![]() In addition to lettuce and garden veggies, we’re adding nuts, seeds, grains, proteins, fruit, berries, and various other ingredients to our salads. Increasingly, people are thinking of salads more broadly and more creatively than before. It is this view of salad that inspired comedian Jim Gaffigan to tell us: “One of the benefits of eating salad is that you can eat tons of it and never be satisfied.” But recently, that’s begun to change. Order a salad at a restaurant where the rest of your table is indulging in rich meals full of meat, dairy, and processed carbs, and someone will likely make a crack about “rabbit food” or “sticks and twigs” (unless you’re their boss, in which case they will just think it). Or a big wooden bowl of lettuce, carrots, and cucumber slathered in Italian or ranch dressing at the center of the family table, from which everyone tongs a small portion onto their plate before the “main” course.Īs a result, salad has become, to many, a coded shortcut for “living a joyless life in a vain and misguided attempt to achieve immortality through self-denial.” Many of us eat salads when we’re trying to shed pounds for the wedding or the beach trip, not for the sheer joy of eating salads. A meager serving of iceberg lettuce, two sliced cherry tomatoes, half an olive, and three and a half grams of shredded carrot as served by casual chain restaurants and airline meals. The first salads were just veggies made palatable by some form of preservation, possibly pickled or brined, or just salted to draw out moisture and make them easier to chew.Īnd until recently, that was pretty much what most people thought of when they imagined a salad. Going all the way back to the invention of the word “salad,” which comes from the Latin herba salata, meaning “salted vegetables.” You know what, let’s back up for a moment and view the salad in historical context. The writer and social commentator Fran Leibowitz once stated: “A salad is not a meal, it is a style.”Ī provocative sentiment, surely, although I have no idea what it means.
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