Carrots

Carrots. Beets. Cabbages.

This week, I have a guest, again. (He wrote about Cooking with Grandmothers a few weeks ago.) This guest is writer and excellent person K'eguro Macharia. He is the author of the book Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora, winner of the 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize. He lives in Nairobi, and you can follow him on Twitter, where he talks about vegetables A LOT.

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Carrots

Carrots. Beets. Cabbages.

Carrots are lies.

Beets taste like despair.

Cabbage is evil.

***

As a child, I hated peas. Whenever they were in a stew, I’d move them to the side of my plate and, eventually, my mother would tell me to put them on her plate. These were regular peas, not sweet peas. The flavor was what the foodies call “earthy” and the texture was dry. Such a lovely shape. Such a disappointing experience.

I did not grow up with brussels sprouts—they were not common in Kenyan cuisine, though a distant, nagging memory is telling me I might have tasted some at some holiday party. If that happened, I will do my best to bury that memory of horror. We should never have to relive the worst things we have ever tasted.

We accept that children are picky about vegetables. We even respect it. But, somehow, magically, adults are supposed to grow out of these childhood tastes. If we roast vegetables we hated as children, they, somehow, taste good. If we marinate and sous vide and ferment and freeze dry the horrors from our childhoods, we can grow to love them.

A host of too many articles over the years have insisted that the problem with our vegetable childhood horrors was the cooking technique. Simply, our mothers and aunts and grandmothers and other cooking adults did not know how to cook stuff properly.

But now that we have discovered the proper way to cook the vegetables that terrorized us—roast everything, coat lightly with balsamic and butter—we can exorcize our worst memories and embrace our adult, posh palates.

Bullshit.

*

Say it with me.

Carrots are lies.

Beets taste like despair.

Cabbage is evil.

*

A few years ago, I started naming vegetables I hate on Twitter, and I invited others to name vegetables they hate. I wanted to liberate adults from the obligation to love vegetables. A very onerous obligation.

Children are allowed to hate vegetables. Adults are supposed to have grown out of that hate. Or, at the very least, to know that vegetables are “good for us,” so cannot be hated.

Try this: ask a few of your adult friends how they feel about vegetables. I am willing to bet that many of them will respond that vegetables are “good for you.” That is not liking. That is not love. That is duty.

From what I can tell, this duty is now fulfilled by juicing vegetables. Place everything in a juicer, blend it until no distinct flavor can be detected, and have your healthy vegetables without having to contend with how any single one tastes.

*

Carrots are lies.

Beets taste like despair.

Cabbage is evil.

Why these three?

*

Kenyan grocery stores and seed stores carry one variety of carrot: nantes. Based on my experience with it, it is best used for stews. In salads, it adds color and texture and very little flavor. Perhaps a bit of sweetness. But it is unremarkable. On its own, it’s tough and fibrous, lacking anything distinct or interesting. Mostly, it is a lie.

My father told me that if I ate carrots, I would have good eyesight. I was wearing glasses by 14. Diagnosed with myopia and astigmatism. What had the carrots done for me? Nothing.

(A more reasonable person would point out that, perhaps, my father was at fault. Perhaps he lied. But nothing about my response to vegetables is reasonable.)

Carrots are lies.

I have tasted other varieties of carrots besides nantes. Sometimes, they are very pretty. A rainbow of colors: yellow, purple, red. Some have a little more juice than nantes. And the freshest of baby carrots can be tender, not fibrous.

Still, the overall experience is much promised, little delivered. I encounter a carrot—raw and whole, raw and grated, roasted with honey, sliced into chunks for a stew—and experience the familiarity of lies. Eating carrots prepares you for the lies other people tell you.

While carrots are lies, beets taste like dirt and despair.

Many cooks, chefs, and gardeners will describe beets as “earthy.” I think “earthy” is supposed to sound like something is good for you. It will connect you to nature, the primordial past, the essence of health and wellbeing. Eating it will be a spiritual experience that reactivates your dormant ancestral genes. Eat earthy vegetables.

Earthy is a synonym for dirt. It simply means things taste like dirt. And nothing tastes more like dirt than beets. (For aesthetic reasons, I exclude golden beets. They are much too pretty to be slandered.)

Beets are one of the top foods reclaimed through cooking techniques. I did not eat beets as a child—like brussels, they are not common in Kenyan cuisine—but I understand the standard way to make them in the 70s and 80s was to boil them. Or to buy canned ones. Or pickled ones. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Today, we are advised to roast them. Roasting solves all the texture and taste problems associated with boiling and canning and pickling. Roasting intensifies the sweetness and mutes the earthiness.

I have roasted beets. I have roasted them when they are wrapped in foil and I have roasted them when they are wrapped in banana leaves and I have roasted them without any covering. I have roasted them on a bed of whole spices and I have roasted them on their own. Roasting does nothing magical. Roasted beets still taste like beet. And beets taste like dirt and despair.

In fact, our bodies know that beets taste like dirt and despair, because we pee red after eating beets. We could be scientific and say that the intense color from beets dyes our pee. Or, we could be silly and say that our bodies are weeping from the despair that beets create.

And, finally: Cabbage.

Cabbage crawls across the pages of many novels. The smell of boiled cabbage fills the hallways of poor neighborhoods. The smell of boiled cabbage announces economic status.

I learned to hate cabbage in primary school. My parents had paid whatever fee so I could eat in the school dining hall. After the very hasty prayer—for what we are about to receive, may the lord make us truly grateful—we would sit down to whatever fresh horrors were available. More than once, the meat served was slightly green. Rotted. Always, the pineapples served for dessert were raw, so we learned to salt them to enhance the sourness and make them palatable.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, was as terrible as the cabbage. It was hacked into chunks, boiled until it had lost whatever color it once had, and appeared on our plates in shades of gray and slime. It was mushy and slimy. But, sometimes, because it had been cooked so unevenly, there would be barely a cooked piece.

All of this is bad.

Perhaps it would have been better if the cooks had started with a fresh head of cabbage. Perhaps there would have been something slightly redeemable.

I suspect they got the cabbages left at the end of the market day, the ones that cannot be sold, the ones that even goats and cows reject. It was these cabbages, hacked into uneven pieces, that were boiled until whatever resemblance to food had been eliminated.

When I read novels that described cabbage served across institutions—hospitals, schools, prisons—I felt a deep sympathy for those forced to eat it. I knew what they were going through. Is any food more institutional than cabbage?

A reasonable person would ask if I have not had good cabbage since primary school in the 80s. Fresh cabbage. Prepared with care. Flavored with the right spices. Retaining crunch and hint of sweetness. Cabbage that might not make me love cabbage, but might repair the memories of the horrors I once endured.

No. Never.

Nothing can ever erase the horrors of institutional cabbage. Nothing ever will.

*

A final chorus.

Carrots are lies.

Beets taste like despair.

Cabbage is evil.

Hold on to your vegetable hatreds. Do not let adulthood rob you of that pleasure.