Similarly, there is a vegetable known as the heart-of-the-palm, or otherwise known as millionaire's cabbage, which can be harvested from a fully grown coconut tree, but which will kill the tree once harvested.
Go to Brazil, heart-of-palm is in basically every salad bar anywhere, as common as lettuce and tomatoes. Just a normal and normal-priced vegetable, very mild flavor.
A lot of vegetables kill the plant that produces them... and the heart-of-palm that is canned and sold is produced from farmed palms that aren't coconut palms.
I did some extra research because I find this sort of HN style dismissivness extremely annoying.
Millionaire's cabbage seems to refer to Millionaire's salad which seems to be specific to the use of Deckenia nobilis, which are a protected species due to illegal over-harvesting. So the assertion that the term "millionaires cabbage" is funny because heart of palm is common in brazil seems disingenuous.
From Harold McGee's fabulously scientific book On Food and Cooking[0]:
"Hearts of palm are the growing stem tips of various palm trees, especially the South American peach palm Bactris gasipaes, which readily resprouts after its tip is cut....[Harvesting] hearts of other palms often results in the wasteful death of the entire tree."
or perhaps they'd never heard of the term before (as I hadn't), and didn't know about the distinction, as the previous post didn't make that explicit, and they didn't bother to do the research you did. Not sure why you're jumping to the conclusion that the comment was disingenuous.
