Broccoli is a social construct

It shows a green head of broccoli inside a circular slogan that repeats Broccoli is a social construct. The joke takes the favourite move of social theory, calling things social constructs, and applies it to the vegetable children love to refuse – with the twist that, in a narrow sense, broccoli really was made by people.

Something that exists because people collectively treat it as existing – money, borders, marriage, a university degree. The paper in your wallet is only money because everyone accepts it as money. Saying something is socially constructed does not mean it is fake; it means its existence and meaning depend on human practices and agreements rather than on nature alone.

In a sense, yes. Broccoli does not grow wild; farmers bred it by selection from wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, choosing plants with large, tasty flower heads. It descends from cultivars grown in Roman times and was most likely refined in southern Italy; the name comes from the Italian broccolo, the flowering crest of a cabbage. So it is a human construct – though an agricultural rather than a social one.

Yes, botanically they are one species, Brassica oleracea. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, collards and Brussels sprouts are all cultivar groups that farmers selected from the same wild cabbage by favouring different parts – leaves, buds, stems or flower heads. Broccoli rabe is the odd one out; it belongs to a different species, the turnip.

The term was made famous by the sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). They argued that the everyday world we take for granted is built up through habits, roles and institutions that people create and then experience as objective facts. Earlier thinkers such as Marx and Durkheim had prepared the ground.

Classic examples are money, property, nations and borders, laws, games such as chess, titles and job roles. John Searle analysed them in The Construction of Social Reality (1995) with the formula X counts as Y in context C – a piece of paper counts as money in a given economy. Whether categories such as gender or race are social constructs, and in what sense, is debated much more intensely.

No. Money is a social construct, yet it really pays your rent. Ian Hacking showed in The Social Construction of What? (1999) that the claim is often unclear – is it the thing, or our idea and classification of it, that is constructed? Many constructs are fully real; the point is that they could have been otherwise and can be changed.

Yes. It is popular with sociology, philosophy and gender-studies students, with gardeners and with anyone who has been told at dinner that something is just a social construct. It works as a vegetable joke for everyone and as a theory joke for those who have read Berger and Luckmann.

Broccoli is a social construct comes as a unisex classic T-shirt, a women’s T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a premium hoodie, a mug and a sticker – the mug being ideal for the kitchen, where broccoli is constructed daily.