It all comes down to this for me: vegetables are fantastic.
I am mesmerized by the colors, shapes, textures -- the incredible variety of palpable aliveness. While meat is dead food, vegetables -- the really good ones -- are still living and vital well past the moment that you bite into them. No one could invent something as simple and as complex as a watermelon radish, a baby carrot with it's green tassels waving, a bowl full of tiny lettuce leaves.
You know how sometimes you see an apple, or a pear in a store display and wonder if it's real? And you pick it up to see and it turns out to be a wooden apple or a plastic pear, compelling at first glance but nowhere near the real thing upon closer inspection. Well, take that magnetic appearance and then add the fact that vegetables are edible. Beautiful and edible and exactly unique and magically nourishing. Vegetables are a simple opportunity to experience the vast brilliance of nature and our direct visceral connection to it.
Granted, a trip to the grocery store can be a buzz kill for the farmer's market devotee, with generic vegetables standardized for weight, color and minimal flavor. However, there is still a variety and array of color and taste that cannot be rivaled in the cracker aisle, at the meat counter, or in the bags of frozen food. The lovely and compelling and alluring thing about vegetables is that we didn't have to do a thing to invent them. They simply are, fantastic. Stop a moment and really contemplate a carrot, or the complexity of a broccoli crown: truly a wonder of existence. Now take it home and eat it, life energy from the earth directly into you.
It all comes down to this for me: vegetables are fantastic. 
I am mesmerized by the colors, shapes, textures -- the incredible variety of palpable aliveness. While meat is dead food, vegetables -- the really good ones -- are still living and vital well past the moment that you bite into them. No one could invent something as simple and as complex as a watermelon radish, a baby carrot with it's green tassels waving, a bowl full of tiny lettuce leaves. 
You know how sometimes you see an apple, or a pear in a store display and wonder if it's real? And you pick it up to see and it turns out to be a wooden apple or a plastic pear, compelling at first glance but nowhere near the real thing upon closer inspection. Well, take that magnetic appearance and then add the fact that vegetables are edible. Beautiful and edible and exactly unique and magically nourishing. Vegetables are a simple opportunity to experience the vast brilliance of nature and our direct visceral connection to it. 
Granted, a trip to the grocery store can be a buzz kill for the farmer's market devotee, with generic vegetables standardized for weight, color and minimal flavor. However, there is still a variety and array of color and taste that cannot be rivaled in the cracker aisle, at the meat counter, or in the bags of frozen food. The lovely and compelling and alluring thing about vegetables is that we didn't have to do a thing to invent them. They simply are, fantastic. Stop a moment and really contemplate a carrot, or the complexity of a broccoli crown: truly a wonder of existence. Now take it home and eat it, life energy from the earth directly into you. 
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