Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee are hoping to come up with a garden-variety treatment for blindness: spinach.

New Scientist reports that the researchers plan to add light-absorbing pigments from spinach to nerve cells in the retina. The hope is that the nerve cells fire when hit by light.

A team led by Eli Greenbaum has shown that adding plant pigments to human cells makes the cells respond to light. Even if successful, however, the experiment would only partly restore vision, and subjects would be color-blind.

Greenbaum told New Scientist, however, that it could provide far better resolution than the electronic retinal implants being developed. Retinal implants are offered to people suffering from degenerative eye diseases like retinitis pigmentosa.