the resurgence of the humble cabbage

On the one hand, the public pronouncement of cabbage as the defining vegetable of 2026 reeks of a recession indicator. The silver lining, if we look for it, is that cabbage’s ascendance reveals a socio-cultural preference for humble foods over the extravagant and hard-to-find.

The whole internet’s talking about cabbage, from Vogue…

… to the New York Times:

Even Pinterest’s 2026 trend report, an exhaustive documents that identifies 21 budding consumer preferences to follow in 2026, lists cabbage as predictor of what’s to come.

Of course, this is all marketing. But it had me thinking about the vegetables and meats we consider desirable or even acceptable to cook or to eat on a given day. Last week at the grocery store, I passed on a $10 head of cauliflower and instead went home and baked the cabbage that had been sitting neglected in my fridge. I simply sliced it into round slats, coated them in our ghee and salt and pepper, and baked them in the oven. 20 minutes later, I had a perfectly charred cabbage that I cut up and added to tacos filled with Morgan’s most recent elk harvest.

cabbage as a pan-cultural vegetable

This, coupled with the internet buzz around cabbage, brought me back to the Indian Christmas Dinner that we threw through Empress of Ghee in late December. We served so many dishes: pakoras, samosas, bhel; kheema, mom’s chicken curry, sprouted mung bean curry; kheer and kaju kathli and chai. But to my surprise, the one dish that all of our guests came back asking for was our cabbage sabji, the simple and warming cumin-spiced dish that takes fifteen minutes to make and will forever alter the way you look at cabbage.

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The beauty of cabbage is that it’s a pan-cultural vegetable. It’s the star of kimchi (Korea), sauerkraut (Germany), gołąbki (Eastern Europe), okonomiyaki (Japan), colcannon (Ireland)… the list goes on.

Throughout history, cabbage has been the ultimate winter crop: it’s hardy, lives well into the winter, and is high in vitamin C and anti-inflammatory properties. For those who try to eat seasonally and believe that food is medicine, cabbage is the way.

I commonly cook cabbage the Indian way, which is deceptively simple and cheap. Here’s how to do it:

the 15-minute cabbage recipe you’ll make for life

You will need:

* 1 small green cabbage, chopped into 2-3” threads

* 2 tbsp ghee

* 1/2 tsp cumin seeds

* 2 tsp ginger-garlic paste (this is essentially just ginger and garlic blended with water in a 1:1 ratio; alternatively use 1 tsp ginger finely chopped + 1 tsp garlic finely chopped)

*1/8 tsp turmeric

* 1 thai green chili, slit (remove seeds for less heat) (these are the small ones available at Indian stores & sometimes health food stores)

* 1/2 tsp red chili powder (I use kashmiri red chili powder, again from an Indian store, or you can buy online)

* 1/2 tsp garam masala (use ground coriander if you don’t have on hand)

* 1/3 tsp salt, plus more to taste

Method:

1. Heat a pan on medium-low with ghee. Add cumin seeds. When they begin to crack/pop, add ginger and garlic.

2. Add the spices — turmeric, chili powder, half the salt, garam masala and green chili — and mix thoroughly. Keep an eye on it to make sure the ginger and garlic don’t burn!

3. Once thoroughly mixed, add the cabbage. Stir fry on medium heat until the cabbage is cooked to your liking — it should be soft and wilted but still retain a light crunch (though all of this is up to your individual preference).

4. Add the remainder of the salt to taste and mix thoroughly.

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If you try cabbage the Indian way, feel free to let me know how you get on with it. If not, I hope you try cooking cabbage per your cultural or geographic traditions. Food is best prepared this way, I think — in homage to the places we’ve lived and the people who’ve come before us. ✦˚*

I recall reading an essay in The Drift a few years ago about the ascendance of IBS. “Why does everyone have IBS?” The subhead read. The acronym IBS, which stands for irritable bowel syndrome, had never personally resonated with me. But the idea of that a significant percentage of our populace — 25 to 45 million people in the United States, according to the Drift — were unable to easefully digest their food struck me as unassailably, though anecdotally, true.

