Salad Is Overrated

[xoxoxoBruce]

salad ain't food, salad is what food eats, the old saying goes. WaPo makes a case for salads not being a sound investment in resources.

As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some truth in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear-cut villain.

There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate. It’s salad, and here are three main reasons why we need to rethink it.

Those three reasons are...

Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition.
The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources.
~snip~
... rate foods based on how much of 27 nutrients they contain. Four of the five lowest-ranking vegetables (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, iceberg lettuce and celery. (The fifth is eggplant.)

Those foods’ nutritional profile can be partly explained by one simple fact: They’re almost all water. Although water figures prominently in just about every vegetable (the sweet potato, one of the least watery, is 77 percent), those four salad vegetables top the list at 95 to 97 percent water. A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (1-liter size: 96 percent water, 4 percent bottle) and is only marginally more nutritious.
~snip~
Salad fools dieters into making bad choices. Lots of what passes for salad in restaurants is just the same as the rest of the calorie-dense diabolically palatable food that’s making us fat, but with a few lettuce leaves tossed in. Next time you order a salad, engage in a little thought experiment: Picture the salad without the lettuce, cucumber and radish, which are nutritionally and calorically irrelevant. Is it a little pile of croutons and cheese, with a few carrot shavings and lots of ranch dressing?
~snip~
Salad has unfortunate repercussions in our food supply. Lettuce has a couple of No. 1 unenviable rankings in the food world. For starters, it’s the top source of food waste, vegetable division, becoming more than 1 billion pounds of uneaten salad every year. But it’s also the chief culprit for foodborne illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, green leafies accounted for 22 percent of all food-borne illnesses from 1998-2008.

To be fair, “leafy vegetables,” the CDC category, also includes cabbage, spinach and other kinds of greens, but the reason the category dominates is that the greens are often eaten raw. As in salad.

[fargon]

Not the way I make salad.

[xoxoxoBruce]

See reason #2.

[fargon]

You have to do something to make that stuff palatable.

[xoxoxoBruce]

So why bother with that stuff that is such a waste to start with?

[fargon]

I like the crunchy coolness of it all.

[xoxoxoBruce]

So your crunchy coolness is more important than the environment and starving children in Africa?

[fargon]

Well they can have salad too.

[xoxoxoBruce]

" EXTRA, EXTRA, Starving African Children Savor Crunchy Coolness"... film at 11.

[fargon]

YAY!!!

[Gravdigr]

That was a thought-provoking read. Stop provoking my thoughts!!

There's nothing nutritious, or economical about them, but, I do like me a Zaxby's House Zalad, now and again.

[Gravdigr]

Remember when you used to get a sprig of parsley with your steak dinner?

I wonder how many tons of parsley sprigs have been thrown into the dumpsters of the world's steakhouses.

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

So your crunchy coolness is more important than the environment and starving children in Africa?

Originally Posted by fargon

Well they can have salad too.

D'oh!! That's why they're starving, salad has no nutritional value!!

[Undertoad]

Nutrition = science

Nutritionism = religion

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

D'oh!! That's why they're starving, salad has no nutritional value!!

Not the way fargon makes them.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Nutrition = science

Nutritionism = religion

Lettuce relates to neither.