With the release of Avatar: Seven Havens, I decided to cave and grab a Paramount+ subscription just to watch it. After checking out the first three episodes, I can honestly say I'm hooked. With the series creators returning on the project, it feels like quintessential ATLA.
My newfound subscription also granted me access to the recent Avatar Aang movie, which I also loved. But there's one element of that movie that stood out to me: the inclusion of the "My cabbages!" guy. It's a long-running joke in the series that even made it's way into The Legend of Korra via the cabbage merchant's son, who ran Cabbage Corp in Republic City.
So as I started watching Seven Havens, one question on my mind was whether or not the cabbage joke could actually get referenced in this series. The first few episodes show off a dusty, post-apocalyptic world that doesn't immediately seem like it's conducive to cabbage farming. Most of the foods you see in the first few episodes are brown, and the foliage seems oddly geometric as the characters make their way throughout the environment. But there is one scene in Episode 3 that points to the possibility of a cabbage man.
Without going into any spoilers about the episode or the series so far, I wanted to hone in on the above specific screenshot from Episode 3 of the show. Specifically, this is the first time we see something even remotely cabbage-like. While this does appear to be some form of cauliflower here, its existence suggests that it is possible to grow cabbages in this world. Both cauliflower and cabbage are cruciferous vegetables that share very similar growing conditions. Cabbage is actually easier to grow than cauliflower.
So now that we know that cabbages do probably exist in this new environment, it seems all but inevitable that we'll see some sort of reference to the "My cabbages!" gag later in the series. I'd be very surprised if the creators were to choose this particular series to remove a fan-favorite ongoing reference. The question is just how connected the reference will be to the original cabbage merchant.
In The Legend of Korra, the owner of Cabbage Corp was Lau Gan-Lan, who had taken over the business from his father, the original cabbage merchant. There is no reference in that series that Lau Gan-Lan has any sort of descendent, but it seems likely that he'd want to leave his cabbage empire to somebody. It's clear in Avatar: Seven Havens so far that something horrible happened to destroy the world we knew at the end of Korra's time as Avatar, something which likely put an end to Cabbage Corp. But that doesn't mean the family business didn't continue.
There are still 10 episodes left in the season, so there's plenty of time to set up some solid cabbage lore before the finale. This innocuous cauliflower stand may not be the strongest indicator that we'll get that reference, but it's enough for me to believe it will happen.