When I was in China, I ate a lot of the vegetable the Chinese call "you cai" [yo tsai], which translates as "oil vegetable." It's the plant that produces the seeds from which we extract what we Westerners call canola oil. We don't eat it here, though it's delicious fried in its own oil, and it's very, very green and thus very, very good for you.
Besides our general aversion to leafy green things, and our unwillingness to try said things cooked in a way that helps us to like them -- i.e., fried in oil -- the name of the plant is probably what's keeping us from adopting it as a viable snap pea-broccoli-cabbage alternative. The plant is called rape.
Imagine a campaign by rape farmers to turn this vegetable into a national sensation. "Try rape! You'll like it!" or "Rape: it goes with everything!" come to mind as possible horrifying (and tasteless) slogans.
I propose, then, that we all agree to do what I did in China, which is to call rape "canola," which is what we call its cooking oil, anyway. One of my precision-is-close-to-godliness teammates didn't like this, but I'm a woman of the people. Give them what they want! After all, "a rape leaf by any other name would still taste as sweet..." etc.
Anyway, think about it.
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