The title says it all. When I was a kid, kale was used as a garnish, under plates in salad bars. At some point, it changed from something you look at to something you eat (raw, cooked, in soup, roasted, so many variations).
Is this a new cultivar of kale that’s different from the stuff under plates in salad bars? Did it get less bitter or something, like Brussels sprouts? And, when did this change start happening?
The Google ngram for kale shows a phenomenal uptick in 2002. The term superfood also leaps up then, but Superfood Kale doesn’t do it until 2007.
That bracket 2002-2007 accords with my memory of kale becoming the latest thing.
Kale always reminded me of that Far Side cartoon with the two cavemen: “No no, Thag! No eat parsley! Just for looks!” So I too found it surprising when people actually started eating it. Early 2000s seems to match up with my memory. I had a coworker around that time that ate kale chips a lot. Then suddenly it was everywhere, in smoothies and other stuff.
Jim Gaffigan is not a fan. From at least 2013 if not earlier.
Man, he is REALLY not a fan.
Exactly! I guess it changed from parsley-like to spinach-like in the early Oughts.
I suspect it’s one of those things that went from food people ate to garnish in the 60s when people ate neon green jello “salads” to be discovered as food again in the early 21st century.
The part I don’t understand is, why kale? I mean, sure, a general trend towards eating more vegetables, I get that, veggies are good for you. And leafy vegetables, yeah, those are versatile, you can make a salad out of them or put them on a sandwich in addition to all of the usual vegetable things, and can even dry them into chips. But of all of the healthy leafy vegetables, why kale specifically? Chard and spinach both also have all of the benefits of kale, but both taste better. Or, for that matter, there’s bok choi or collards, which biologically speaking are kale; why didn’t they get a similar boost?
Kale is heartier in terms of shelf life and ships better.
For my parents who grew up in the farming/veterinary community kale went from being a food for cattle to being superfood for humans 
Two words: Big Kale. The kale lobby has had great success without having to do any advertising by leveraging emerging social media platforms.
I don’t know that it’s exactly kale specifically - I think that multiple leafy vegetables became more popular at the same time as kale. Or perhaps it was realy that the other more popular again - I don’t recall salads pre-2005 or so having any sort of greens other than iceberg and romaine. Then suddenly salads were described as being mesclun or field greens or spinach or containing radicchio and escarole. And restaurants started to offer spinach that wasn’t necessarily creamed or boiled to death.
You can thank Alice Waters. She spent a couple years in France at the end of the 60s, and fell in love with their salads. She brought the sensibility back when she and her friends opened Chez Panisse, and after the restaurant got some national traction, she evangelized for updating the salad standard with her fellow chefs.
This also gets some discussion in the new Chef’s Table on Netflix, where Waters gets her own episode, if you’d prefer to watch something on the subject.
In college in the early 80s, I worked in the school cafeteria. One of the full time employees, a woman named Benny (a South American), was training me and wanted to pass on some learned knowledge to avoid trouble with management she had experienced.
Pointing at the leaf of kale at the edge of the tray of scrambled eggs, she intoned: “Is no decoration…is garnish,” as she had clearly been corrected.
Of course the thread title reminded me of that.
Taste is subjective and as mentioned kale has a long shelf life. Collards and some other greens require long cooking times; kale cooks very quickly.
When I was growing up, my family had kale for dinner all the time. It was one of my favorite side dishes. It was really kind of amusing to me when the rest of the country finally “discovered” it.
I love greens. We grow several kinds.
Kale being the biggest crop.
I can eat it raw with no tummy upset. Not so with turnip greens or collards. Spinach, uncooked bothers me, more than I like.
Cooked greens lose some of their nutrient value.
I’ve eaten it for quite a few years. I have to say it took me awhile to decide I needed it in a smoothie, tho’.
When I read the OP, I thought “…in the US.” Kale was eaten elsewhere.
Wikipedia says
For most of the 20th century, kale was primarily used in the U.S. for decorative purposes; it became more commonly consumed starting in the 1990s, mainly due to its nutritional value.[10]
Not true, at least here in the old world.* Kale is by far the most nutrient rich type of commonly available vegetable. It’s an outlier in many nutrient categories, and the healthiest thing I can grow, for instance, so I grow it and eat it daily.
*I’m not up on U.S. varieties / cultivation practices. Maybe kale is not head and shoulders above others there.
Kale has been a staple in Portuguese cuisine forever. When I was first dating my late wife 20 years ago, she made me her mother’s Cape Verdean kale soup recipe which she grew up with. I’ve been making it ever since.
This reminds me of when I worked at Wendy’s in 91’. We had huge leaves of kale lining the edges of the salad/taco/ baked potato bar. At closing we would take them off, rinse them, and store them in a metal pan with ice. In the year I worked there, no new kale leaves were ordered.