The Food Police: Kale

Organic produce is not pretty. I just needed to say that. It has to be said.

C’mon folks, when was the last time you actually had the urge to bite into a nice, crumpled organic peach, or worse, a creased and spotted nectarine? They look a bit like shriveled spaldeens. The avocados are positively growth stunted and the limes more than a bit creepy. But the organic insanity is just the tip of the iceberg, no pun on that much maligned, prosaic head of lettuce once used basically as sandwich filler in the glory days when Wonder Bread reigned. Nowadays it’s all about giant globs of food foliage, huge bundles of garden fodder that look like mid-sized bushes or house plants on steroids, whether pure and straight from the earth or tainted, partially frozen and sprayed with baddies; it has to arrive on a stem and be big, very big. And this “greens” craze can be downright scary if only in terms of the actual space these humongous, unruly plants and veritable small trees take up in your shopping bag and then your fridge, with or without pesticides. Despite these obvious detriments, I succumbed to the hype; and as a result this tale could very well have been entitled “Kale: A Journey of Love, Loss and Acceptance.”

I first started hearing about kale through my vegetarian friends, those good intentioned souls in search of immortality through beta carotene who casually throw off now and again with just the slightest hint of sanctimony that they sautéed some up for dinner; or that a clump of branches from the edenic shrub had been included in their weekly food co-op delivery. This cornucopia of healthy fare comes by way of a local growers cult that basically rations what you will be eating under the guise of “available and fresh,” even though you live in the food capital of the universe and the untamed, somewhat feral looking contents of the box left outside your door often look amazingly unappetizing. Though not a cult member myself I had heard the word “kale” without actually ever having had occasion to use it and knew that it was something crunchy, curative and cool along with its pal the rather dashing and romantic sounding “Swiss chard,” but beyond that I had not given it much thought. Would I even recognize it in the produce section?

My encounter with Big Green happened as I stood staring at the veggie counter one day trying to figure out if I should try some watercress or just play it safe and just grab the romaine. But in truth the watercress could wilt before you even got it home and I desperately needed a change, even at the risk of being called fickle. And that’s when I first noticed it, that big curly-headed lug of a Green with a capital “G” that made me think of bouquets and spring and unheard melodies. The large swath of exotic foliage looked so fresh and happy- dare I say sexy?- I was envisioning detoxifying like crazy, garnering intense light rays of energy as I went and possibly achieving immortality. And so I began to figure out how to prepare it.

For those of you who have gone this terrible route, starry eyed and hopeful only to be crushed in the end by the sheer weight of the leaves themselves, this will not come as a surprise; to the others, heed a warning. In essence there is no way to cook or eat kale; parboiling and then sautéing is an abysmal failure. The texture is akin to cowhide, and chewing on this stuff interminably, as one must do in any attempt to digest, evokes unsettling images of the very animal from which the tanned aforementioned leather emanates. Unless you are in need of serious jaw exercise, probably best to skip; in addition, you will never get it out of your teeth. Baking is no better and reduces it to the kind of miniscule flakes that often fall off dead geranium leaves. It’s a fad boys and girls, created and promulgated by the foot soldiers of the Food Police! But fads take on a life of their own and grow tentacles. A recent NY Times real estate piece brazenly announced: Union Square: A Place to Converge and Buy Kale.

It’s obvious they control the media now, so shut all your devices, put your screens to sleep, chuck your phones, head for the hills as far away from lower Manhattan as possible, tell no one where you’re going and include a month’s supply of Twinkies in your back pack.