Kale is a four-letter word with all sorts of hidden subtext. If you eat kale, you’re good, you’re healthy, you’re DOING THE RIGHT THING. If you don’t eat kale, well, you might as well be on the Twinkie Train to Tubbydom.
Okay, so maybe I am on the Twinkie Train to Tubbydom. I might even be accused of being the conductor. But dammit, I’d take a Twinkie over kale any day, and I don’t even particularly like Twinkies! I hate vegetables, and I hate that the self-righteousness of veggie-re-virginated people means we kale-aversers are practically the modern-day equivalent of cigarette smokers.
A few years ago I did an empathy juice fast with my daughter, who needed to undergo suffer through one for medical reasons. I knew I was the underdog from the start, being the vegetable-loathing creature I am. As a self-diagnosed supertaster, I find the taste and smell of most vegetables to be abhorrent at best. So the idea of living on the extract of that-which-makes-me-gag wasn’t particularly enticing. Not like the idea of being on Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food fast, for which I might be first in line. I held out blind hope that “juice fast” translated to plenty of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Now that is the kind of juice fast I’d be all over.
Alas, it turns out that fruit juice, even fresh-squeezed, is akin to mainlining sugar straight to your veins. It’s your pancreas’s worst nightmare. I’m a carb junkie, so I’m all about mainlining glucose in all its officially-decreed health-obliterating forms. Evidently I am a lifelong commuter on the Twinkie Train to Tubbydom, where I fear I will remain, unless I develop a freak affinity for foul food or am issued a death sentence from my doctor unless I change my jaded ways. Because for me, that juice fast was aptly described: fast. As in: I lasted precisely ten hours before I dry heaved my way into waving the white flag of surrender.
It’s not that I didn’t want to succeed on a juice fast. After all, it seemed like a quick and easy way to thin-dom. I was emboldened by having watched that paean to juicing, the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. If you don’t want to guzzle your liquefied kale way to health after having witnessed that piece of Vegetable Producers of America-esque propaganda, you’re a lost cause. I saw it with my very own eyes, how people went from fat and unhealthy to near super-human, all by simply pulverizing veggies into a drink. Three glasses a day and I was going to be golden, I just knew it.
Stockpiling supplies for this family juice fast was eye-opening. Make that wallet-opening, because the sheer volume of vegetables one must process in order to make a meager eight-ounce glass of juice is staggering. And I needed a walk-in fridge to store the stuff. For the four out of five in my family who were on board with this thing, I purchased cases of kale, restaurant-level supplies of carrots, cucumbers out the wazoo, enough celery to supply the lunchbox of every child in a tri-county region with peanut butter celery (which the kids would invariably throw out as soon as they were out of their mother’s line of sight). I bought spinach galore, peppers by the pound, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, parsley, ginger, even a few token fruits like apples, pineapple and papaya, though I couldn’t include much, due to that glycemic load problem. I truly tried to envision something I’d want to ingest in a juice: I’m a fan of tomatoes, so maybe with a soupçon of gazpacho? (Nope, it was what caused me to nearly vomit all over the kitchen and call it a day).
The financial implications of all of this veggie-acquisition were truly budget-busting. Yet it’s like paying for caviar, only to eat dog poop.
My family will never believe me, but early in the day, when the juicing commenced, I wanted to believe that I’d acclimate. After all, eventually even Civil War soldiers got used to eating hardtack (which were pretty much army-issue, maggot-infested, molar-cracking rocks).
I’d longed for one of those evangelical moments: this, Jenny, is what you’ve been missing out on your whole life! Vegetables are actually amazing, and delicious, something you will from here on out, till death do you part, crave. Instead, juicing made me hate the few veggies I could tolerate—cucumbers, for instance, and raw spinach. It made me further loath the ones I already detested-beets looming atop that list. Juiced beets reduced me to tears. And not in a good way.
And while the taste was the deal-breaker—one nose-plugged gulp and I knew my fast was doomed—the smell truly created an airtight coffin in the death of my health-food experiment. You know how a certain aroma will take you back to a different time in your life? Say, the waft of your mother’s chocolate cookies in the oven as you opened the front door after a long day in third grade? Take that sensation and flip it, and that’s how I feel at the mere aroma of vegetable pulp even now. I can see if it was the macerated remains of a bloodied animal, perhaps. But smashed-up veggies? How could that be so repulsive? But trust me, grasshopper, it is. I walk by a juice bar, catch one whiff of that pulp oozing through the juicer and I have to suppress my gut revulsion.
Flickr/Larry Jacobsen