Have your cake, eat veggies too

All, apparently, is fair in love and vegetables.

Twisted that may be, but it best accounts for Vegio, a tasteless, odorless powder made by drying and pulverizing 21 kinds of vegetables. Soloflex Inc. sells the supplement as a sort of stealth salad bar.

“Can’t get your kids to eat their vegetables? Soloflex can!” reads the press release from the Hillsboro, Ore.-based company.

Click the Vegio can on soloflex.com and you’ll be ushered, far, far away from the steely rectilinearity of Soloflex exercise machines and their inmates, off to a magical land populated by gloriously gooey slabs of chocolate cake.

But not just any cake. This is health cake, dosed on the sly with tasteless, odorless Vegio powder. “Health food for the clever,” reads the title — cake that claims to provide most of the nutrients and fiber of 21 vegetables, including those we’ve read about in novels about the South, but never eaten, such as kale and okra.

Also ORAC, which is not okra misspelled, but Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity. Which apparently is a good thing despite sounding like a weapon deployed by aliens.

In reality, the more ORAC, the better, and a tablespoon of Vegio has 3,000 units — the equivalent of those five or six servings of vegetables that we should be eating daily.

One 8-ounce can of Vegio ($25 plus $5 shipping on the Web site) contains the equivalent of about 100 servings of vegetables with none of the bulk, muss, fuss or flavor. Twenty days’ worth of better veggies through science.

It reminds you of the 1955 movie “Conquest of Space”: The guys on the space station chosen for the Mars mission had to eat all their meals in pill form while their buddies behaved like gleeful trenchermen, and stopped just short of ordering roast suckling pig for breakfast.

At least you won’t have to worry about Charlton Heston bursting into your kitchen shouting, “Vegio is people!!!”