak. At your neighbor’s house for every grilling party. The salad you got at fancy weddings.

I’d select the three greenest pieces of lettuce and chew on them like cud for a while before tossing the rest. Shredded carrot? Sure, who wouldn’t want to eat this ribboned bicycle tire? And there was no way you were getting me to eat a raw tomato. If I wanted a mouthful of mucous I’d just call my high school boyfriend with the aggressive seasonal allergies.

I grew up an intensely picky eater. I picked the onions out of tomato sauce, feared all green things but broccoli, avoided things with questionable smells. (Why did broccoli — the most questionable smell ever — not provoke this response? The brain is a strange place.) Some cooked vegetables were ok, but you could not have paid me to eat a raw salad.

In college my diet became extremely unhealthy. Making changes was tough because I didn’t want to eat vegetables. I spent a whole semester going to the salad bar at school and getting a plateful of raw broccoli with croutons and honey mustard dressing for lunch. This was as shitty as it sounds.

The point is, I spent the first 24 years of my life thinking that vegetables were gross. That healthy food tasted awful. That a meal could never be filling if it didn’t have a meat centerpiece and some creamy carb involved.

And then three things happened at the same time:

1) I became a personal trainer, and suddenly felt the responsibility of promoting health to others. I was supposed to recommend brussels sprouts when I’m the one who secretly scrapes mine into the trash?

2) I started dating a personal trainer who loved eating salad. Trying to connect with him, I immediately said, “Oh my god, I love salads too!” and felt the ground give way beneath my deceit and lies.

3) I went to dinner at a friend’s house where most of the meal was vegetable-based. The polite picky eater’s nightmare, I neither wanted to eat anything nor be rude enough to refuse everything. So I had about two bites of each dish. Which caused my friend to sheepishly ask whether I had hated everything they made for me. Which made me feel awful forever.

So yeah. You could say that I started eating salads because I was a humiliated adult who was still acting like the eight year old picking three green leaves out of her lettuce bowl.

But I was not about to compromise all my childhood values when it came to the quality of plant I was willing to eat. There would be no assberg lettuce floating in spermy ranch. I knew there had to be greener salad pastures out there, and I committed to finding them.

It turns out that salad is like what Shakespeare said: prose before hos. No, no, no, sorry, not that. He said: don’t waste your love on someone who doesn’t value it. Boring salads don’t value us or deserve us. Those veggies create an image of salad as unsatisfying rabbit food; something for wispy, boring women; something that men think is emasculating to enjoy. Honestly, how the fuck did we manage to gender stereotype SALAD?

Instead, please enjoy what I have learned over the last decade of vegetable discovery. I’ve done all the taste testing of swiss chard, burned all the kale in the oven, and ordered all the shitty caesars, in order to come up with the definitive list of Salad Tips For Vegetable Haters.

Salad Tip #1: Dress only the leaves

This is the most important thing. When you put the greens (and raw veggies, if you’re using any) into a bowl, dress them. Right then. NO ONE does this. They don’t do it at Sweetgreen. They don’t do it in restaurants. Everyone puts the entire salad in the bowl and then dresses the entire salad. Uh…you better really like that salad dressing because you’re about to eat a pound of food that tastes like Greek vinaigrette.

Why It Works: No one needs bacon or pine nuts to taste like salad dressing. They already taste awesome. So hold off on all of your accessories, and only add your dressing to the items that need a little boost. You’ll use less dressing, and it will ensure that your salad has more complex and interesting flavors. Your dry-ass kale will get some zing, but the snozzberries will still taste like snozzberries.

Salad Tip #2: Don’t Ignore Fruit

This is a tip for all my playas out there who can handle a few leaves, but aren’t prepared to go from zero to pickled cabbage. You can have your bowl of (pre-dressed!) leaves, and then fill the rest of the salad with fruit, something more palatable to most people. Blackberries, strawberries, cherries, mango, pineapple, grapefruit, plantains, raspberries, avocado (stay outta my DMs, avocado is a fruit), grapes, mandarin oranges, apples — all of these can turn your bowl of plain leaves into a rainforest of citricultural excellence.

Why it works: Because fruit is delicious AND awesomely healthy. If you have some asshole in your life telling you that fruit is too sugary, break up with the friend before you break up with the fruit.

