If you hate Brussels sprouts, there is both good and bad news this Christmas. The good news is that the vegetable is scarcer than usual, thanks to the work of a heroic little creature called the Diamondback moth. Its vocation-based nickname is the "cabbage moth", although it doesn't just eat cabbages, it loves brassicas in general. Broccoli, kale, cauliflower and sprouts are all among its favourites.
Just as you would expect, on such a diet, it’s a very healthy insect.
Considered a "superpest" for its resistance to sprays, it is also "highly fecund", and a superb traveller. Blown by the wind, it can cover enormous distances. And so it did last June, when descending on Britain and Ireland – but especially Britain – in vast numbers.
Inexplicably, the Daily Mail did not have a front-page splash on the invasion, although it was only days before the Brexit referendum and, typically, the migrants were thought to be from eastern Europe.
The BBC called the event "biblical", and in one Herefordshire town the swarm was so dense a motorist likened it to "driving through rain". Mail-reading Brexiteers may have been conflicted, because the moth's targets included the aforementioned bonsai cabbage, synonymous with Brussels and all its evil works.
The crop was wiped out in some places, but the overall result this Christmas is that yields in Britain are a third less than normal. They’re down here too, but not so much. In fact, in an echo of the Famine (albeit not one we shouldn’t complain about), sprouts have been leaving Irish ports this year – a rare event – to supply the British market.
The bad news is that there are probably still enough to go around. According to Teagasc, supply and demand are just more "in balance" than usual, meaning higher prices. The other bad news is that recent weather has been perfect for sprout harvesting. A cool dry November meant sprouts maturing at exactly the right time, not too early as they did in warmer, wetter conditions last year.
Mild spell
The mild spell now upon us also ensures than the little green buds will part easily from their stalks, unlike their behaviour during a painful December many years ago when, as a teenager, I spent several mornings picking them.
It was glorious, Christmassy weather, if you were doing anything else. If you were a sprout-picker, it meant you had to prise every frozen bud off its stalk, hoping that the little “snap” sound was the sprout and not one of your fingers.
You couldn’t wear anything thicker than rubber gloves, which were useless against the cold. And after hours of suffering, the net result (an actual net in this case – the bag) was a mockery. Unlike potatoes or fruit, the stingy sprouts would not even give you the satisfaction of a heavy haul.
Oh well. The obligation to eat them in December (I’m sure some Brexiteers blamed an EU directive) remains in force for now, and probably will do until food scientists find out something damning about the plant.
Actually, there was encouraging news in that vein back in 2012, when a man in Scotland was hospitalised after overdosing on sprouts. His problem was that he was on blood-thinning medication to prevent strokes and being very high in Vitamin K, sprouts, when eaten to excess, tend to undermine such medicines.
Unfortunately, they have many health-giving qualities too. Indeed, it would seem to follow from the Scotsman’s case that they might be beneficial to people suffering from “Christmas Disease”, aka Haemophilia B, in which the inability of blood to clot is the problem; although I haven’t seen sprouts credited as such.
The disease has nothing to do with Christmas, in any case. It’s so-called after a patient of that surname, the first officially diagnosed.
Maybe sprouts were part of the mystery regimen prescribed to one of the most famous sufferers of the condition, the heir to the Romanov throne, Tsarevich Alexei.
On the other hand, experts suggest the withdrawal of aspirin – a pain-relieving agent but also a blood thinner – may have been his mystic healer’s main idea.
But that’s a matter of speculation now because the political influence the remedy earned Rasputin also earned him too many enemies. During a Christmas party 100 years ago, his food was poisoned. Then he was shot, for good measure, before being dumped through an ice hole in a river. Alas, in the postmortem, Brussels sprouts were nowhere implicated.