From The Hustle:
We had a hunch: no one actually likes kale. So how'd it get so popular? It didn’t take long to find the Kale Queen herself, Oberon Sinclair. But she was just the tip of the iceberg...
Hot take here: kale sucks.
Actually, I’m convinced that, in fact, nobody actually likes kale. Or rather, no one naturally gravitated to it.
Ask anyone — even the biggest kale evangelists will immediately point to the various preparations of kale devised to make you forget you’re eating a shrub: baking, battering, dressing…
And, just when you start to chime in that if you cooked a car tire long enough it’d probably be edible, they hit you with the kicker — it’s just so good for you, they say.
But here’s the thing: Kale doesn’t even scratch the top 10 greens in terms of nutrient density.
Yet, sometime in the 2010s, we all woke up and thought, wait a minute — you mean we’re allowed to eat this garbage leaf? And then the world went hog-f*cking-wild.
So how did kale go from something we put under cantaloupe on buffet tables, to the cover of Bon Appetit, Beyonce’s sweatshirt, and my Midwestern mom’s crisper, seemingly overnight?
I started to turn over a few leaves. And I didn’t have to look far before I stumbled across the self-proclaimed Kale Queen herself: A woman by the name of Oberon Sinclair. And it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Peak Kale
From 2011 to 2014, America’s interest in kale skyrocketed.
Kale-related search queries quadrupled, and the butch lettuce gained high-profile endorsements from food magazines (like Bon Appetit, which named 2012 ‘The Year of Kale’), celebrities (a la Beyonce’s KALE sweatshirt in her 2014 music video for “7/11”) and of course, everyone’s favorite health ‘guru’, Dr. Oz.
By 2014, kale had officially been canonized in American pop culture, Whole Foods was selling 22k bunches per day in its stores, and small-time kale chip producers became multi-millionaires practically overnight.
When Dr. Oz and Bey talk, people listen. But how did kale enter the conversation in the first place? Who planted the seed?
The Kale Queen
“The story is really simple,” Ken Albala, director of food studies at the University of the Pacific told National Geographic. “One woman said, ‘I’ll get everyone to eat kale.”
According to sources from PAPER to The Independent, that woman was New York-based publicist and self-proclaimed kale evangelist, Oberon Sinclair.
In 2015, Sinclair began taking credit in multiple publications for rehabbing kale’s rep, telling MindBodyGreen that she used guerrilla marketing to “educate consumers” on kale’s benefits, “put it on chalkboards around Manhattan,” and convinced trendy restaurants like the Fat Radish (one of PR agency’s clients) to feature kale on their menus. “The ‘trend’ escalated from there,” she said.
What kind of cruciferous chalkboard vigilante are we dealing with?...MUCH MORE
If enough demand is created the next step is a kale plunderbund, see "The Sicilian Mafia and the International Lemon Cartel"
