If this doesn’t sound like leadership and the rest of what I usually write about, it is. It’s about awareness, perception, discovery, and living your life. Increasingly I see food and how you eat as fundamental to leading yourself.

Cabbage is delicious!

I grew up thinking it was supposed to taste bad. I thought maybe when I grew up I would “acquire the taste for it.”

I never bought cabbage before last year. Since joining the farm share, where I get vegetables from a nearby farm every week, I’ve been eating a lot more vegetables. Even when I got it last year as part of the shipment, I would steam it and make something like sauerkraut with it. I didn’t know anything else to do with it.

Later, when I put it in the pressure cooker stews, while cutting it I would nibble on cabbage leaves just because.

Lately, I’ve realized just plain raw cabbage is juicy and sweet when you first bite into it, at least near the stem. Then it’s crispy and crunchy. At the end it has a horseradish-y taste. The core is crunchy and has the strongest taste. It’s not something that doesn’t taste good that you have to acquire the taste of. Cabbage is delicious!

Frankly, nibbling on cabbage reminds me of eating potato chips, except it doesn’t make my mouth raw from all the salt, it costs a lot less, it fills me up, and it has a lot more fiber, vitamins, and other nutrition.

I don’t know when I bought into the mainstream view that cabbage doesn’t taste good on its own and that you have to make it into cole slaw, sauerkraut, or kim chi for it to taste good. If more people tried it, we’d eat a lot more cabbage. Plus you can dip it into dips, like hummus.

I can’t believe I didn’t try it before with an open enough mind and palette to enjoy it. I think I was afraid of what others would think if I ate it differently, like with orange peels, despite knowing how healthy it was. I can see my body fat decreasing even while I eat to feeling full every meal—that’s the value of vegetables. Eating a lot, losing fat, saving money, enjoying delicious food, supporting local farms, …

I’m glad I’ve adopted the habit of trying things instead of analyzing so much I don’t try things.

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