Where I come from in South Eastern Nigeria, eating greens (vegetables) is almost a compulsory thing because almost all our diets are made up of greens. We have a lot of variety of vegetables that are use to make different soups and the soups are usually named after the vegetable the were made with. For Instance we have:
Ugu soup made from Ugu leaves.
Uha Soup made from Uha leaves.
Bitterleaf Soup made from bitterleaves (it is also medicinal).
Ukazi Soup made from Ukazi leaves.
Waterleaf Soup made from water leaves.
Okro Soup made from Okro with Ugu leaves to add more swag to it.
Ugbogoro Soup made from Ugbogoro leaves.

There are just so many of them in the village that we don't see so much in the city. But I tell you, it hard to see a typical South Eastern Nigeria family go a day without eating greens.

Another thing we do is we like combining greens in soup to give it another taste so that it doesn't become boring eating a set of soup for a long time. So you can have a soup that is made with two or 3 different greens.

One more thing is this, we like adding greens to some starchy food we it like rice, yam, plantain and others, this is to help us digest it very well and also eating them alone without greens make them appear to us as not balanced.

These are some of the things our great great grand parents did and handed it to us from generation to generation and we do the same to our kids so we hope they'll do the same to their kids too.

We already start practicing these eating habits at home even before going to school and understanding what balance diet or classes of foods are all about.

Sometimes I wonder how our great great grand parents knew about the importance of greens even without the colonial masters teaching the such.

I enjoyed reading your post and responding to it has just got me feeling very hungry. Lol.