The real reason this polarizing food made its sweet San Francisco comeback |
The scene opens with a close-up of a pretty ceramic dinner plate. It’s empty except for the floral motif lining its edge and a cluster cowering on one side: eight sad little Brussels sprouts. In this 1960 episode of the wholesome television show “Leave It to Beaver,” 25 minutes are dedicated to the putridness of the vegetable.
The plot is straightforward: The youngest member of the Cleaver clan refuses to eat the sprouts, even after older brother Wally reveals his trick — “all you have to do is hold your breath and gulp them down” — and a number of punishments are levied at Beaver in return. First, he can’t leave the table. Then, he won’t be able to go to the big game with his family the following day.
Brussels sprouts are served with pomegranate seeds and pistachios.
Eventually a deal is struck, and all he has to do is eat the Brussels sprouts the next time they’re served. After a kerfuffle at a restaurant that evening, Beaver miserably ingests a sprout and proclaims, wide-eyed and amazed, “You know something? I think it’s gonna stay down there.”
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Since the “Beaver Won’t Eat” episode aired over 60 years ago, similar scenarios have played out countless times in movies and other TV shows, ranging from “Desperate Housewives” to “Ernest Scared Stupid.” The endless anti-Brussels sprouts propaganda cemented the crop’s reputation as the vegetable equivalent of punishment, something you’d wish upon your worst enemy — and made its next chapter wholly confusing.
Close-up of raw Brussels sprouts in a white bowl in Lafayette, Calif., Nov. 16, 2025.
By the early 2010s, Brussels sprouts unexpectedly became the culinary darlings of San Francisco’s restaurant scene. From SPQR to La Folie, the prolific local crop once called “the weak member of the vegetable pack” by an LA Times food critic was now gracing dozens of menus, often in roasted and glazed form. So was that it? Did we simply alter its presentation and become enlightened to its virtues?
Not really. It was the sprouts that changed.
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The sprouts redemption tale began overseas in the Netherlands, a couple of hours away from their namesake, Brussels, Belgium. In 1999, a Dutch scientist named Hans van Doorn working for a company called Novartis Seeds published a paper identifying the two compounds that made Brussels sprouts bitter — sinigrin and progoitrin. With this knowledge in hand, scientists took stock of milder varieties of the crop and began a breeding program to change the sprouts’ maligned flavor profile. “It’s around 12 to 14 years before you really have a new variety,” said Joske van den Burg, a breeder at Syngenta — a global agricultural science company that acquired........