Salad Tip #3: Roasted Vegetables

As someone who isn’t thrilled about raw vegetables all the time, adding roasted vegetables to salad was a game-changer. Veggie haters always like roasted vegetables better, because roasted vegetables taste better. But no one wants to bother taking the time to cut and cook half a squash just to make a salad. So what I do is roast a tray of vegetables (olive oil, salt, pepper, 400 degrees til roasty) any time I’m using the oven or grilling something outside. Then I keep a container in the fridge, ready to microwave and add to a salad any time.

Why it works: Roasted >>> Raw, especially for those who are squirmy with veggies. That great caramelized outside, with a warm, rich inside (how’d this become an article about your mom?!) is heaven on top of cold salad leaves. Adding roasted squash, broccoli, beets, or cauliflower into a salad is gonna make you furious that you haven’t been doing it for years.

Salad Tip #4: Carbs

This is a simple one. Don’t be scared to add carbs to your salad. Rice, quinoa, orzo, whatever. Just mix it on in there, or add some buttered/jammed/cheesy toast on top.

Why it works: Because it’s carbs. Duh.

Salad Tip #5: Use the right toppings

Crumbled bacün bitz in an unrefrigerated container that has a shelf life of ten years? Does this sound like just the thing to punch up a food you’re not crazy about? Hell no. How about those little containers of Crunchy Salad Topper? This is what’s in Crunchy Salad Topper:

Sunflower Seeds, Soybeans, Textured Soy Flour, Rice, Onion, Carrots, Canola Oil, Red and Green Bell Peppers, Salt, Sugar, Parsley, Barley Malt Extract…

Don’t be fooled that there are some healthy-sounding stuff here. Those ingredients are vegetable dingleberries and salad terrorists. For a lot of people, toppings are gonna be what they enjoy the best. Most of us can get on board with some raw peppers if there’s gonna be a crouton clinging to it. So don’t let the best part of your salad be some manufactured bullshit.

Why It Works: Crunchy Salad Topper has one thing right, which is that crunch in a salad is a beautiful thing. Raw or roasted nuts, pumpkin or sunflower seeds, POMEGRANATE SEEDS OMG, bacon, cheese crisps, chickpeas, tortilla chips, croutons, granola, plantain chips. Hell, I’ve used leftover scallion pancakes, diced mozzarella sticks, and crushed-up jalapeno potato chips as crunchy salad toppers and all were awesome.

(Did you just have a moment of Mia, you put…scallion pancakes?…in your salad…? If so, you’re not alone. Listen. You’re about to eat a colon-full of fruits and vegetables. If you’ve made your salad right, you’re gonna be packing a million vitamins, minerals, and nutrients into your body. The benefits of that will not be nullified or ruined by adding something like chopped scallion pancakes as croutons. What will be ruined? Your hatred of salads. Because each time you get a great bite of veggies AND it has a motherfucking scallion pancake on it? You’ll fall in love all over again.)

Salad Tip #6: The Finishers

The Finishers are up to you but these are your final touches. Right before eating, I hit most salads with salt, pepper, and a squirt of lime or lemon juice. If you’ve got a bunch of salty ingredients like roasted veggies, hard cheeses, etc, you might not need the salt and pepper. But don’t forget the lemon.

Why it works: Like humans, the best salads are salty and kinda bitter.

I left meat off of this list because any meat works well in a salad. Just remember that salads can be delicious and filling without meat too.

The beautiful thing about a homemade salad is that you control the ingredients. You don’t have to use anything in it that you don’t want to. For example, I hate most lettuce. So I always use raw spinach or kale as my base. It doesn’t matter at all if everyone else puts cucumbers in a salad. If you think they taste like annoying water bananas, don’t buy em. Practice with proportions and I guarantee you’ll soon find yourself like me, loving salads from my head tomatoes. (Not raw.)

Mia Lazarewicz is a strength coach, writer, fitness speaker, and shoe fanatic. She co-owns a gym, Amplify Fitness, opening in Boston in 2022. She has recently appeared in SELF magazine, The Evening Standard, and StrongFirst. Recent speaking engagements include Boston Children’s Hospital Female Athlete Conference 2021 and the Female Performance Summit 2020. Find her on Instagram @thebossiraptor, or at lazertraining.com.

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