Put Those Collards Down. You People Are Gentrifying Greens.

Since the beginning of January, Whole Foods has been screaming it from their Facebook pages, corporate blog, news affiliates, and tastefully designed signage: “Collards are the new kale!” While at first glance this just seems like a flash-in-the-pan and downright lazy line of ad copy, its casual, trend-focused language raised red flags among some people. When Mikki Kendall, a Black feminist and writer who tweets as Karnythia, began riffing on the laughable idea of Whole Foods and their customers “discovering” a vegetable that had been a staple of working class Black and White Southern Americans’ meals for centuries,the hashtag #foodgentrification was born.

(Is this the right time to point out that the linked article was written by a woman named Ho and published in Bitch Media? I thought you might want to know, because it seems like life often imitates The Onion.)

What all of this adds up to is a massive PR campaign aimed at rebranding collard greens, divorcing the vegetable from its working class and indigenous affiliations to place it squarely within the culinary crosshairs of the same massive gourmet health food apparatus that turned acai berries, quinoa, tofu, and chia seeds into “superfoods.” Though the health benefits of such foods are well-documented, their trendiness within majority populations tends to result in a generally unhealthy outcomes for their cultures of origin. The tendency takes the form of a curious kind of reacharound logic wherein economic and racial minorities are castigated for eating “primitively” and “unhealthily” while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class as “exotic” delicacies. As a result, the price of that food item inflates to meet the surge in mainstream demand for it.

What is "reacharound logic"?  Anyone care to hazard a guess, because the author leaves us not a clue as to its meaning.

Nor does she provide examples of racial minorities being "castigated for eating "primitively" and "unhealthily" while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class...".  Does she refer to criticism of the junk foods bought by people receiving governmental aid?  That is not isolated to any one racial group, although perhaps in her mind there is only one racial minority.  No, wait, she references working class "white" and "black" southern Americans.  Working class, that convenient catch-all for people in an undescribed demographic.  Everyone who has a job is working class, am I right?