30 vegetables a week

I've seen and heard a lot recently about aiming to eat not just five portions of fruit and veg a day but thirty different ones each week.  It's easy to understand why that would be good for us - different vitamins and minerals, lots of fibre, etc etc; what I wondered was exactly how difficult it was because it actually seemed easy.

Now, I eat a lot of vegetables anyway - salads for lunch, meals filled with allotment produce for dinner - but a closer look at what I was eating made me realise I'm probably repeating the same meals and/or eating the same vegetables in a different way eg peppers and tomatoes in lunch-time salad, peppers and tomatoes with evening pasta or in chilli. This obviously isn't the way to get thirty different varieties a week.

So, I decided to keep track of my meals for a week, and see how things went, starting off enthusiastically with fairly usual breakfast for this time of year with blackberries and strawberries,




 

After a couple of days I realised that, yes, I was eating lots of fruit and veg by volume but a limited range. I needed to make some additions - beans, beetroot and corn to my lunchtime salads, courgettes, peas, and different beans to dinners.  I also decided I should supplement my apples an easy-peelers with a greater rage of fruit - grapes, peaches and melons.

By the end of the week, I'd a list of 27 fruits and veg, which I didn't think was too bad. When I shared my efforts on social media people were quick to let me know that I could also include rice, potatoes, grains from bread and breakfast cereals - so I squeezed over the 30 mark.

Dinners had proved to be the hardest part as the weather turned warmer and I didn't feel like cooking every evening. I wonder if they might prove easier in autumn or winter when I could add cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli or pumpkins to meals. With that in mind I've decided to repeat the experiment, maybe once each season, to see when is the hardest time of year to make that magical 30 mark.