Should greens make up their own food group? Is it deceptive to classify greens as “vegetables?” Raw food pioneer Victoria Boutenko offers her ideas on how to ensure greens receive proper attention as the most essential part of human nutrition.
I wonder how greens such as kale, romaine lettuce, spinach, and carrot tops got classified as vegetables. Why do we call foods from completely different food groups “vegetables” when they look different and contain different sets of nutrients? A produce manager from a local health-food store complained to me that his customers often got confused when looking for a particular ingredient among the 150-plus types of produce all gathered under the single name “vegetables.” This man had worked in the produce section for more than ten years. He suggested that the produce be divided into several different groups of plant foods with specific characteristics, for example, roots (carrots, beets, daikon, etc.), flowers (broccoli, cauliflower, artichokes, etc.), and nonsweet fruit (cucumbers, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, etc.). Combining foods with similar nutritional values would not only help shoppers find necessary ingredients faster but would also help them become familiar with more plant foods and increase the variety of vegetarian foods in their diet.
Obviously, plants are not considered important enough to be classified properly. Even at a regular supermarket, one can see that other food departments have more detailed classifications. For example, the meat department is divided into poultry, fish, and red meat, which in turn is subdivided into smaller sections such as veal, ground meats, bones, and byproducts. Every item is carefully categorized, specifying which part of the animal it is from. Cheeses have their own specifications. Nobody would ever classify cheese and meat together in one “sandwich food” group because it would be inconvenient and unclear. Yet this kind of confusion and error continually occurs in the produce section. Some of these errors are quite serious, to such a degree that they could cause health problems. For example, placing starchy roots in the same category with tomatoes and rhubarb could prompt customers to make improper food-combining choices. Many nutritionists believe in the importance of proper food combining*, and have found that starchy tubers combined in one meal with sour fruits or vegetables can create fermentation and gas in our intestines.
I propose that we separate greens from vegetables, now and forevermore. Greens have never received proper attention and have never been researched adequately because they have been incorrectly identified as vegetables. We don’t even have a proper name for greens in most languages. The name “dark green leafy vegetables” is long and inconvenient to use, similar to “the animal with horns that gives milk.”
We don’t have complete nutritional data about greens. For my book, Green for Life, I had to collect bits and pieces of information out of books and magazines from different countries, and I still don’t have all the data. I have not, for example, been able to find the complete nutritional content of carrot tops anywhere. Nevertheless, I have found enough to draw some essential conclusions: greens are the primary food group that matches human nutritional needs most completely.
*Herbert M. Shelton, Dr. Shelton’s Hygienic Review (Pomeroy, Wa: Health research, 1996).
This excerpt was adapted from Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko (2010). Best-selling author, raw gourmet chef, teacher, inventor, researcher, and artist, Boutenko teaches classes on healthy living all over the world. As a result of her work, millions of people are drinking green smoothies and eating raw food internationally. To learn more, please visit www.RawFamily.com.