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Deciphering my bodily unease

For years, I had felt like my nourishing diet was inexplicably leading me astray. I ate mainly whole foods, and a wide variety of them. I tried to source local wherever possible. Due to a thyroid issue, I wasn’t eating gluten or dairy (except for ghee). And while I felt generally healthy, by and large, I was still plagued with stomach troubles and breakouts that seemed to emanate from a mysterious source.

Consulting the internet was little help, as every online creator seems to have a different idea of either a) the food group one needs to cut out entirely to achieve maximum well-being — again, gluten, dairy, grains, sugar, etc — or b) the food product one needs to purchase to achieve clear, bouncing skin and seamless digestion.

This, to me, is the greatest peril of consuming health & wellness content on the internet, which is basically comprised of either a) dogmatic lifestyle interventions or b) ads. It took me a while to understand that the dogmatic lifestyle interventions are essentially ads, too.

And yet we often feel that we have no other place to go. Where do you find answers to your questions? I often ask my first-year college students. Google, Chat GPT, Reddit are the common answers; sometimes, a ray of light will open in the heavens and someone will say “my intuition” or “a friend.”

It was always clear to me that my skin issues were manifestations of what was happening internally, not externally. As much as Big Skincare will work to persuade us that skin problems are simply par for the course — and recurring product purchases are the key to keeping them at bay — this just isn’t true. Bad skin is common, but it’s not normal and, like I said, always stems from an internal imbalance.

We’ve long known this to be scientifically true, and we have the words for it: the gut-skin axis refers to the two-way communication system between what’s happening in our stomachs and our skin. And yet, I wasn’t sure what specifically was happening internally to cause digestive unease and skin issues. I had taken a probiotic for years. I regularly fermented my vegetables! What could give?

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The test that changed everything

Then I saw a naturopath in my town named Dr. Rozen. She told me about a blood test that often changes the game for her patients. The test was, in essence, a food intolerance test. I was doubtful in the beginning: the idea that I had an undiagnosed food intolerance felt like a stretch. She told me that many of us have food intolerances that we’re unaware of. The foods that we’re intolerant to aren’t obvious because they don’t act like allergies. Instead, they cause gastrointestinal upset within 72 hours, leaving sufferers wondering if the cause was the hamburger they ate two nights ago, the oatmeal they made this morning, or anything in between.

Dr. Rozen pricked my finger, sent off the sample to a lab for analysis, and about a month later I walked into her office ready to hear the verdict. She told me that everyone has a different intolerance: yours might be dairy, or fruit when combined with cane sugar, or something else. She told me that mine was potato.

The test is called Naturopathic Dietary Evaluation (NDE), which uses a few drops of blood to determine which class of food or combinations of food are poorly digested by the patient. This website explaining the test explains that “Lack of digestibility creates greater problems than just gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms. Since indigestibility means a person will be mounting a degree of endogenous toxicity, a ‘dietary error’ can wreak havoc on all of the patient’s symptoms, even those outside of the GI tract, such as the heart or skin.”

At first I didn’t believe her. Potatoes are a mainstay in most diets, regardless of geography. They are so ubiquitous that my initial reaction was that I rarely even eat potato. Nevertheless, she recommended I cease potato consumption for an entire month before reintroducing the tuber to see how it made me feel.

I swiftly realized that I was consuming potato more than I had initially thought. (Potato is a common ingredient in most gluten free and regular flours, and several additives like xantham gum and guar gum are derived from potatoes). I did the best I could for a month and then weaved potato into each meal for a whole day — chips with a sandwich, roasted rounds on the side with coq au vin. In the immediate aftermath, I felt fine; it wasn’t until a few days later and into the proceeding week that my digestion went awry. My ability to digest my food weakened, as evidenced by most post-meal movements. And within seven days, my face had fresh slate of breakouts. The proof was in the pudding.

