Veggie Smarts: A Doctor and Farmer Grows and Savors Eight Families of Vegetables

A nerdy farmer—and doctor with expertise in nutrition—provides insight into how best to prepare and savor vegetables while recounting his journey in building an organic vegetable farm and discovering the family that farmed the same land some 200 years ago.

Dr. Michael Compton shares his passionate approach to savoring vegetables daily from across eight plant families: the Brassicas, the Alliums, the Legumes, the Chenopods, the Aster Greens, the Umbellifers, the Cucurbits, and the Nightshades. Trading in city life for an old stone house and a fertile field in the scenic and historic Hudson Valley, New York, Compton built a compact, organic-certified vegetable, fruit, and flower farm. Sharing the joy and proud successes—like selling piles of gorgeous rainbow chard at the farmers market—as well as funny personal admissions—like failing at spinach every year and crying over stolen cabbage—you will discover the nutritive properties of numerous vegetables and be inspired to savor them as Compton does. In building his farm, Compton uncovered who farmed his fertile land long before him, coming to feel kinship with the Delamater family by understanding how they farmed and ate some 200 years ago.

As a doctor of lifestyle medicine, prevention, and psychiatry, Compton shares lighthearted scientific facts, including why onions make us cry and beets can make our pee pink, while giving nutritional facts and “Free Health Advice.” And as a farmer, he recounts his delights in growing a bounty of clean, delicious, and nutritious food for himself and others. You might even find yourself wanting to test the greenness of your thumbs or determining whether or not you, too, are a natural-born berry picker.