And what not to do.
Let’s begin with what not to do. Do not slice up raw green pepper and mix it into so called salads. Sure, that’s easy. Sure, they look pretty. Sure, they’re nutritious. But we all know they’re not delicious, Mom. Since you’re not going to convince others, lying to yourself about this will be particularly pathetic. You might well be able to get your kids used to eating them raw anyway, the way you can get them used to flossing, but you could also get them used to beatings, and that wouldn’t make them good, would it?
Of course, if you’re a Gentile whose default way of cooking a vegetable is steaming it and melting a wad of butter over it, I can see how raw would seem a preferable alternative for a green pepper. I can also see how the case seems desperate when melted butter doesn’t help something taste better. Of course, let not your desperation drive you to baking it stuffed, since thus steaming just vaporizes its off flavor, infecting the stuffing with it besides, which won’t do either it or the stuffing any good. Besides, green peppers are pallid baked. Knowing that you are what you eat, do you really want to smell off and be pallid besides?
People don’t like green peppers precisely because of the something off about their aroma and flavor. They smell and taste like they should be bad for you, and the fact that they’re actually good for you is more perplexing than persuasive. They’re vaguely sour, not in the wholesome if offensive way that your kid’s B.O. is, but in a vaguely medicinal and vegetal way. Or else they remind one of grass, and grass is not appetizing—your dog eats it when he’s queasy in order to throw up. Asparagus is a more concentrated case of this, and celery a well-watered down version of it. Sage is like this. When wine tastes of it, critics poeticize it as “brambles”. Well, I wouldn’t eat brambles, so why it that a good thing?
