Veggie Smarts

A nerdy farmer—and doctor with expertise in nutrition—explains how the vast majority of our vegetables come from just eight families of plants, which can guide how we eat them (“eight on my plate”), while recounting his journey of trading in city life to build a thriving organic vegetable farm.

Dr. Michael Compton shares his passionate and healthy approach to savoring vegetables daily from across eight veggie 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 of New York, Compton built a compact, organic-certified vegetable, fruit, and flower farm.

Compton shares lighthearted scientific facts, including why onions make us cry and how beets can make our pee pink, while providing nutritional information about the eight families of vegetables. As a farmer, he recounts growing a bounty of clean, delicious, and nutritious food for himself and so many others, and shares his exploration of those who farmed the land before him. You will delight in following his rewarding but sometimes frustrating efforts to reclaim old farmland for new adventures in organic farming. You might even find yourself wanting to test the greenness of your thumbs or to determine whether or not you too, are a natural-born berry picker.

This is a deeply personal celebration of growing and savoring life…and vegetables.

Dr. Michael T. Compton is board-certified in psychiatry, preventive medicine, and lifestyle medicine—a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the American College of Preventive Medicine, and a Member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. As a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, he has a deep understanding of what makes people feel secure, content, and happy; he also happens to have expertise in healthy lifestyle behaviors and nutrition. Having grown up on a dairy-farm-turned-beef-farm in rural southwestern Virginia, embracing a whole-foods, plant-predominant eating pattern might not have been in his genes. But creating a garden with his two green thumbs from Granny definitely was. Attending college at Mary Washington, medical school at the University of Virginia, and specialty training in psychiatry and preventive medicine at Emory University took this proverbial boy off the farm, but as all who know the old saying might suspect, the farm had not been taken out of him. In a mid-life burst of productivity, he built a compact, organic-certified vegetable farm and got smart about growing and savoring vegetables.