Every year it seems like hipsters find a new vegetable to colonize and make prohibitively expensive. Broccoli rabe growers want their humble plant to be this year’s winner.
The industry behind the vegetable, often used in Italian food, has hired myriad public relations and media experts to try to push broccoli rabe as this year’s “it” vegetable, reports the Wall Street Journal.
“So many other cruciferous vegetables are popular,” Claudia Pizarro-Villalobos, of D’Arrigo Bros. Co., which is pushing the campaign, told the Journal. “Why can’t ours be more popular, too?”
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Other vegetables, like kale, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts, have become popular in recent years, the Journal notes, escaping from the weird vegetable purgatory they had long been resigned to.
There are a few challenges facing broccoli rabe—namely that a lot of people don’t know what it is, thinking it is just another name for broccoli. The fact that it isn’t easy to put in salads also hurts—not to mention that most people have to be told that “rabe” rhymes with “job” not “babe.”
