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Today, kale is on the brink of reaching its cultural saturation point. Us Weekly has covered the veggie in a feature, “Stars Who Love Kale.” Kale Caesar salads are the “it” food on farm-to-table menus, and kale has become a hipster statement, stitched on Beyoncé’s sweatshirt.
And America is eating it up: According to the Department of Agriculture, U.S. kale production increased by nearly 60 percent between 2007 and 2012. Kale is for sale at Wal-Mart. Even McDonald's is jumping on the cruciferous kale bandwagon and began testing kale breakfast bowls in nine California locations in May.
How did this happen? Not so long ago, salads were made of iceberg lettuce and broccoli was an exotic, acquired taste. For the last few years, I've been working on a book about the millennial generation and food culture, and it got me wondering, why did kale become the epitome of cool?
The reality is that kale is nothing new. It has been cultivated around the globe for more than 2,000 years. Before 2012, rumor has it that the largest buyer of kale was Pizza Hut, who used the curly leaves as décor along their salad bar.
But now, “anyone and everyone is growing it," says Charles Muranaka, executive vice president of Muranaka Farm, Inc., the largest shipper of bunched kale in the U.S. "The market is pretty saturated.”
Through my research, I’ve found that it’s not uncommon for fruits and vegetables to have public relations money behind them.
Exhibit A: Orange juice was created by ad agency Lord & Thomas to help the California Fruit Growers Exchange utilize an over-abundance of citrus trees in 1907. The concept “Drink an Orange” made OJ a staple morning drink.
Similarly, one woman, Lynda Resnick, is credited with giving new life to pomegranates, creating PomWonderful through a similar viral marketing campaign, tapping into her celeb-stocked Rolodex. She was so successful that California’s acres of pomegranates have multiplied from 2,000 to 30,000 acres.
Oberon Sinclair, founder of My Young Auntie PR.
Photo credit: @oberonsinclair
A quick Google search about the popularity of kale reveals the name Oberon Sinclair, founder of My Young Auntie PR in New York City. With a client list that includes Hermès, Vivienne Westwood, and Jack Spade, Sinclair reports that she was hired by the American Kale Association (AKA) in 2013 to, well, make kale cool.
Sinclair is cited as the mastermind behind kale in publications around the world. “Meet the Woman Who Made Kale Famous,” they write, calling Sinclair “the woman responsible for it all and the representative of kale across the nation.”
With a sturdy client list in the fashion and music industries, Sinclair amplified the plant with custom t-shirts, pricy salads and celebrity endorsements.
“My approach was relatively simple,” Sinclair explained to me, via email. “I sought to educate consumers on the benefits of a product via guerrilla marketing. I literally put it on chalkboards around Manhattan and on the menus of cool restaurants, the Fat Radish being one of them,” another My Young Auntie client, “and the ‘trend’ escalated from there.”
I thought I had solved the mystery. Celebrity-laden PR guru markets kale and gets it in the hands of paparazzi-followed friends, on restaurant menus, and in the fashion world. End of story, right? Not so much.
Later that day, I had a call scheduled with Dr. Drew Ramsey, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, the founder of National Kale Day and author of 50 Shades of Kale, a cookbook that boasts “fifty enticing new ways to enjoy one of Mother Nature's hottest properties.”
I figured it was worth getting his opinion on the rise of kale, though I thought I’d already solved the riddle.
“I’ve heard that before,” Ramsey said on the phone about Sinclair’s role in elevating kale. But, he countered, “Have you talked to anyone at the American Kale Association? I’m not sure they exist.”
I paused in confusion. I had assumed the American Kale Association was a group of kale farmers. Kale sales go up, good for the people who grow it, right?
In fact, the exact opposite is true: Many kale farmers are actually suffering from kale’s sudden popularity. “The demand is rising, but the supply is outpacing it,” explained Muranaka, the executive vice president of, again, the largest shipper of bunched kale in the nation.
Ashley Rawl, the director of sales and marketing at Walter P. Rawl & Sons, a large kale farm in South Carolina, told a similar story.
“A lot more people have gotten in on the business,” he explained. “I’m sure there are some farmers who are winning, who never grew kale before. But those of us who have been in the greens business all of our life, [the demand] has changed the dynamics of [the business].”
Not only has more competition bombarded the kale landscape, but eating kale raw, Rawl said, means farms have had to develop intensive food safety measures for a green that used to just sit below plastic bowls of ice on buffet tables.
With the farmers battling an increasingly competitive market, and My Young Auntie claiming that they were paid to make kale cool, I began to wonder who was really behind the American Kale Association.
Clicking around the American Kale Association website reveals little. A well-linked loop runs from their website to Facebook page to Twitter account (where they have more than 15,000 followers). Posts go up on a somewhat regular basis, but contact information is omitted.
A domain search for their homepage discloses the site was created via GoDaddy through a third party, Domains by Proxy, whose website announces: “Your identity is nobody's business but ours.”
So I went back to my original source to ask, quite simply: Who is the American Kale Association? A My Young Auntie staffer replied that AKA has “been great collaborators, but prefer to remain behind the scenes, focusing on the growth and supply, and providing the most accurate, updated information.”
I called the National Farmers Union, figuring if a group of growers and producers had paid a PR firm, this national union of farmers would be able to point me to some growers who were involved.
