There was a great piece in The New York Times last week on vegetable consumption in the U.S. The article was prompted by a recent CDC study, which found that only 26% of Americans eat three or more servings of vegetables per day; disappointing news but hardly a surprise.

Most of those interviewed in the article take a pessimistic tone when responding to the study’s findings. Here are a couple illustrative quotes:

“Eating vegetables is a lot less fun than eating flavor-blasted Doritos,” said Marcia Mogelonsly, a senior analyst for Mintel, a global marketing firm. “You will always have to fight that.”

“There is nothing you can say that will get people to eat more veggies,” said Harry Balzer, the chief industry analyst for the NPD Group, a market research company. …“Before we want health, we want taste, we want convenience and we want low cost.”

Despite the article’s generally dour tone, it did provide strong academic support for a key component of a better food system – edible gardens that are integrated into school curriculum:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, spent three years examining the difference between children who participated in the Berkeley Unified School District’s “edible schoolyard” program, in which gardening and cooking are woven into the school day, and children who didn’t.

The students who gardened ate one and half servings more of fruits and vegetables a day than those who weren’t in the program.

What better way to make vegetables exciting than to establish a personal connection with the growing process. Plus, I’m going to wager that the fresh tomatoes from those edible schoolyards taste a whole lot better than the canned alternatives.

Produce photo from Flickr user Mckaysavage, accessed 10/4/10. Creative Commons.