Remember when you were a kid and your mother would used to scream her head off at you to eat your veggies? I'm sure you also remember the face that you made when you had to shovel those peas into your mouth. And heaven forbid if you had to eat those ghastly lima beans. It was enough to make you want to hide under the table.



Yes, vegetables are certainly good for you. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they don't all have the greatest taste in the world. Or at least so the kids say. Maybe by the time you're an adult you've managed to built up a tolerance to the flavor of most vegetables and somehow you're able to force them down.

Part of the reason and maybe a large part of the reason that vegetables don't taste all that great is because of the condition in which they're grown. Because of the cost of farming, farmers can't afford to throw out a large portion of their crops. So all things are now grown with a ton of pesticides dumped all over them. As a result, while you're killing off the bugs, you're also killing off a lot of the value of the vegetable itself. Along with the vitamins that are being destroyed you're also killing the taste. Forty years ago if you ate a carrot, it was sweet and delicious. Today, most carrots are pretty tasteless or even just taste plain awful. You can thank technology for that.

Still, vegetables do serve a purpose. In spite of their diminished nutritional value, they do still contain important vitamins and minerals that we need to stay healthy. And while maybe those vitamins and minerals aren't in the amounts that they used to be back in the good old days, they are still there and we still need them. And for whatever reason, each vegetable contains a certain vitamin or combination of vitamins that we need. For example, carrots are high in vitamin A. Peas are a great source of iron. So in order to get all the vitamins and minerals we need, we need to eat many kinds of vegetables.

So what's out there to choose from and is there any possible way we can get our veggies and actually make it a little bit fun to eat them?

Actually, yes. Dips to the rescue.

A favorite at parties is vegetable dip. This is usually some form of sour cream and onion dip. Many people use this for potato chips but this dip is also great for vegetables. Some of the more common vegetables that people use for dips are carrots, celery and cauliflower. You can even get bags of already cut up carrot sticks so that you don't have to chop them up yourself. It's a very convenient snack and a lot more healthy for you than the chips, which are very high in sodium and cholesterol.

With a little thought, you can make eating vegetables not the horrible experience that most kids think it is.