It must have been the 90s, because I’m pretty sure by the 2000s I had gained enough personality to feel like I could complain about what my parents put in front of me at dinner time. Sitting around the IKEA Raising coffee table—I’m actually not sure how we all managed to fit around it, my brothers and I.
What was served to us was proudly declared as “curly kale.” I have since been told that, similar to sprouts and cabbage, how it is prepared is crucial. For example, sprouts are great with bacon, because bacon. More often than not, the reason a food isn’t palatable is because the food itself is unpalatable, not because of preparation. If it doesn’t work on its own, you’re merely hiding the actual flavour with something else.
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My dear mother prepared curly kale for us once—which at the time was a cutting-edge foodstuff. You only hear of kale now because of celebrity nutritionists, but in the 90s? Nobody knew what it was. Trying to explain to classmates what kale was... well, it was as traumatic as eating the stuff.
In short, I couldn’t swallow it.
Unswallowable.
It wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t my mum’s cooking. It’s the ingredient itself. None of us could swallow it and have been safely inoculated from the obsession that has emerged in the last 5 years. Thankfully.
Thanks mum.
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