The dinosaur method

Five years ago, when I was 20, I found a way you could teach someone to like eating vegetables—or teach yourself how to like them more. That is, if you know you should eat more vegetables, you want to eat more of them, but you just can’t get very excited about them—this is the method. All you have to do is pretend you’re a dinosaur when you’re eating them.

Wash a whole leaf of lettuce and hold it in two hands. Bend at the waist a bit to mimic a more horizontal spine. Imagine you’re some bipedal herbivorous dinosaur, like a parasaurolophus, iguanodon, or pachycephalosaurus. Rip a huge mouthful of vegetation out of your hands. Don’t be afraid to really put your neck into it. Chew extravagantly. Steal furtive glances from side to side as you watch for predators.

Go ahead and do it right now. I promise you it will be the funnest god damned leaf of lettuce you ever eat in your life.

Even if you only do it a few times, the dinosaur method works. It gives you the idea of vegetables as something precious and coveted. I never hated vegetables, but doing a bit of dinosauring a few years back took my appreciation of them to the next level. Even when not eating like a dinosaur, per se, I can still keep the idea in the back of my mind that hey—fuck it—I’m just a tenontosaurus, and munchin’ on salad is what I do. 

I learned the dinosaur method—in a different form—when I was six or seven. Like all right-thinking boys of that age, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. When I would leave class to use the bathroom or drinking fountain I would—as discreetly as possible—walk in the gait and posture of my favorite dinosaurs. I would put my hands right up against my pecs with my fingers curved and facing outward like claws. Two fingers meant I was a tyrannosaurus. Three fingers—and a bit more forearm extending from my chest—meant I was a velociraptor.

(I had one friend who got even more into character than I did. He really didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought if they saw him. He would walk in lumbering, menacing steps and look at you with the possessed eyes of a predator. His posture was such that you would swear he had a tail. He’d even snarl a bit and refuse to respond in words if you said anything to him. Damn, he was good.)

The dinosaur method helped alleviate some of the boredom of school—and other parts of life. I would do it whenever I needed to. The physicality of it made the imagining more intense. (Again—just try it. It can’t not make you feel good.) 

I guess when I was about nine, though, I decided acting like a dinosaur was no longer an appropriate way to spice up my life. It was over a decade later—as I looked at a head of lettuce—that I rediscovered its effectiveness.    

Adults need more fantasy in their lives.