Legalize Kale

My family has been eating kale for years, for me since the 1950s, for the rest of the Mahlers since 1850. A good German immigrant family, we ate what we called brunkale.. After the first frost you got the best kale. When our family got together we would cook a bushel of kale, and pinklewurst, and a ham.

We had a family get together planned.

There was a 24-hour supermarket near us and my brother was a very early riser. So that morning at 4 a.m. he drove to the supermarket and filled a grocery cart with kale. When he was checking out, a teenager looked at the kale and said, “Gee mister, what are you going to do with all this?” This was the 60s, and my brother looked like a hippy. He replied with a furtive eye and he looked around to make sure his reply was private. He said, “sssh, we smoke it.”

Big family laughs that day, and we came up with the saying “Legalize Kale”. And imagined that kids all over the country would be buying, drying, and smoking kale. But we never made the tea shirts or bumper stickets.