Cabbage: A Global History

Cabbage has as many faces as it does leafy furbelows. How could a vegetable be so beloved, so universal, and at the same time so disdained? One of the oldest crops in the world, cabbage has for millennia provided European and Asian peoples with vitamins A and C . . . and babies—a belief lent credence by folktales about infants found “under a cabbage leaf” as well as contemporary Cabbage Patch Kids. Cabbage is both a badge of poverty and an emblem of national pride; a food derided as cheap, ...