I'm not vegetarian, but I loves me some beans and rice

I saw a TED-talk about nutrition today. No, I’m not going to link to it because several bits of the science were weak or outright inaccurate. But it did get me to thinking about how the household eats. In reviewing, I realized that while we were doing fine in terms of lunches,¹ we just weren’t eating enough veggies when it came to dinner, doing far too much “sauce onna carb”type of meal. That’s fine when it’s a really veggie-intensive sauce, but I still wasn’t satisfied.

Being lazy, and wanting to do the whole recommended filling of half one’s plate with veggies and fruit, I went the salad route. I like salads and always have. When I was a small child, this was the only way I would eat vegetables. Yes, that meant we had a salad with dinner almost every night when I was a youngster.

But it also got me to thinking about how much veg I really do eat. When I make spaghetti sauce, yes, there’s real tomatoes in it, as well as a green or red bell pepper and a fresh onion. The beans in that beans and rice pic were cooked with the New Orleans Trinity of green peppers, onions and celery, and we’re not talking garnish for flavoring, here. That pot of beans had about five cups of the Trinity in it! When I make soups, it’s similar.

Yet when you see pictures of “healthy” plates of meals, you do tend to see pictures like this one – displaying half the plate with easily-identifiable vegetables in it as a side rather than cooked into a dish. While in part that’s marketing, does loading up a sauce like spaghetti sauce with vegetables “count” to the nutritionist? I mean, logically speaking it should, yes?

What do you think? If you’re trying to eat more vegetables, do you tend to throw them into dishes that don’t always have them, or do you make a special place on your plate?

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¹ As I’ve posted here, my bento tend to be pretty heavy on the fruits and veggies.