Once, asked by a girlfriend what his father was like, John paused and, I’m told, replied “he thinks quinoa is a government conspiracy”. Boy, did he nail it.

But right up there, or down there, with quinoa is kale: horrible stuff, and PJMedia’s Stephen Green captures the fraud that it is in a short essay. I’ve excerpted it here, but treat yourself and read the whole thing; far, far tastier than a wadded clump of green poison.

The Horrible Truth About the World's Worst Vegetable

If you've never tried kale, imagine large crinkly leaves of lettuce that somehow retain a texture that is at once rubbery yet unpleasantly crunchy, no matter how long you boil it, broil it, fry it, sauté it, or whatever the hell else my lovely bride has done to make Hell Lettuce almost-but-never-quite palatable.
Torn into manageable smaller-than-bite-size pieces in an Italian soup loaded up with so much parm that you have to wonder about any remaining health benefits was the one and only way Melissa reliably got me to ingest it.
Today, however, is Liberation Day. Today I learned that everything you thought you knew about kale is a lie.
…. Thanks to professional carnivore Sama Hoole, I just learned that kale only "became a superfood because a publicist in New York invented a trade association that did not exist."
"Before all that," Hoole continued, "the biggest kale buyer in America was Pizza Hut. Not for the menu. They bought it by the ton, fourteen thousand pounds of it in 2012, and laid it round the salad bar to hide the ice."
Kale, in short, was the stuff they put food on.
"Nobody was meant to eat it. It was the doily."
I did a little digging, and Hoole might have actually undersold the mostly imaginary American Kale Association's origins and effort. On the nutrition side, Hoole is on shakier ground — but maybe not by much, if you're getting older and what you need is more protein and iron.
"You could eat a kilo of the stuff, which would take you most of an afternoon and do something permanent to your jaw, and still not catch up with two eggs [worth of digestible protein]. The iron is the non-haem sort your gut mostly turns away at the door."
Devoid of the iron and protein Melissa thought we were getting and with all the chewability of a truck tire, kale is just celery for masochists. As soon as this column goes live, I'll forward it to my lovely bride with the note: "Never again."
So it's OK. You don't have to pretend to like kale any longer.
None of us do.