For All Of Rhubarbkind

A story about our most beloved pink vegetable.

February 08, 2024

This piece was originally written for a company blog which never saw the light of day some three or four years ago. I came across it in my files the other day when I was looking for a recipe and thought it deserved an airing—particularly since EVERYONE AND THEIR MOTHER IS GOING ON ABOUT FORCED RHUBARB AT THE MOMENT. I’ve taken out all the marketing gubbins and kept the fun stuff. Hope you enjoy.

In a shadowy shed, under the light of a single candle that counts the midnight hours by the drip, drip, drip of its molten wax, there’s a creaking. The room feels eerily alive. The gentle noise continues, like a sail under gentle winds. As your eyes adjust, fronds of leaves appear in the gloom, topping tall, slender stems of crabstick pink. If the shed were underwater, your first thought—kelp—might be right. But it’s not. You’re standing in a forcing shed looking at rhubarb, and it’s 1am, and it’s not as cold in here as it is outside in the frosty fields. You clap your hands together in your thick gloves and watch over hundreds of pale stalks leaning toward the lonely flame. It feels alive in here because it is. The rhubarb is growing before your eyes, croaking and snapping its way out of the earth and up, up towards its only light source.

“Come on then, time for a brew,” says the farmer, leading you back through the way you came in. The slatted wooden door is covered on the inside with black plastic sheeting to keep the darkness in. It clatters shut behind you, leaving the rhubarb alone.

It takes three years to grow a perfect crop of forced rhubarb. Firstly, the plant is grown outdoors, cropped and then left to fend for itself in the cold. Then, in the third year, the rhubarb is transplanted from the field and plunged into the darkness of a forcing shed to encourage long pale stems and smaller leaves. Forced rhubarb has been grown in this solitary way in Yorkshire since the early 1800s. Before it was forced in fields near Wakefield, rhubarb was a valuable drug named “Rhacoma root” so prized for its effects on lung, stomach and liver problems it once commanded three times the price of Opium. It’s not a native plant to the UK, and it’s thought that while the Romans and Ancient Greeks used rhubarb in their own medicines, it wasn’t until Marco Polo brought some back from its native Siberia that it began to be cultivated in Europe.

Rhubarb thrives in the cold wet climate of Yorkshire wintertime, no doubt it reminds the plant of its home on the Volga steppe. Recognising this preference for a Baltic climate, the Whitcliffe family of Leeds took rhubarb growing to another level in 1877, which is, according to The Yorkshire Society, when commercial rhubarb growing finally moved from London to God’s Own County.

Yorkshire had a few vital things going for it in the late 1800s when it came to growing forced rhubarb. The booming wool industry provided growers with a nitrogen-rich waste product to nourish their soil with. The climate threw down plenty of rain. The massive Yorkshire coalfields provided a cheap source of fuel with which to heat the forcing sheds. E. Oldroyd and Sons, a fifth generation forced rhubarb farming family in the Yorkshire Triangle and owners of an amazing online rhubarb resource, also mention Yorkshire’s geography as a lucky reason rhubarb took off so quickly there. Trains crossed over the Yorkshire Triangle area to get to every corner of the country; it was easy to transport your forced rhubarb crops to market in London, Edinburgh or even on a boat to Paris within a day, on what became known as the Rhubarb Express. Trains packed with carriage after carriage of Yorkshire-grown rhubarb to satisfy the tart-sweet teeth of the public left the North every single day, providing fresh, delicious fruit almost year-round. It was readily-available fresh produce like nobody had ever seen before.

Where there once were 200 family growers in Yorkshire producing convoys of forced rhubarb, there are now only 12 or so, despite it being given Protected Designation of Origin status in 2020.

Shane Holland, Executive Chairman of Slow Food in the UK (SFUK) says that a major factor in the loss of rhubarb farms in the traditional Yorkshire Triangle area is to do with land — and the value of rhubarb itself.

“Rhubarb is facing extinction,” he says. “And evelopment on farmland is the main threat to the continued existence of forced rhubarb.”

There is an international catalogue of endangered heritage foods, maintained by the Slow Food movement of which Shane Holland is a chairman. In this catalogue, which is known as the “Ark of Taste”, foods which are of unique taste or provenance are protected as best they can be for future generations by promoting their cultivation, preserving biodiversity in the human food chain by actively encouraging people to grow and eat endangered foods. Forced rhubarb is one of these foods.

There’s not much protection for the Yorkshire Triangle land available either. “The land itself is only protected by green belt legislation in some areas, and there’s currently no subsidy available for foods that are part of our heritage — foods that are worth preserving for historical merit.”

After 50 years of decline, rhubarb is once again on the up. While there may not be rhubarb-packed locomotives steaming down the country every day, we’re seeing it in more and more products, many of them luxurious. It’s a flavour we all know but don’t taste often. To generations who didn’t live through wartime rations and school dinner crumbles, rhubarb has a tart, floral flavour and an aroma like rose petals, Turkish delight, raspberries and cider vinegar. It’s almost exotic, in its way. Creating a coveted product from it seems like a stroke of genius; at once both sustainable and fantastical, old-fashioned and contemporary. It’s a popular fragrance for luxury skincare products and even popped up in a designer fragrance by Commes des Garcons. This newfound interest in a home-grown ingredient gives hope that there is a future for this delicious yet endangered plant.

Shane and the rest of the Slow Food movement would love it if we could do our bit to protect forced rhubarb from extinction. Like some of the rarest delicacies in the world, this food is on the precipice of no-moreness—so close to vanishing from our markets and tables, becoming a history lesson rather than a living industry.

“We can talk about campaigning for protective status and subsidies, but what would be great is if we chose forced rhubarb for ourselves!” says Shane. “If we eat — or drink — Yorkshire rhubarb we are protecting it from obscurity, sustaining our landscape, and protecting rural jobs and communities.”

Crack open that bottle of pink gin. It’s for the future of all rhubarbkind.

Other Stuff

My Stuff

  • It was my final PROCESS essay this week! Find it here.

  • I’ve got a lot of writing work on, so I’ll some more stuff to post in this bit soon.