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Rhubarb
Appears in
By Abra Berens
Published 2023
“Oh, I just love rhubarb!”
“You know, rhubarb is a vegetable. Just sayin’.”
I find the phrase just sayin’ to be one of the most feckless combinations of words to come into vogue. To employ this phrase is to make a point by way of declaration, but with complete and utter inaction; just sayin’, yet doing nothing more.
Yes, rhubarb is technically a vegetable. It was declared classifiable as a fruit in 1947 by a New York court because it is most commonly used in the same way as fruit. It has been used medicinally in China and across Asia for thousands of years. It arrived in Europe in the fourteenth century, transported along the Silk Road, and was more valued than other imported luxuries like saffron, satins, jewels, and spices. Europeans began cultivating rhubarb as a way to increase supply. Increased abundance, in tandem with the decreasing cost of sugar produced on colonized land with enslaved labor, moved rhubarb from the medicine cabinet to the kitchen cupboard.