VEGE TALL TALES
Existen-kale Crisis
Susan Brearley was right!

In her latest article, Susan Brearley posed a question that rocked my world. “Does anyone really like kale?”
Wow.
I have eaten more kale in my lifetime than I care to admit. I’ve drunk the kale smoothies, baked the kale chips, and hidden kale in my child’s banana bread.
I concocted the non-alcoholic kale mojito. I mixed kale into my turmeric, honey, and oatmeal mask.
I have massaged kale, roasted kale, blended kale, and had a short but meaningful Las Vegas nuptial with kale. I do look healthy in my wedding pictures.

So when I read her article, I wilted.
“Do I even like kale?”
I haven’t had an existential crisis this big since I was a single-cell organism deciding if I should self-replicate myself into a human existence. I had been in complete acceptance of my corporeality until now. Bam!
I pretended to be an existentialist in college. Who didn’t? It was the only way I could pass philosophy. Every week, I turned in nothing.
When my teacher asked where my work was, I’d say, “Am I even here?”
You can get away with that if you’re dating your teacher and you’ve got a hidden camera set up in your dorm room. Just kidding. My professor had the incriminating photographs.
Life has been pretty non-litigious since I burned those photos. Remember when we could burn photos? Remember life before the all-seeing cloud? Honestly, I can’t remember anything since my reincarnation when I came back as a middle-aged mother.
These days I could launch a career with those photos but in my day, those pictures didn’t reach a wide enough audience. I didn’t say what kind of career.
So. All this, is triggered by kale. Do I like it, love it, vaguely tolerate it?
How can we ever know what we really love when it is also really healthy? If something is nutritious, we tell ourselves it is also delicious — because we get to live longer if we eat it. It adds that I’m living longer flavor.
But ask me if flan is yummier than kale? Yes. Is sucking whipped cream out of a can preferable to piling kale onto a bacon kale tomato sandwich? It is. Does kale taste like dirt? You betcha.
What if I like dirt? Have you ever thought of that, Susan Brearley?
What if the world ends and all the Marshmallow Fluff and Oreo factories burn up in a solar flare? Who’s gonna survive? I’ll tell ya who. Kale, cockroaches, and people who can fake a kalegasm.
Thank you T. Kent Jones for putting all the sentences in order.
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