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Culture

I’m Sorry for Helping Make Kale Cool

GREEN MONSTER

The leafy green is tough, bitter, and completely unsuited for salads, brownies, pizza, and most else. It’s the triumph of cool over taste.

Mimi Sheraton

Updated May. 28, 2020 11:23AM ET / Published May. 29, 2016 12:15AM ET 
BEAST INSIDE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

Color it green, black, brown, blue, purple, white, or red.

Call it braunkohl, cavolo nero or riccio, chou frisé, borecole, colewort, yuyi ganlan or brassica oleracea acephala.

In any color and by any name, I know and hate kale when I see it—and these days I see it everywhere: like scorched bits of burned paper atop pizzas, muffled into pesto as a dusty, bitter blanket over pasta and risotto, studded like flecks of parchment into brownies and cookies, muddying up the cool elegance of ice creams and sorbets. Recently a food article in The New York Times buried Caesar by suggesting that kale be tossed in with the supple romaine lettuce that is the classic standard for this gently piquant salad. Like equally ubiquitous roasted (a.k.a. burned) carrots and beets and bronzy quinoa, kale on a menu tells gourmet wannabes that they are dining on the cutting edge.

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