The Main ‘Vegetables’ Americans Eat Are Pizza and French Fries

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8. Frozen vegetables are cheap and fast to prepare

My husband likes eating a lot of vegetables - salad and vegetables every day and he doesn't like mushy canned vegetables. It was a struggle for me to make the time to do the prep work for fresh vegetables, plus I ended up with a lot of waste and used a lot of water cleaning and preparing them. So I've gone to frozen and bagged vegetables and we eat a lot more of them with much less waste and much less time invested.

Frozen vegetables can be microwaved quickly and cooked to whatever level of crispness you like. They tend to be cheap, sometimes cheaper than fresh because they can be processed close to the place they're grown and do not have to be transported at the peak of ripeness. I still tend to watch the sales - the new little "steam in the bag" versions are for sale at the local stores regularly 10 bags for $10. Those are 10-12 ounces (usually 4 servings, so a quarter a serving), so are more per serving than the larger 16-48 ounce discount bags I can get when I bulk buy. The big bags are not as handy, but I can pour out as big an amount as I want to prepare and keep the rest frozen.

As for the salads my husband loves, we now buy bagged salads. They do cost more than buying lettuce and other salad greens separately, but there is no waste and the time savings are tremendous. Again, I watch for sales and buy as much as we can use before the salads go bad - they keep a pretty long time if kept sealed.