We Discovered the New Kale, and It's Literally Everything

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a story with the headline “Broccoli Rabe Is Trying to Be the New Kale.” This gave frankly too much credit to the vegetable—actually it’s broccoli rabe’s allies in the industry who are making the effort, on broccoli rabe’s behalf. Its partisans feel that the vegetable, also known as rapini, has not gotten its due. “So many other cruciferous vegetables are popular,” said the marketing manager from D’Arrigo Bros. Co., which sells most of the broccoli rabe in North America under the brand name Andy Boy. “Why can’t ours be more popular, too?”

Get in line, rapini marketer. If you Google the phrase “the new kale,” on the first several pages of results you’ll find the following nominated for that lofty, leafy role: Brussels sprouts, watercress, moringa, seaweed, cauliflower, chickpea water, crickets, spirulina, quinoa, avocado, matzoh, dandelions, BroccoLeaf™, freekeh, and contra dancing. (No accounting for taste!) Epicurious said tahini’s “the new kale.” Elsewhere acupuncture is the new kale. So are eggs. Beets. Medicinal mushrooms. Goat. Lard.

Whither cabbage? I bristle at its rejection. Whole Foods tried to make collards the new kale, though some considered this bad politics: “food gentrification,” according to a thoughtful article at Bitch Media, where writer Soleil Ho worried that the upscale chain's embrace meant "divorcing the vegetable from its working class and indigenous affiliations" by rendering it just another expensive superfood. In fact the kerfuffle generated a bigger conversation about food and appropriation. But spare a thought for whatever Whole Foods marketing team dreamed up this campaign—how could they have predicted so much pushback to this most meaningless of phrases? If everything is kale, then nothing is kale. The unbearable lightness of being kale. From kale to eternity.

It’s a rough business, though. One day you’re triumphant Tom Hiddleston, the next you’re mopy John Mayer. In the same week that broccoli rabe became the new kale, Natalie Jacewicz, a writer at NPR’s food blog, The Salt, came out hard against celery. “Celery: Why?,” read her plaintive headline. (Perhaps she missed last year’s Today.com story declaring celery “the new kale.”) The poor vegetable, Jacewicz wrote, “packs a puny six calories per stalk and—in my opinion—about as much flavor as a desk lamp.” More damning still, she quoted the president of the Michigan Celery Promotion Cooperative comparing poor celery—approvingly—to classic rock.

In short: Celery is out, broccoli rabe is in, and kale remains mired in an unremitting identity crisis that is perhaps best illustrated by the article I found that named cavolo nero as the new kale. At first I was perplexed, as of course cavolo nero is the new kale—cavolo nero is kale. It seemed a bit tautological until I realized that we've actually exhausted all the other options and kale has become, finally, the new kale. It was only a matter of time. Kale is a flat circle.

Miso Carbonara with Broccoli Rabe and Red-Pepper Flakes

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