I Am Broccoli … Let's Meet in the Middle

The food on your plate

- By Kate Lowenstein and Daniel Gritzer

IN MARCH 1990, President George H. W. Bush admitted to a reporter that he hated me so much he had me banned from Air Force One.

The statement prompted the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association to deliver three cases of me, plus a bouquet of my florets, to the White House a few weeks later. The delivery represented about 20,000 pounds of me that was donated to local food banks. The boxes at the White House included a few new recipes” in hopes of changing the president's mind. They didn't.

I've been “a political vegetable,” as one reporter put it, ever since, playing the metaphorical role of the thing people don't want” in the GOP's messaging around affordable health care, among other issues. President Barack Obama sealed my fate on the left side of the American crudité plate when he called me his favorite vegetable in 2013. But the reality is that, as much as you like to complain, you do eat quite a bit of me. I'm the tenth-mostconsumed vegetable in the U.S.; in 2020 the average American ate nearly six pounds of me.