While reading Clarissa Wei’s Made in Taiwan cookbook, I learned that sweet potatoes made their way to Taiwan from China in the 17th century. Initially, the sweet potato’s leaves were consumed as food during famines when there was little else available to eat, and as livestock feed. This is why sweet potato leaves are often referred to as “the pig vegetable.” Original sweet potato leaves had coarser, rougher, tougher leaves, which made them more time-consuming to prepare. In the late 20th century, an agricultural center in Taiwan developed a new variety of sweet potato that was cultivated just for its leaves, which were more tender than the original varieties. Today, sweet potato leaves are cultivated worldwide, but they are mainly consumed in Asia. In Taiwan, you can oftentimes find stir-fried sweet potatoes leaves made by night market vendors, dressed up with a lot of crushed garlic for extra pungency and flavor.

Prior to this year, I’d never really given sweet potato leaves much thought. I’d only see them at Asian grocery stores, and because I didn’t know much about them, I never thought to buy them. Given that I’m down in Chinatown every weekday now given Kaia goes to school there, I figured it would be my opportunity to try to give unfamiliar Asian vegetables a try, especially when they are on special, so I have now purchased and cooked sweet potato leaves at least three or four times now.

Well, I’ll be honest: they are certainly not my favorite Asian vegetable, or any vegetable, for that matter. I bought it subsequent times because it added variety to our diet, and you can never have too much variety when it comes to fresh fruit and vegetables. But at dinner time today, Chris commented that he was NOT a fan.

“These sweet potato leaves… they are not good,” Chris said, begrudgingly crunching down on them. “Can you not buy them again?”

As he said this, Kaia was pushing them around on her tray, hesitant to eat more of them. Clearly, they were not her favorite Asian vegetable, either. We had to bribe her with a “treat” after dinner to finish eating her leaves (she got a quarter of a taro bao).

I told him that sweet potato leaves were looked at by older generations of Taiwanese people as famine food, so many of them to this day refuse to eat them because of the negative association. He quickly said he could understand that sentiment.

Okay, so I relented and said that if he really didn’t want them again, then I would no longer buy them. All I’m trying to do is diversify our gut biome as well as Kaia’s exposure to different produce, so can you really fault me for trying?