SAMA HOOLE: Kale became a superfood because a publicist in New York invented a trade association that did not exist. Before all that, the biggest kale buyer in America was Pizza Hut.

Kale became a superfood because a publicist in New York invented a trade association that did not exist.

Before all that, 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… pic.twitter.com/kzx2d4yTe5

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) August 26, 2026

Kale became a superfood because a publicist in New York invented a trade association that did not exist. Before all that, 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. Nobody was meant to eat it. It was the doily. Then a PR firm called My Young Auntie went to work. Hermès on the client list, Givenchy, and kale. She chalked it onto boards around Manhattan. Got it onto the menu of a restaurant she already represented. Had T-shirts printed, because obviously. And she set up the American Kale Association, website, Facebook page, thousands of followers, and then rang journalists to tell them she had been hired by the American Kale Association. Actual farming bodies said they had never heard of it. They had never heard of it because it was her, at a desk, in New York. She owned up in 2015 and called it the proudest campaign of her career, which is fair enough. It went off like a rocket. Bon Appétit declared 2012 the Year of Kale. Dr Oz got hold of it. Paltrow made the chips on television. Beyoncé wore the word on a sweatshirt in a video, Michelle Obama ate the chips on Fallon, and Whole Foods was shifting twenty two thousand bunches a day. A leaf that was hiding ice in 2011 was a moral position by 2014. And the noble heritage everyone assumes it has is fodder. Kale is Brassica oleracea, same as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and sprouts, all of them the same wild cliff cabbage bent into different shapes over centuries. Kale is the one nobody bothered improving, because it was never for people. Britain grew it by the acre and called it cow cabbage. Fed it to stock to get them through winter. In Scotland it was so profoundly unremarkable that kail just meant dinner and the vegetable patch was the kailyard. Then the nutrition, which is where it falls apart completely. A hundred grams is thirty five calories. 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. The iron is the non-haem sort your gut mostly turns away at the door. And the whole superfood case runs on nutrients per calorie, a ratio that automatically flatters anything containing no calories, so the winner is always going to be something nobody could live on. Congratulations to the kale. The word means nothing, incidentally. Banned off packaging across Europe since 2007 unless you can back it with an authorised health claim, and nobody can, so it lives on menus and in headlines where the rules cannot reach. It is also so unpleasant raw that somebody had to invent a technique. You massage it. Grown adults stand at a worktop giving a hand rub to a leaf until it is theoretically chewable, then eat it anyway, because a woman with a fashion client list decided in 2012 that they should.

Pizza Hut had it right the first time. It was decoration.