Midwest Vegetables

What the plate gets wrong

The picture was generated, and these are its errors of fact, checked against the kitchen and the Lexicon. Read the plate with them.

• Broccoli prints “Season: April to October”. Midwest broccoli is not cut in April, when transplants are only going into the ground; the local heads arrive from about June, with the best crops in early summer and again in September and October after the heat passes. Broccoli needs roughly two months from transplant to head and Midwest transplants go out after the soil thaws in April, so the first local heads come in June, and midsummer heat makes the buds loosen and bolt.
• Collard Greens prints “Season: October to March”. In the Midwest collards are cut from early summer until the ground freezes, roughly June through November or early December, and a harvest running to March is a Southern window, not a Midwestern one. Collards take light frosts and sweeten after them, but Midwest fields in USDA zones 3 to 6 are frozen or under snow from December through March, so there is no field harvest in those months on the twelve states this plate maps.
• Kale prints “Season: September to March”. Midwest kale is cut from June until the ground freezes, roughly December, sweetest after the first frosts, and the outdoor harvest does not carry through to March in this region. Kale is the hardiest of the brassica greens and can be pulled from under early snow, but the frozen Midwest ground ends the field harvest by December, so a season ending in March describes the Southeast or the Pacific coast rather than the heartland.
• Spinach prints “Season: April to October”. Midwest spinach comes in two windows, spring from April to June and fall from September to October, with a gap in July and August when the heat makes it bolt. Spinach is a cool weather leaf that flowers and turns bitter once days are long and hot, so Midwest growers stop cutting it in midsummer and local spinach should not be expected in July or August.
• Acorn Squash prints “Nutty, sweet, dense”. Acorn squash is the least sweet of the common winter squashes and its flesh runs fibrous and mildly nutty rather than sweet and dense, so the sweetness on the plate comes from the butter and maple baked in the cavity. The Lexicon's Acorn Squash entry teaches that dry matter is around 12 percent, the flesh is fibrous and mildly nutty, and sugar never climbs the way it does in kabocha or delicata, declining rather than improving in storage.