Self-Taught Homework #5: Oops, you fell in love with beets

For the first day of vegetable week, you order a patty melt from Harlem Shake. The cheese fries and salted caramel milkshake are icing on top, they’re gravy, whichever food idiom best works with the salty and sweet combination of junk food.

This tendency to lean into the unhealthy, to indulge in the less healthy option, put distance between you and vegetables. Vegetables are rabbit’s food, a lame idiom with an aftertaste of starvation, over-restraint, suffocation. A nibble, not a chomp.

You grew...