A Report on Our Year of Veggies

You may remember that our family declared 2024 our “Year of Veggies.”

(2025 is our “Year of Sleep” – more details about that here if you’re interested!)

Here are the 4 things we really focused on for our Year of Veggies:

1. Pretty much always have a vegetable or salad as a side dish at dinner and usually both! I started regularly ordering more vegetables in my weekly grocery delivery and roasting or sautéing or serving them for dinner, and making a salad most nights for dinner.
2. Have more vegetables as snacks at home. Most days, I tried to put out a board or plate of washed and chopped veggies that would be easy for all of us to eat, either as part of our lunch (since we all eat lunch at home) or as an afternoon snack.
3. Take vegetables on the go as a snack. This was in full force especially during the summer for boating – I bought this (extremely excellent) snack box and I’d fill it all with fruits and veggies and when we’d come home it would be almost empty – it just made it so convenient and mindless to munch on vegetables while we were boating or camping or at the park.
4. Order more salads and vegetables when we went out to eat. This obviously was a pretty fun one! Ordering appetizers that were vegetable based or choosing interesting salads made our eating out a little more varied and let us try things we might not have picked if it hadn’t been for our “Year of Veggies” goal.

Frankly, this didn’t feel like a HEAVY goal – it felt fairly easy to incorporate more vegetables into our lives with just a little more focus.

Here are some of the questions about how to eat more vegetables that came in on Instagram when I asked what people wanted to know about our Year of Veggies.

Did you plan your veggies when you planned your meals?
Yes! When I make my weekly menu for the week, I absolutely picked out what vegetable sides I’d have go along with the main dish.

How did you get your whole family on board?
We talked about it over dinner at the beginning of the year – we talked about how vegetables are one of the very best things you can feed your bodies and how it gives you lots of fiber and vitamins, plus it’ll generally make your body feel better. This was an ADDITION goal (not taking away things), so it was pretty easy to get everyone on board!

How did you get the kids to actually eat them?
My goal with food has always been to keep it as low-key and low-stress as possible for both me and my kids. I make dinner and there are several dishes available and if they don’t want to eat it, they can have a banana or a string cheese or a bowl of yogurt instead. We encouraged them to start with the vegetables at each meal (although that wasn’t a requirement – just a suggestion) and usually they were happy to eat some before digging into the main dish. But there were no “YOU MUST EAT SO MANY BITES OF THIS” or having dessert dependent on eating vegetables or anything like that. There was just a lot of exposure and a lot of opportunity and they were old enough (6-14) to be pretty low-key about it.

Do your kids generally like veggies?
Generally yes – we’ve eaten a fair amount of vegetables throughout their life, so this was a ramp up, not a completely change.

How to make it quick and easy to eat more vegetables?
My goal wasn’t a million new vegetables but rather more consistency. I basically just bought more of the vegetables we like (carrots, bell peppers, avocado, tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, zucchini, Brussels sprouts, sprouts, green beans, etc) and had them more readily available and cooked them more often. I also got in the habit of washing and cutting a few at a time – if I were washing and cutting a pepper, I’d do 3 instead.

Do you think a year long goal or effort is good time frame for family?
For us, it has been a nice time frame that gives you real meaningful time to change your habits and not feel like any single day or meal sinks the whole effort.

How did you remind yourselves? How often did you talk about it?
We mentioned it at dinner usually at least once a week and when we’d go out to eat or when we were packing snacks for an outing. It was pretty natural to come up because we were eating in all those instances ANYWAY.

Any other questions about our Year of Veggies? Happy to answer!

If you liked this post about how to eat more vegetables, you might also like these other posts:

• The “Year of Sleep” – Our 2025 Family Goal
• Jalapeno Popper Dip, or, the Appetizer I Can Always Count On
• Tips for Handling Summer Snacks and Meals