10-100-500-100-10 Rutabagas

I am a witness to the death of the rutabaga.

That’s right: The miracle vegetable that has graced so many Thanksgiving tables is about to go the way of the dinosaur and the five dollar steak. The rutabaga cures cancer BEFORE IT EVEN STARTS! Of course, after it starts, you’re on your own. But, the point is that it is really effective on cancer when you don’t have any. It is a cross between cabbage and turnip which is ANOTHER miracle because, most times, a turnip wouldn’t look twice at a cabbage. It can be baked, boiled, steamed, slapped, beaten, humiliated and then served with an unhealthy amount of ketchup.

And, who alerted me to the rutabaga’s demise? Why Farmer Ted, of course. He was a generous man who’d give you the shirt off of his back; and, sometimes that shirt had his wallet in the pocket. Once he gave me his shirt but he never took it off, so I had to follow him around for six hours until I was able to ditch him at a laundromat. And, Ted happily contributed towards maintaining the San Andreas wildlife and flora because the man was generous to a fault. Ted was so charitable, he would’ve laughed at the previous joke, despite how contrived it was. And, he was constantly thinking and working towards new and innovative uses for existing technologies. He was the one who discovered that a c-clamp could also be used as a Robot Pac-man sculpture or a single-use boomerang. Once, he even clamped his two hunting dogs together to see if he’d enjoy living with a two-headed land-octopus. It’s explained in his memoirs, which were titled, I Think I Know Why My Dogs Bit Me… Ted had vast fields of rutabagas, as far as the eye could see, and half as far as the ear could hear. Each one was harvested by hand by his six children and each was given a Christian name, a nickname and warned about the evils of Bitcoin before being put into a cool warehouse for distribution among the rutabaga-eating public. But, who is the rutabaga-eating public? According to the numbers, it is mostly the SWISS. You know, the people who make the cheese with more empty space than a cheap chocolate Easter bunny. The Swiss also consume, per person, 36 liters of wine, 56.5 liters of beer, and 8.4 liters of pure alcohol… and THIS IS NOT AN AVERAGE… THIS IS MANDATORY. In fact, many of those polled were too intoxicated to finish the poll without asking the woman taking the poll what she was wearing at that moment. And, they are the eaters of rutabaga while here in the states, mentioning rutabagas gets you the same look Harrison Ford gives you while trying to parse a compound sentence. I thought we were in favor of antioxidants in this country but I was wrong, really wrong and almost dangerously cheesy. Why don’t we eat more rutabaga in this country? Well, for starters, people think of it as a turnip and the word “turnip” sounds like a punchline or nonsense word… like “parsnip”. Either word sounds like the last name of an antagonist in a Jerry Lewis movie. Rutabagas are half cabbage so give them a cabbage name like “root cabbage” or “Eleanor”. This may not help a lot because a lot of people don’t see the rutabaga as “exciting”. You know, a food that dances on your palate and parks its motorcycle on your tongue. As a consequence of our short-sightedness, the United States has the sixth largest exports of rutabagas. It’s odd that fact isn’t mentioned in our national anthem…

We’re giving up on a good root… one three times as good as the radish and a hundred times better than chicory. Farmer Ted is at his wit’s end, knowing that most of his crop is used by a nation whose sole contribution to science is the cuckoo clock. He’s told his children that they’ll be switching crops to exotic mushrooms and endive because THAT is what you grow when you’ve given up on life. Gone are the days when the half-turnip/half-cabbage is served at the Thanksgiving table, ending up partially chewed and spit into napkins and potted house plants.

Inevitable? Try telling that to a man who grows endive…