I’m a bona fide Southern Boy and can produce credentials as thick as Jerry Clower’s accent. I was born in a house with no running water or indoor toilets. I was still bathing in No. 3 washtubs until fourth grade. And I could make homemade cornbread before I reached double digits.
Cornbread is best paired with vegetables cooked beyond recognition, seasoned with pork offal, and swimming in potlicker. Turnip and collard greens are my favorite green vegetables. Nothing else is even close.
The Landlord is a Yankee girl. While she and I can agree on copious amounts of food we both like, we differ greatly on certain greens—which are having a moment—at least for the past few decades.
I’d never heard of kale or arugula, much less tasted them, until two decades ago. Brussels sprouts and artichokes are green, but weren’t included on my food wish list for decades. Now that I’ve learned how to grill them they appear regularly on my plate. Both of us have influenced the other, but we still have an uneasy food truce.
Suzy thinks green beans should squeak when bitten into. I think they should melt in your mouth. Salmon reminds her of liver. I’d eat it every day. But our sticking point remains green, leafy vegetables. She has been influenced by trendsetters. I am traditional on green consumption.
I still refuse to knowingly eat kale or arugula. Kale is bitter and useless, and there are too many alternate choices to convert to eating this stuff. I’ve considered this might be an extreme reaction until I read about a study at England’s Durham University.
These folks, with all other global scientific problems solved, decided to figure out how babies feel about kale. Major surprise— they didn’t like it. Somehow they exposed babies still in the womb to kale and carrots. The subjects smiled when eating the carrots but made the Bitter Beer Face when kale was forced upon them. That’s good enough for me. Science wins again.
Kale wasn’t even a real thing until the ’90s, a questionable decade for many reasons. We like to blame the current state of America on the ’60s, but the ’90s gave us all the primary components of the internet which has exacerbated everything divisive since—Google, World Wide Web, usable cell phones, and text messaging.
That decade also gave us the Macarena, Beanie Babies, McDonald’s Super Size meals, Madonna dating Vanilla Ice, Lorena Bobbitt, and Bob Dole doing Viagra commercials. Kale was able to sneak in with little notice.
And now foodies everywhere can’t do an Instagram tidbit without extolling the virtues of the trendy but bitter, leafy veggie. So will the news that babies hate kale lead to its demise? I doubt it. Trends don’t end because common sense takes over and shames us into sensible thinking.
If that were true the entirety of Congress would be different. Besides, babies don’t follow Instagram— at least not a significant segment. I’ll just have to bravely continue this solitary fight. At least I won’t be distracted by arugula. I also dislike its taste but don’t hate the idea.
There’s something enjoyable about pronouncing arugula.
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