Revenge of the vegetables, or: Death by tubers

One of my friends, a mother of 3, became deathly ill with “morning sickness” (which lasted all day) during every pregnancy, while I never got sick. We were pregnant around the same times for our first 2 (my only 2), and I researched around a bit to figure out why she was feeling so extremely awful. The best thing I found was Margie Profet’s startling new idea about morning sickness, published (around 1994?) in the New York Times and elsewhere, and subsequently posted to the web: vegetables and other foods contain so many naturally-occuring toxic substances that a woman’s “morning sickness” is a way of stopping her from eating these things since they could hurt her baby.

I hadn’t given these ideas much thought until yesterday, when I was nearly prostrate from an attack of root vegetables.

I have to conclude that, aside from carrots, I hate most root vegetables, and they hate me. If vegetables have a high success rate for soaking up toxins, root vegetables probably have the highest since they’re stuck in dirt most of the time.

The whole crazy thing started because we felt it was important to prepare more vegetarian dishes to encourage healthier eating by our children. Hence, I dug out my old falling-apart edition of Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure, both volumes, trying to find recipes that sounded appetizing.

There actually isn’t much in those two books if you want to eat low on the glycemic index, or avoid masses of butter or cheese, as Thomas unfortunately goes high on the refined sugars, brown sugars, molasses, and dairy fats. I did find a “Winter Vegetable Stew” recipe that sounded moderately appetising (with “only” 9 tablespoons of butter), and ran to our local store to inquire about parsnips and turnips, two vegetables I never eat (and never will again), and about which I know nothing. I learned that parsnips are long, with a fat end and a skinny end, and that turnips are round. Both seem sort of whitish.

Carrots, which I do like (and which weren’t part of this recipe) can be eaten raw. This relates to my new theory of palatability of vegetables. If I like it raw, I’ll tolerate it cooked. If I can’t stand it raw, chances are it’s not going to agree with me cooked.

I would rather not eat raw turnips. Or potatoes. Or parsnips. Radishes give me heartburn. Celery root typically is an exception (along with carrots): I like it raw (shredded, with apple, in a mayonnaise dressing) and cooked (similar prep). But I think that pretty much adumbrates my repertoire of root veggies.

An hour after a hearty serving of this aforementioned carrot-free Winter Vegetable Stew, I thought my head would explode. After that my insides began to feel inflamed. Imagine a really bad hangover. That’s how I felt within hours of eating this meal.

I finally knew what it must be like to have an extreme case of “morning sickness” — at midnight, and at a far remove from pregnancy, too. This morning I looked like a survivor of poisoning.

Later this afternoon I am going to dump the leftovers onto the compost. And Anna Thomas, you can stick that parsnip where the sun don’t shine.