Sprouting Ideas

We are told that sprouts divide the British public.

Now, I like a sprout. I don't mind you knowing.

I like what they visually add to a plate, and the fact that no decision is required in how to eat one. You just pop it in.

And I was raised on a diet of maternal advice that they are "good for your pumps". While I have never doubted it, I would not like to have to defend why you need good pumps, on anything approaching an evidence-based basis. In all honesty I've never fully looked into in it with any level of analysis that would pass muster. But I can imagine appreciating a long dry one on a brisk afternoon on top of the North Yorkshire Moors.

I have learned tonight that sprouts are becoming more popular - they are up 30% in sales this year alone. Had I been asked, I would perhaps have offered that it may be because they are picked younger, and not allowed to become the large craggy messes that would be boiled in an afternoon's ever-greying bathwater.

But it turns out that it is not that alone, or possibly at all. 

Apparently today's growers act to make sure that sprout bushes(?) produce sprouts of similar size, and more importantly the supermarkets have influenced the growers to genetically engineer the removal of the bitterness.

So the sprout denier should actually be pretty easy to convert if they can be persuaded to give the little fellas another go.

The bitterness has been removed and that brings the sweetness out.

Maybe.

Maybe.

We're all sprouts.