Size of a Baseball

There are no sports fans in this household so sports references are generally lost on us. We come closer to visualizing area when referenced to furlongs or roods than to football fields. So in reading about USDA's definition of "servings" in their food pyramid and nutritional guidelines, referencing a portion as "the size of a baseball" was annoying. There's not one baseball on the place and I probably last hefted one forty years ago.

When the food pyramid was first published I was a bit taken aback by the recommendations. Five servings of vegetables and fruits a day minimum with six to nine being ideal. Wow! I had thought up to that point that I was doing OK. You see, southern cuisine is rich in vegetables, often seasoned with animal fat but vegetables none the less. When someone asks for recommendations for a restaurant, they are often quizzed as to what type: fast food, sit down, or meat & vegetable? The last one being a restaurant which serves a small portion of meat along with three or four seasoned vegetables. This opposed to the sit down type restaurant usually of non-Appalachian cuisine in which the notion of a serving of vegetables is odd by our standards. At such a restaurant one evening Et Ux was having a trout, the restaurant's specialty, and the only vegetable in sight was a sprig of kale as a garnish. When she asked for a side of green beans to go with it, the serving was six green beans. Six! Green beans are a staple here and a serving usually a large pasta bowl full. Things are not well when one can count the green beans in a serving at a glance.

So you can imagine my misgivings when I contemplated nine of what passes for servings of vegetables as I was used to them.

Then I read the details and found that a "serving" of green beans is half a cup. Yikes! We have spoons bigger than that! A typical southern meal of meat with seasoned vegetables provides ten or more servings of vegetables in just that one meal.

So in reading this and that I came on yet another of those studies that show that all manner of illness and malady is thwarted by regular consumption of fruits and vegetables along with the usual references of what 3 oz of meat or fish look like and that a "serving" of cooked vegetables is about what you could hold in the palm of your hand.

And salad? A serving of green salad is, as it said, about the size of a baseball. Here in the growing season green salads are eaten twice a day. Plans for supper are not what we will have for supper but what will we have with the salad for supper.

Here around the Freeman's Table this is a serving of salad for one person. It is a tall bowl, about hemispherical, and more often than not it is refilled during the meal. Since the reference to a baseball leaves me largely unenlightened, I calculated the volume of a baseball and the volume of our salad bowl. The bowl holds 4 1/2 servings.

The salad will vary from early spring until late winter and beyond. During a very good year there will be salads from the garden year round. Here at the height of spring the bowl contains lettuce, spinach, kale, broccoli-rhab, mizuna, tsa-tsoi, beet tops, radishes, garnished with feta cheese from the spring goat milk, and dressed with a little shoyu and olive oil.

Two bowls of this salad adds nine servings of vegetables to the evening meal.