We recently had a chance to host some of our very good friends at our house. As we were winding down the evening, we began to discuss our plans for breakfast:

Savvy Husband & Lovely Wife: Lately we’ve been using bananas, strawberries and yogurt to make ourselves some smoothies…
Friends: (interrupting) WAIT! Do you make smoothies, or GREEN smoothies?
Lovely Wife: Um…
Savvy Husband: Well, I mean, we don’t add any extra pesticide or high fructose corn syrup, so I suppose they’re green in that sense.
Friends: But – (emphatically) ARE. THEY. GREEN?
Savvy Husband: I suppose I would have to describe their appearance as more of a strawberry-banana color with a hint of yogurt.
Friends: (exchange knowing glances) Let us tell you a little about green smoothies…

And so they did. Now, let it be clear that neither Lovely Wife nor Savvy Husband are particularly prone to fad diets. Sure, Savvy Husband spent his fair share of weeks on the South Beach diet in order to adopt a more carb-balanced lifestyle (it turns out eating Cheerios for 3 meals a day not only reduces the risk of heart disease, it also makes you so sick and tired of Cheerios that you’ll try anything else for variety). There was also the matter of Savvy Husband’s allergy test results that limited his intake of eggs. That led us to our current practice of blending fruit smoothies each morning. Apparently a liquified bunch of fruit wasn’t good enough for the hippies some people, so this movement decided to bump it up another notch: enter GREENS.

There was quite the hullabaloo when recently the food pyramid was done away with (and replaced by a lowly plate nonetheless! I guess I was absent the day we learned about the “plate” as the eighth wonder of the ancient world). Ancient World Wonders aside, it’s been touted that Americans, by-and-large (pun intended), aren’t consuming the quantity of fruits and vegetables recommended for a healthy lifestyle. All this comes as a surprise to no one, however the solution to this point has merely been: EAT MORE VEGETABLES. And there are a few greens that are okay – fresh spinach, romaine lettuce, pistachio ice cream, etc; but have you ever tried to eat leafy kale? Or how about some raw chard? Has ANYONE ever gone to the grocery store with the express intent of buying chard? It’s like one of those things you find when your second grade teacher tells you to go to the store with your mom and pick out one vegetable for Show & Tell that you’ve never seen before. 90% of kids the next day show up with Chard (or Kale!), make snide comments about how bad it smells, then conveniently manage to drop it under the bus before they have to take it home and possibly eat it (and secretly, their parents approve). Then they don’t think about it again for a few decades until they’ve got a second grader of their own whose teacher sends them home with an assignment to attend a trip to the grocery store…

Okay, so perhaps that’s all a little dramatic. I know in my mind that there’s no way the Chard-farms can rely solely on the business brought in by the parents of second graders. But still, to taste the stuff raw reminds me of the time the older neighbor kid walked me around our property and dared me to eat dandelions and thistles! Apparently I was not the only one who thought they tasted like this (well, maybe I was the only one who knew chard tasted like dandelions), but I did know I was skipping out on the portion of my diet that’s supposed to be the leafy green vegetables. So someone came up with a rather elegant, if not aesthetically-unpleasing, solution: Green Smoothies.

I won’t insult your Googling abilities here, but the short story is: Blend a 60/40 ratio of fruits/vegetables, and you’d be impressed at how many more of those “good” things you’d be willing (or able, for that matter) to consume. The bitter tastes of the collards or beet-tops or whatever is almost entirely masked by the sweet taste of the fruits. Regrettably the color still resembles that of your childhood Easter Eggs once you dropped them in every single dye bucket (i.e., raw sewage). However, if you can get past that, it’s all downhill from there. Sure, you might have a few mishaps at the start (our first batch reminded me uncannily of thistle) and you may have to fiddle with the ratio until you’re palate is comfortable with it, but you are consuming more of it than you would otherwise. Regardless, until the FDA revamps half of the Food Pyramid Plate to include the sadly neglected “Ranch Dressing” and “Deep-Fat-Fry”, this option really isn’t half-bad.