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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| Not to brag, but I've known this for a long time. Still, there's always new stuff to learn. This is a fairly old article from Vox: Kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage are all varieties of a single magical plant species  And collard greens. Also kohlrabi, but every time I mention kohlrabi people be like wut? In some circles, kale has become really, really popular. Too popular. I think people may have finally calmed down on it a bit since this article came out in 2015. I don't know what the latest fad food is, but I can almost guarantee that behind the fad is someone with money trying to make more of it. Once a little-known speciality crop, its meteoric rise is now the subject of national news segments. Some experts are predicting that kale salads will soon be on the menus at TGI Friday's and McDonald's. I don't know about Friday's, but apparently McD's did come out with a kale salad that had more calories than a Big Mac. Calories (if you haven't been following along, I talked about calories a few days ago) aren't the only indicator of healthiness in a food, but I do find that hilarious.This makes it pretty interesting that kale and cabbage — along with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collard greens, and kohlrabi, and several other vegetables — all come from the exact same plant species: Brassica oleracea. Linguistic detour, as I often do: you might notice that most of those have some variant of "cole" in them. It's in the middle of broccoli, the beginning of cauliflower and collard and kohlrabi, and it's a slight vowel shift for kale. Not so much cabbage itself, but the syllable survives in that version's most perfect presentation, coleslaw. The odd one out is Brussels sprouts. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is where the species name brassica came from, but apparently not; brassica seems to have been Pliny the Elder's name for the cabbage group. No, Brussels sprouts were named for, believe it or not, Brussels, the one in Belgium, near which the plant was heavily cultivated. Nor was Brussels apparently named after brassica. The similarity of the first syllables there seems to be another linguistic near-coincidence.How is this possible? About 2500 years ago, B. oleracea was solely a wild plant that grew along the coast of Britain, France, and countries in the Mediterranean. Because France doesn't count as "Mediterranean?" I guess they meant the north and/or west coasts of the country. As for "how is this possible," obviously, the article goes into detail. But it's the same sort of thing as saying "How is it possible that a chihuahua and a Great Dane can be the same species?" Short version: artificial selection; that is, trait selection by humans. As we, too, are part of nature, the distinction between artificial and natural selection is, well, an artificial one. For the long version, there's the article. All this speaks to one thing: the remarkable power of human breeding and artificial selection. Wow, that could have been worded better, couldn't it? Oh, well; I'm sure I've done worse. |
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