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Since my experiment with potato, I’ve mostly avoided the tuber and have experienced stellar digestion and clear skin. The test cost me $150 and I was happy to pay the one-time fee, considering the recurring and often exorbitant costs of skincare lotions, toners, exfoliators, and creams, which I now rarely use. I also picked up a copy of The Beauty Chef cookbook at my local used bookstore for $4 and have been moving through the recipes as if it’s an album on repeat.

At the end of The Drift article on IBS, the author comes to the conclusion that, in light of new research, recurring ill digestion is probably caused by food allergies, which sometimes develop later on in life. There’s nothing wrong about this conclusion, but there is some necessary nuance that her verdict is missing. Food allergies differ from food intolerances, and the latter often won’t show up on a typical “food allergy” test, which only show the most severe and immediate reactions. The Naturopathic Dietary Evaluation (NDE) test, like the one I did, shows delayed and less severe, but still significant, reactions.

It feels like every corner of the internet hides an avatar of a person telling us what to do to achieve vitality and bodily ease: Drink spearmint tea! Avoid nightshade vegetables! Cut out garlic and onion because of histamines! No gluten, dairy, or sugar! The list goes on. I was happy to find, after my visit with Dr. Rozen, confirmation of my suspicion that much of this is noise. Everything is bio-individual: the surest way of easing gut and skin drama begins with a simple and painless blood test. ✦˚*

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fiber is the new protein

If you haven’t heard, fiber is the new protein.

That’s not to say that fiber is more important than protein (it’s not), only that it’s having a bit of a moment in the wellness world. There’s good reason: fiber contains all sorts of prebiotics and probiotics that feed and nourish the gut, which we know is the key to better skin, mood, hormones, and general vitality.

Enter vegetables. It took a while, collectively, for our culture to recover from the influencer-peddled veganism dogma of the 2010s, but as all pendulums do, this one has swung back. We’re ready to acknowledge the significance of vegetables. This piece is not a tirade against animal products — since moving to Montana, I’ve enjoyed a steady diet of venison, elk, bison, turkey, and the occasional beef (mostly harvested by the inimitable Morgan).

But just as protein and amino acids are integral to well-being, so are fiber and gut-loving bacteria.

The issue in America is that the injunction to “eat your vegetables” usually goes hand in hand with cold, leafy salads. I hate to say it, but Sweetgreen does not strike me as the path to the glowing green health goddess I’m trying to be in 2026.

the dilemma: “eat your vegetables” 🤝 cold salads

The issue is that cold salads are:

a) frankly unappetizing, especially in the colder months

b) not ideal for our digestive systems.

In both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda — ancient medical systems that have been practiced for thousands of years — we each possess, in our bellies, a digestive fire that we would do well to keep stoked at all times. These ancient systems of medicine closely guard the integrity of the stomach, and suggest that eating cold and raw food hampers our digestive fire because these foods require so much more energy for our bodies to process. In order to compensate for the coldness, the thinking goes, our digestive systems produce excess mucus, bile, and digestive enzymes. These lead, over time, to bloating, gas, indigestion and more.

It’s times like these that I feel grateful to come from a culture that knows how to cook and season vegetables, a culture for whom vegetables are an integral part of daily life. Of course, every ancient culture had its own ingenious ways of cooking vegetables. India does not have a monopoly on that. It feels nothing short of a miracle of modern life, however, when people (of any culture) are able to retain ancestral eating ways — despite the creep of ultra-processed and industrialized food systems.

In India, eating vegetables has historically been the norm in many humble villages; it’s also true that a significant portion of the population is vegetarian for religious reasons. Because of these two factors combined, Indian cuisine has a lot to offer for those on the quest to eat more plants — not as a side hustle or a new year’s resolution but as an orientation to life.

The thought dawned on the me other day that if our lives are the sum of our daily choices, and the food we eat is a decision we make three times a day, then what we eat determines the structure of our lives.

