![]() ![]() Vegetables grow in the ground-there is no ethnicity to. The same is true for Chinese cabbage, often sold as Napa cabbage. And yet, with names like Chinese broccoli (as gai lan is often known) or water spinach (ong choy), they're suddenly made more approachable. So-called “Asian” vegetables like gai lan and ong choy can seem insurmountably foreign and intimidating to the unadventurous, Chen says. Back in 1995, when he opened Betelnut, a Bay Area restaurant specializing in street food, he sold xiaolongbao rebranded as “little dragon dumplings.” Like Ira Wallace with her collards, George Chen, a chef and restaurateur who's opening ChinaLive-dubbed the “ Eataly of Chinese food”-in San Francisco in January, isn’t above using a little wordsmithing to get people to try something new. " Southerners of all kinds claim these greens." What's in a Name? “The exchange suggests that collards, until about 40 years ago, if not more recently, were thought of as a black thing-at least to white Northerners," says Rafia Zafar, a professor who teaches a course on food in American literature at Washington University in St. "As people rose up in class, was a way of distancing themselves."Īnd for some, collards were viewed as an African American food and, thus, “other.” In Vibration Cooking or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, the late cultural anthropologist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor relates an anecdote about a white woman who asked her, “What do you people do with those ?’’ “After the Civil War, collards and black-eyed peas were what poor people in the South subsisted on for a few years," Wallace says. Kale may be viewed as practically medicinal, but collards just can’t seem to shake off their own downmarket reputation. “If you eat it and it tastes like medicine and you think you’re doing wonderful things for your health, I can see why it would get some traction,” says Nestle, who prefers arugula over kale. And that intimacy means that the taste of a food doesn’t matter so much as the meaning it's given by the person eating it. “Food is very intimate-you're putting it inside your body," says Marion Nestle, a nutritionist, professor, and author. Chinese cabbage is, well, for Chinese food. Collards are the domain of poor Southerners, drowned in pork lard. We think kale is the healthiest, the stuff of smoothie-swilling yogis. The answer seems to be that it’s mostly in our heads. So why haven’t other greens gotten kale’s star treatment? Collards, the 'Other' Healthy Green (See Who Owns Kale?)īut watercress, Chinese cabbage, and chard actually took the top three places as " powerhouse fruits and vegetables” in a 2014 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. In the era of “superfoods,” collards are hardly the only nutritious green to be largely overlooked while kale, with its celebrity fans and catchy hashtags, has reigned supreme for years, becoming shorthand for clean, healthy living. ![]() To which she responds, “It’s not your mama’s collards! Don’t you love it?” “People say, ‘What is that?’” Wallace says. That's why, when doing cooking demonstrations, she doesn't initially reveal that it's the ingredient of her wildly popular “Brazilian greens." “It’s your grandmother’s food-it’s not so exciting and classy," says Wallace, co-owner of the cooperative Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. Ira Wallace knows people think collard greens aren’t sexy. ![]()
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