Myisha Nawar
With the growing world population, we have developed a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have been directed to lots of different foods as ‘problematic’. From almonds and their water use to corn and its monoculture to beef for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some candor in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear cut culprit.
There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing playing against it. It takes up precious crop acreage, demands fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but some *oh so good* crunch to your plate. Yeah. I am talking about salads.
Salads are miserably low in nutrition. The wrong-est thing with salads is lettuce, and the wrong-est thing with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources. Instead, take collard greens.
They are 90 percent water, which still sounds like a lot. But it means that, compared with lettuce, every pound of collard greens contains about twice as much stuff that isn’t water, which, of course, is where the nutrition lives.
But you’re also likely to eat much more of them, because you cook them. A large serving of lettuce feels like a bona fide vegetable, but when you saute it (not that I’m recommending that), you’ll see that two cups of romaine cooks down to a bite or two. Lettuce is a vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table. When we switch to vegetables that are twice as nutritious — like those collards or tomatoes or green beans — not only do we free up half the acres now growing lettuce, we cut back on the fossil fuels and other resources needed for transport and storage. SAVE THE PLANET, SKIP THE SALAD.
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?
None of this is to say that salad doesn’t have a role in our food supply. I like salad, and there’s been many a time a big bowl of salad on the dawat-dinner table has kept me from a second helping of kacchi.