Here lies kale.
The bitter leafy green is survived by countless relieved home cooks after a scathing Atlantic piece chronicled its long-simmering demise.
The piece, “The Saddest Leafy Green” by Amanda Mull, notes that Google trend searches for the one-time It vegetable have been plummeting most of the year — except for in January, when most Americans suck it up and eat the foods generally seen as healthy.
Otherwise, sales of the veg have tumbled, and search interest has gradually waned to pre-Goop years, the article notes, when you were more likely to order your Caesar salad with tried-and-mostly-true romaine.
The article elicited a resounding “Oh thank God” from readers, long tired of massaging individual leaves of the stuff to make it even remotely palatable.
And it’s more than just Google trend searches signaling the vegetable’s demise: Earlier this year, kale made its way onto the Dirty Dozen list, an annual compilation of the most pesticide-ridden fruits and vegetables by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
For a vegetable long seen as “clean,” the pesticide findings were a nail in the coffin for many.
“It’s kale’s time to move away from the spotlight,” Food Network host Skyler Bouchard told The Post in March. She says that “anyone who’s into food could tell you that it’s already been on the way down” since its heyday when the green received a shoutout on Beyoncé’s sweatshirt in her 2014 music video for “7/11.”
Plus, there’s the fact it’s not all that healthy anyway, compared to other healthy foods. A highly publicized 2014 Centers for Disease Control study of leafy greens found that kale was only the 15th healthiest of the bunch.
Of course, the internet, ever-contrarian, offered up plenty of recipes to counter Mull’s thesis.