Winner
Book Title: Veggie Smarts: A Doctor and Farmer Grows and Savors Eight Families of Vegetables
Author:Michael T. Compton
Published:2025
How is your book helping others?
Veggie Smarts inspires people to get smart about vegetables, so that meals will be more delicious and health will be optimized. It helps the reader eat vegetables smartly, while cultivating curiosity about how they are grown on farms and can be grown at home. Beyond nutrition advice and ample quirky scientific facts about many of our veggies (like why some people are genetically prone to despise broccoli and kale, how onions make us cry, why beans make us fart, and how beets can make our pee pink), Veggie Smarts is a doctor's personal account of leaving behind the big city for an old stone house and a fertile field in the Hudson Valley. It's about his journey in building a small-scale, organic-certified vegetable farm. It elevates readers' understanding of how nearly all of our veggies come from just eight families of flowering plants, from among more than 400: the Brassicas, the Alliums, the Legumes, the Chenopods, the Aster Greens, the Umbellifers, the Cucurbits, and the Nightshades.