It’s harvest season now, and my family suffers an embarrassment of riches. Our counters and bowls overflow with tomatoes, beans, corn, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, apples, and other delights from our garden. So I thought it odd that while I’m knee deep—sometimes literally—in this bountiful bevy of edible plant life, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just released a dismal report on fruit and vegetable consumption in the U.S.

It found that less than a third of U.S. adults consume two or more servings of fruits a day (including fruit juices), and barely a quarter consume three or more servings of vegetables. That’s far from the goals of the government’s Healthy People 2010 initiative, which aims for at least 75 percent of us to eat that much fruit and half of us to eat that many vegetables. And even those goals are modest.

Recommendations from the USDA actually urge all adults to eat at least two to four servings of fruits a day and three to five servings of vegetables. Something’s getting lost in translation here. We’ve known for a long time that vegetables are good for us (hey, how old is Popeye?). We’re eating more and more calories every year—just take a look at our waistlines. Yet we’re not eating more of what we should. Maybe it’s cost. Maybe it’s convenience. It might be that, like my uncle, you think of vegetables as punishment.