Lettuce Entertain You

I am eating a salad right now. I’m really enjoying my salad. I made it myself, at the salad bar at the grocery store, so it has only things that I like in it.

Okay, the above paragraph is almost a complete lie. First, I am not really enjoying my salad that much because I would much rather have something dipped in batter and deep-fried. Second, when I say that the salad has only things I like in it, what I mean is it has raw vegetables that I can tolerate in it. If it truly had only things I like in it, it would have ice cream in it as well as chocolate in some form. But I suppose that all of that can be taken as read, since that’s the way we all feel about salad. I mean, maybe you would rather have a slice of pie than ice cream, but the fact is, we only eat salads because we are supposed to.  Salad is not part of the natural order but came about through an excess of civilization. 

We have all heard the term “politically correct” ad nauseam. In fact, we now use it when we actually mean socioeconomically correct or culturally correct, but "PC" has just become the shorthand for all things that we say and do to keep from looking like cavemen. Well, I will add a new kind of correctness to our vocabulary: healthfully correct. There are a lot of things that we do nowadays that we would never have dreamed of back when we thought that food was supposed to just taste good and when we got exercise by going outside, playing, and having fun. But now we engage in all of these healthfully correct behaviors to please our doctors, our spouses, and, most importantly, our insurance providers. In the HC world, just as in the PC world, it does not matter what your actual opinion of something is. You must subsume your actual likes and dislikes to the Greater Good. In the PC world, this means that you must not act like a caveman toward people who are of a different gender, race, ethinicity, religion, or lifestyle than you are. In the HC world (note that HC can also stand for "high cholesterol" and "heart condition," both of which you will end up dying from if you do not become healthfully correct), you must no longer eat like a caveman–meaning that meat and potatoes are off the menu–and you must not say demeaning things about people who eat differently from you, meaning, they claim to actually like salad, tofu, and whatever that horrible stuff is that Vegans substitute for chocolate.

Well, just as with political correctness, that’s not entirely true. In all types of correctness it is okay to say demeaning things toward people who are in the mainstream group. It’s just not okay to say discouraging words to the people who are in the “alternate” groups. So, we omnivores must not even look askance at vegetarians, fruitarians, and vegans or at people who eat a “raw” diet (are they "rawans?). However, members of any of those groups are allowed to give long lectures to omnivores about the errors of their diets and how their diets are going to, in fact, be the death of the entire planet, except for that, blessedly, the omnivores will all die of heart disease, pesticide poisoning, and steroid overdoses before they can do too much more damage. It is okay for them to tell omnivores about how chickens are treated on factory farms (which is beyond abominable, by the way) while we are eating our KFC and to tell us how much grease is in those delicious Mickey D's fries that we are scarfing down. But omnivores are not ever supposed to mention to the non-meat eaters that tofu tastes just like cheese that has had all of the flavor and texture left out or that the stuff that they are calling chocolate tastes a lot like dirt.

But I digress. I was talking about eating salad and enjoying it. I remember something called iceberg lettuce. It was served as a vegetable from about the 1950s through the 1980s. It was crisp, crunchy, cool, watery, and, best of all, it had no discernible flavor that anyone could object to. It was the perfect vegetable. Except for, apparently, it also had no nutritional value. So, in the 1990s, we began to disapprove of iceberg lettuce, with feelings that became stronger and stronger, until finally, iceberg lettuce was outlawed in California in 2003. More and more western and northeastern states have outlawed it since 2003, and it will finally be outlawed in Tennessee in 2210 and in Mississippi in 2212. (Except that those two states, plus West Virginia, will still allow iceberg lettuce to be served deep-fried at county fairs.)

Now we who are HC make our salads with something called “mixed greens.” Mixed greens are a variety of lettuces, leaves, and grasses that add texture and a variety of nutrients to our diets. In addition, mixed greens also have taste–a novel concept in a salad–meaning that many children and most adults who were raised on iceberg lettuce will not like them.

For the most part, I can tolerate these mixed greens pretty well. I’m generally well-disposed toward most grasses, leaves, and lettuces, so I happily munch away while hoping that my dinner is going to be followed by ice cream with chocolate sauce. Except for one thing. There is this one kind of...lettuce (?) that is unacceptable to me. It always occurs in big clumps, for one thing, that are very much like a plant version of a hairball. (Do not think cat hairball in this example. Think the huge wad of hair that you pull out of your teenage daughter's hairbrush.)  It consists of long, spidery limbs on light-green stems with sort of spindly, sickly-looking leaves hanging off of them. It looks like a vegetable invented by Dr. Seuss. And there is always such a big clump of it together that it cannot be cut up, corralled, or contained, no matter how you try to attack it with your fork. There is nothing for it but to stuff this huge amoebic lettuce creature into your mouth all in one piece, which leaves parts of it sticking out of your mouth as you try to choke it down (which is hard to do because it reminds you so much of eating hair) and thus pull the errant limbs into your mouth as you swallow the initial tumbleweed.

I do not know the name of this plant. I am sure that it is from another planet, probably one invented by Dr. Seuss. It does not occur on earth. It can’t. It looks like a plant that does not get enough exposure to sunlight, as if it can be found growing in the dim sunlight of one of the moons of Saturn. The only possible earthly origins for this plant would be caves or underground hydroponics labs. I also do not know who thought of putting this plant into the bag o’ salad called “mixed greens,” but I do know that I wish they would stop.

I do not mind eating in an HC fashion, to a certain extent, as long as I do not have to eat lettuce that is like a big wad of hair.

Thank you.