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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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!)
Today I learned...
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)
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.
Takes longer to prepare but if you bake them in the oven you'll get a similar result but won't lose all those nutrients in the water
Side note - you really are a maverick kind of cook lol
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.
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.
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 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.
It’s all about yield÷effort for me.
It's not for everyone, but it certainly worked in my case. ;)
My version was 40 broccoli vs thousands of slugs. Apparently they smell it from as far as they can travel in a life time.
Deleted Comment
That's literally wild, haha. Was it still edible?
Zucchini is great steamed with yellow squash and vidalia onions and seasoned with fresh pepper.
And it always seems to be squash and zucchini.
They're like "Hey I'm going to grow some vegetables this year".
Then on a late summer day they're like: "So uhh yeah, I have a problem. Do you happen to need 47 pounds of squash?"
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.
Once canning is done I would dry the rest.
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.
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 have no frame of reference of any of them, but the anthropologist within me is fascinated you all seem to.
It's like, lets take this wild unit system where we have bespoke units for every scale, but then for this one we'll use a sane prefix.
It’s over 2 years, but nonetheless impressive yield on an acre of land. I wonder how it compares to the standard 1 acre lot for corn or soybeans.
Iowa has the most fertile soil on earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-iowa-town-famous-f...
So, somewhat less than an intensive field crop, but the same order of magnitude.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
1: https://food52.com/recipes/30420-creamy-zucchini-yogurt-soup
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.