It’s National Eat Your Vegetables Day!
Along the highways leading into Charleston we’ve seen billboards the last couple of months that ask us if we can name 20 vegetables in the next two miles. Our gibbons would have no trouble with this (apart from that language-barrier thing…). Can you name 20 veggies in, say, the next two minutes?
As our senior animal caregiver Meg told me earlier today, “Maybe I couldn’t before I started working at IPPL, but I sure can now!”
Our gibbons get a lovely variety of veggies every day for breakfast. In addition to picking up what’s on sale at the local grocery stores, we supplement our daily menu with produce from our Summerville farmers’ market, local roadside stands (the one owned by Mrs. Rivers down the street is one of our long-time favorites), the flea market in nearby Ladson (where vendors often feature veggies popular in Latin American cooking), and even IPPL’s own modest garden plots.
Some of our gibbons, like Elsa, Helen, and Peppy, actually prefer veggies over fruit, which all our gibbons receive at lunch.
Since today is National Eat Your Vegetables Day, why not celebrate with a gibbon-style raw salade composée? If you want to be authentic, you can even serve it in a stainless steel bucket! According to our caregiver Samantha, on today’s breakfast menu we offered our gibbons:
- romaine lettuce,
- peppers,
- green onions,
- sweet potatoes,
- broccoli
- eggplant,
- celery, and
- green beans.
(Or you may want to turn some of that into a stir-fry….)
June 17 may be National Eat Your Vegetables Day—but every day is Eat Your Vegetables Day for the IPPL gibbons!