It’s hard to know what to begin juicing (assuming you have a juicer.) The best way to begin is with what I call the “working man’s juice.”

In the South, an RC Cola and a Moon Pie were known as the working man’s lunch. Working people wanted something that would provide quick energy while tasting good. The “working man’s lunch” appealed to everyone.

The hardest thing about getting people to drink juice is getting them to drink juice. Everyone expects a juice to be nasty. You see a lot of pursed lips, scrunched noses, and squinting eyes. “What’s in this, man?”

This juice will appeal to everyone, and is basically the entry point into juice:

• 4 carrots
• 1 apple
• 1 small piece (size of your pinky finger tip) ginger

Everyone likes that juice. Whenever a person has the above juice, he or she says, “Oh, that’s not bad.”

It’s actually really good, but expectations influence taste perception. People expect the juice to taste like grass clippings. The carrot-apple-ginger juice is so good that it overcomes the anti-juice bias.

From there you should start reducing the sweet content and start increasing the vegetable content. For example:

• 3 carrots
• ½ apple
• 3 large leaves of kale, romaine, or some other green
• ginger

Eventually you’ll want to be increase the greens to as much as you can tolerate and decrease the sweet fruits and vegetables.

After you’ve had some beginner’s juices, you can start making your own. To make your own juices, think of combining three bases: green water, vegetables, greens, and fruits.

A green water is a vegetable that gives off a lot of water. Celery, zucchini, broccoli, cucumber, bok choy, and cabbage all provide a lot of green water per pound of produce. (That is, they have a high yield.) They are also low in sugar.

Leafy greens are kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, spinach, red lettuce, and other nutrient rich, dense, greens. Greens do have what’s called a high yield, that is, it doesn’t give much juice per pound of produce. So you don’t want to make greens your base.

The sweet base is fruits and sweet vegetables like carrots and beets. Carrots and beets have a really high yield.

Giving recipes are hard because as you juice, your tastes will change. You’ll want more carrots or apples in your juice today than you’ll want a year from now. My juices might be too green for you.

But.

There’s no wrong way to juice. Keep adding stuff, tasting it along the way, and you’ll find out the right ratios.

Now you just get all mad scientist in the kitchen.

Here’s what I juiced this week:

Beet, kale, ginger juice

• 1 medium beet (beets will turn your urine and stools red; no cause for alarm)
• 6 whole kale leaves + stems
• 1″ ginger

Bok Choy Ginger Lemonade

• 6 bok choy leaves + stems
• 3 small lemons (I always remove the skin; others leave it on for zest)
• 1″ ginger

Beet, carrot, kale, ginger juice

• 1 medium sized beet
• 3 carrots
• 5 whole kale leaves + stems
• 1″ ginger

Cabbage carrot juice

• 1 whole cabbage
• 6 carrots
• 1″ ginger

Swiss chard lemonade:

• 1 bunch Swiss chard
• 4 small lemons
• add sparkling water

Cabbage grapefruit juice

• 1 whole cabbage
• 2 grapefruits
• 1 apple

Celery refresher

• 6 stalks celery
• 3 lemons
• 1 bunch parsley

Pineapple kale juice

• 2 cups pineapple (remove rind)
• 6 large kale leaves + stems

Kale lemonade

• 6 large kale leaves + stems
• 4 lemons
• 1 apple
• (sparkling water)

As you can see, I especially enjoy citrus fruits. Just start from the premise that you want more greens and less fruit and you’ll end up in the right place.

Also, try juicing as many ANDI score foods as you can.

ANDI is short for Aggregate Nutrient Density Index. The ANDI score is based on a food’s content of: Calcium, Beta Carotene, Alpha Carotene, Lutein & Zeaxanthin, Lycopene, Fiber, Folate, Glucosinolates, Iron, Magnesium, Niacin, Selenium, Vitamin B1 (Thiamin) Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin), Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Zinc, and the food’s ORAC. (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity measures how many free radicals a food will “destroy.”)

“1000” is a perfect score, and any good over 100 is very good for you.