What follows are six easy ways to eat more plants (and fiber), inspired by the cooking practices of the Indian subcontinent. I’ve picked these up from observing my mother cook for my entire life, from sitting in my aunties’ kitchens in India, and from my own forays into learning the arts of Indian cooking myself.

🍆 sabji: the easiest and fastest way to cook any vegetable, anytime and anywhere

Sabji literally just means cooked vegetable. The idea is that you can grab any vegetable you have in your fridge and make a delicious meal with just said vegetable, ghee (or oil if you must), and a handful of spices.

Try this: in a pan, heat some oil and add a tablespoon of one of the following combinations:

1. Tsp of mustard seeds, turmeric, and chili powder

2. Tsp of cumin seeds, turmeric, and chili powder

Once the seeds start to pop, add your vegetable and cook until soft and tender.

That’s literally it. You could make a million different variations of this dish: add cardamom and cinnamon to your spice mix! Omit the chili powder! I’ve made this dish with cabbage, pumpkin, potato, eggplant, Brussel sprouts — the list goes on. Use what you’ve got in your fridge and get after it.

🥒 pickle, i.e. eat a side of something fermented

Most Indian meals are incomplete without a small serving of pickle, a salty-sour condiment made from raw mango that is fermented and then enhanced with spices.

Unless you’re near an Indian store or friends with an Indian cook, it’s unlikely that you’ll be slapping mango pickle on all your meals. Instead, try integrating a small portion of fermented anything: kimchi on the side of your eggs in the morning, pickled red onions in your sandwich in the afternoons.

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🌅 veggies for breakfast

I’ve sung the praises of kitchari many a time on East/West. It’s essentially a nutrient-dense powrhouse of rice, lentils, and ghee that you can eat for any meal of the day. The best part is that you can add tons of plants to your kitchari: carrots, peas, ginger, even spinach.

You can also make upma — a traditional Indian savory breakfast porridge — out of quinoa with peas, carrots, and cashews.

In American cuisine, breakfast porridge usually means oatmeal sweetened with maple syrup, brown sugar, and perhaps some berries or apples. There’s nothing wrong with this meal, but it’s noticeably absent of veggies and also could spike your blood sugar. Try a savory porridge packed with vegetables instead.

🫚 ginger or turmeric garnish

When I’m at my aunt’s house, every meal is served with a golf ball-sized side of grated fresh turmeric. I learned on my last visit to India that there are two types of turmeric, aleppy and madras, the former being the familiar dark orange root easily available in the U.S. In India and other parts of the world, you might be able to find the madras variety, which is a light yellow. My aunt will grate both of these and mix them together, but I just grate what I can find in my Montana grocery story: generic (organic) ginger. It adds a fresh zing to every bite and helps stoke that digestive fire. It doesn’t really matter what I’m eating: any meal can be enhanced with a little sprinkle of ginger.

🍪 experiment with flours

Wheat flour is far from the only flour in Indian cuisine. We often use chickpea flour (besan), sorghum flour, and millet flour (jowar). We use these flours — which are just ground chickpeas, sorghum, etc — to make deserts, flatbreads, and batter for fritters, pancakes, crepes, etc.

These flours are hardly limited to Indian cuisine. When I cook American food, I use these flours often. They’re great for the gluten free among us. Just yesterday, I made cookies out of chickpea flour, and I’ll often experiment with regular muffin recipes by swapping out regular flour (or even 1 for 1 gluten free flour) for sorghum, millet, or chickpea flours.

🍅 (if all else fails) make a chutney

This is probably the lowest lift way to add veggies to your plate: make a sauce. It doesn’t matter if your main dish is Indian: you can spread a chutney on a slice of bread to put in a sandwich, or serve it alongside your chicken, fish, or red meat. Try these:

• cilantro-mint chutney

• tomato chutney

• mint chutney

• beetroot chutney

• carrot chutney ✦˚*

Thank you for reading this week’s installment of East/West! I’d love to know how you incorporate more vegetables into your life. Feel free to drop it in the comments below — I love hearing from you.

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