Conquest of the Cauliflower

  A popular restaurant here in Wynwood Miami sells a wonderful roasted cauliflower for $15. A few years ago, the best you could get in a restaurant was a sad, boiled bit of previously frozen cauliflower as a side. Now there are cauliflower pizza crusts, rice, buffallo wings, steaks, tortillas. Like a mirage, it seems like cauliflower takes the form of anything you want to eat, along with its price. How did we get here? And is a cauliflower that costs as much as a steak such a bad thing?

We as a nation have had traditionally unhealthy eating habits, and we now know that our meat industry, one way or another, adds at best questionable if not alarming additives to its products, as well as taking its toll on the environment. Cauliflower, as part of the brassica family, brings a bounty of nutrition thats nearly free of any calories. It is keto and paleo friendly, and its gluten free. Given all this, its rise to fame is perhaps long overdue. 

And yet a good idea can have a bad implementation. Other than the old school boiled cauliflower, I have yet to see any of the trendy new cauliflower dishes at any restaurant that didn't come either fried or roasted, and inevitably come with a shamelessly lipidinous sauce. I can taste as well as see in these sauces jarfuls of mayonnaise, entire sticks of butter, a suspension of seasoned oil or a cascade of caloric nut butter for the vegan crowd. Cauliflower crusts are bound up with wads of cheese to hold their structure. It comes fried and breaded too. Delicious, to be sure. Better yet, it makes for eye catching pictures!

We are mitigating the health benefits in the way we like to prepare our cauliflower. And what does that say about us? Do we really love cauliflower if we must relentlessly transmute it, mix it, drench it, label it as something else? If a casual, average American diner of modest means who realizes he should eat more vegetables can only afford a cauliflower steak or a real steak, what do you think he will choose? The lofty ideals of the plant based movement are not well served by elevating a vegetable so high that it becomes beyond reach. You'll know we've reached peak cauliflower when you see cauliflower caviar. 

As of this writing, bulk whole cauliflower at our local restaurant supplier is selling a case of cauliflower at the rate of $2.37 a head. Pop it in the deep fryer or the oven, slap a little sauce and laugh all the way to the bank. 

By the way, I checked the menu of that Wynwood restaurant to verify that they still sold their $15 cauliflower. It has actually increased to $20, but they attempt to justify it by adding a nice statement underneath: 1% of all their cauliflower profits will go to charity. Well played.