Listen up salad-eaters, I’m on to you. You can’t hide in plain sight anymore; I know your dirty little secret. You coast by in plain sight, touting the power of salads. The health benefits, the, the… uh… I guess that’s it. “All that fat, all that salt, all that potato? You are a weak fool, who hasn’t accepted the power of lettuce into your heart.” you say as you swan around with your nose up in the air, looking down on those of us who get fries on the side. Proselytizing the word of leafy greens in a bowl, ignorant of the lies that you’re spreading, ignorant to the suffering you cause.
First, eating salads isn’t natural. No one was born with a craving for salad, people are shamed into eating them by cabbage-breathed prophets. Humans only decide to eat salads because they’ve been pressured into it, the kind of pressure that would give a SCUBA diver pause. Declining a salad opens you up to a nonstop barrage of judgement from complete strangers, from your family, and from other people who claim to love you. Questions will be asked, and assessments of your character will be passed at every large gathering where food is served, for the rest of what will become your miserable life.
If you don’t eat salads, you’ll be labeled as a “picky eater”, which is a slur that reflects poorly on you as a person, and on your mother as, well… a mother. She will be disappointed in you, and wonder where she went wrong, and why you’re so stubborn that you can’t just eat a dang salad, David, I thought I raised you better than this.
Even if you prove to everyone that you don’t like salad by choking down a bite of coleslaw at every family gathering, keeping your heaving dry, you’re still a gourmand pariah, hater of vegetables. The default assumption is that if someone doesn’t like salads it’s because they don’t like vegetables, and while that may be true for some it certainly isn’t true for all. People think this because the propaganda arm of Hidden Valley has been remarkably effective at making the devout and non-believing alike fall for the big lie: people eat salads because they love eating vegetables.
If I invited even the most ardent salad-eater over for dinner and I gave them a bowl of raw lettuce, shredded carrot, and some sliced red onion as a salad course, they would rightfully think me a psychopath. No one wants to eat that bowl of raw vegetables, but that’s what the world has been led to think. Sure, if it’s the only food you have, you’ll eat it out of necessity, but desire doesn’t come into the equation at all. Many people wouldn’t even consider what I described as even being a salad, so let’s see if we can figure out what makes a salad a salad.
If you close your eyes and imagine a salad you probably see a bowl of leafy greens and some sort of salad dressing. Garden, Caesar, Waldorf, and Spinach salads all meet the definition. Even Coleslaw is a leafy green salad run through a woodchipper mixed with everyone’s favourite type of cream: the kind that’s been thinned with vinegar. Does a salad have to have leafy greens? Not by a long shot. I’d wager that one of the most popular salads in North America is a potato salad, which is made up primarily of potatoes, mayonnaise, and bowl. According to science, leafy greens cannot survive in such conditions.
Clearly, kale and lettuce varietals are not a defining characteristic of salads so perhaps we can define a salad as being predominantly vegetable based plus some dressing. If you believe that, then I have a pasta salad to sell you, a dish made for people who don’t like eating pasta that could be described as either hot or tasty. Pasta isn’t the only food we’ve managed to wreck by salad-izing it, we’ve done it to chicken, fish, beans, rice and grains, fruit, cheese, and Jell-o.
Only one food has ever been improved in salad form: the taco, and only because taco salads are just a taco, but bigger.
David J. Hughes (masticator)
So, if it isn’t vegetables that makes a salad, then what does? This is the dirty little secret the “friends of arugula” keep to themselves. It’s the dressing.
Eating a salad is just an excuse to up your intake of sour cream, mayo, oil, vinegar, or pimentos. Smother anything in mayo and let people eat it with a spoon or a fork, and you’ve got yourself a salad. Plate of limp romaine lettuce? No one wants to eat that. Add croutons, parmesan, and enough Caesar dressing so that you end up with a watery slurry of fishy mayo and lettuce juice at the bottom of your bowl, you can sell it in a restaurant for $12.
Salad-eaters are, at their core, salad-dressing-eaters. They don’t care about the anything that’s in the bowl other than the dressing. For years they’ve been putting on airs about how health-conscious they are, and how much better they are than those that don’t eat salad. Truth be told, if it weren’t for societal conditioning, they’d just as soon eat mayo out of the jar with a spoon or their fingers, instead of mixing it with honey and lime juice and dumping it on some iceberg lettuce under the guise of “eating better”. Frankly, I’m not convinced that adding a cucumber to your half-litre of sour cream suddenly makes it better for you. If you want to eat a jar of Miracle Whip, combining it with a pound of boiled potatoes doesn’t magically turn it into health food. These cravings for sauce and dressing are a real problem that requires intervention.
It’s time for the holier-than-thou dressing addicts to get off their high horses and admit that they have a problem, and that their addiction is affecting the lives of those both close to them and complete strangers. It’s even affecting those of us who don’t eat salads.
Restaurants are constantly trying to maximize the amount of sauce they can load onto salads yes, but also on burgers. Often, burgers are doused in some combination of mustard, ketchup, relish, mayo, and/or salad dressing to the point where the bun has the texture, and mouthfeel of wet toilet paper. Chefs seemingly take pride in how much sauce they can get to dribble down a customer’s chin, as though it’s a sign of quality compared to their competitors, or, and I suspect this is the real reason, dominance over their customers. For me, the more sauce I find on a burger, the more I wonder what’s being disguised? Is the meat overcooked, or under-seasoned? The bun, stale? Why are you hiding the actual food at the bottom of Lake Thousand Island Dressing?
We need to de-stigmatize the eating of sauces and dressings by the bowlful. If someone wants to go to a restaurant and order a small bowl of Russian dressing, and clearly people do, then just let them scoop it into their mouths like handfuls of movie theatre popcorn. We don’t need to disguise this act by tossing some cabbage or a cheeseburger into the mix just to mollify those who would deign to look down their noses at people doing things that the masses are obviously already demanding access to.
It’s obvious that those who pray at the feet of St. Dill Dip have turned their shame outwards, towards those that would eschew their egg and cream-based concoctions. They’ve created a world that is openly hostile to those of us who don’t bother with the pretense of health-consciousness when building a cream-slide upon which Swiss chard can take a ride down to our gullets. Instead of demonizing foods that the world isn’t ready to slather dressings on, start building a world that is accepting of you. You, that just want to eat a jar of Newman’s Own Creamy Caesar dressing for lunch.
David J. Hughes