Cauliflower vs. Cabbage

Peter Rukavina

The Advice of the Day at Almanac.com is:

“Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” —Mark Twain

Which reminded me of this: when I was working in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner, I was assigned the weekly task of pasting up the ad for the Farm Boy produce market. The Farm Boy ad consisted of a 4-inch wide column the entire length of a newspaper page that listed off the prices of whatever fruits or vegetables were on special that week, along with a tiny photo of each.

On the shelf above one of my coworker’s stations was a collection of various pictures of various fruits and vegetables, and from that collection I drew whatever I needed to compose the ad.

Except I could never find a picture of brussels sprouts.

So every time that brussels sprouts were on special, I needed to find a picture of a cabbage, mount it on the large-format camera, set the camera to reduce to about 15% of the original size, and then shoot four or five copies. I then arranged the little cabbages together to form a rather realistic looking set of brussels sprouts.

Comments

Submitted by Oliver B on

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Not to mention the damage your deceptions were liable to cause to a young cabbage’s body image. Such concerns start long before a cabbage heads off to college.

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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