The Washington Post:
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.
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.
I’ve always hated most salads. I knew it was a waste of chewing. While I love a good Greek Salad, any salad that consists mainly of variations on lettuce is unpalatable to me. This article helps justify my non-eating of that useless rabbit food.
I love salads, and can’t imagine a week without at least two big bowls-full, generally with a grilled protein of some kind thrown on. With or without a decent feta or goat cheese.
And what a narrow focus that article takes, to my lack of surprise. Yes, of course iceberg lettuce is mostly worthless. Darker-green leaves are always better for you. I think that writer needs to try a few new things.
Seriously. What a waste of time reading that rubbish. What a surprise, iceberg lettuce (the Red Delicious of the lettuce world), a product invented by corporations not to taste good, but to last longer on store shelves has no nutrition. Let’s put this in computer terms – this article might as well have read “all iPhones suck because I once tried the cheapest android knockoff I could find”.
Good metaphor.
Agreed. A good salad with a good mix of proteins (eggs or beans if you don’t want meats) is just fine. Sounds like the author just doesn’t like salad. I’d probably write something similar about eggplant or mushrooms.
I’m going to stand up for iceberg lettuce, though. “Mostly worthless” might be technically correct, but it doesn’t really give a full picture. Here’s a good article on iceberg http://www.livestrong.com/article/420531-does-iceburg-lettuce-have-any-nutritional-value/ which says, among other things:
“Iceberg lettuce serves as a good source of vitamin K. Each 2-cup serving contains 35 micrograms of vitamin K — 28 percent of the recommended daily intake for men and 39 percent for women.”
A lot of adults who don’t like salad appear to have the dietary habits of ten-year-olds.
Regarding iceberg, I believe it was Michael Pollan who recommended darker greens. His explanations made sense to me, as did the difference in taste.
Yes, definitely darker greens are great. And I love spinach, brocolli and many others people do not like.
And, yes, at age 49, I’ve tried a lot of eggplant and mushroom recipes. I can handle stuff with cream of mushroom soup added but that’s about it. I try lots of things, from squash to octopus and squid and quite a lot of other things. I’m not really one of those who just straight out decides not to like something based on one tasting or the look of it.
Or—just as often—a preference formed in childhood and never re-explored. Because Sagan forbid anyone might grow into having different tastes.
This article is BS. If humans ate their species-specific diet of fruits, starches, grains, legumes, and the occasional handful of nuts and seeds, greens would serve as a stupendous side dish loaded with minerals, phytonutrients, antioxidants, and vitamins. People attempting to live on salad are bound to feel this deep hatred for the leafy greens as they are undeniably low in calories–one cannot build a life on greens alone. I do not support the hatred of salad. I support the criticism of animal agriculture–which is the primary consumer of greens and grains across the globe. If you’re upset about needless shipment of wasted food around the world, point your finger at the cows and the people who eat the cows. http://www.cowspiracy.com
Shawn, this is the worst article you’ve ever posted to The Loop. Dark leafy greens are just about the best thing you can eat, period. They are packed with phytonutrients and antioxidants, have anti-cancer effects, are a great source of fiber, and are inexpensive. I read Dr Fuhrmans’ “Eat To Live” in 2009 and it completely changed my life. The main idea is to eat mostly nutrient-dense foods – foods with the highest nutrient per calorie, and the most nutrient dense foods of them all? Dark leafy greens. Since I started, my allergies, asthma, and acne disappeared, among other things, and I have more energy than I did 20 years ago. This article is doing a disservice to your readers; we have a major health crisis on our hands, and this is the LAST thing we should be telling people – to avoid perhaps the healthiest foods on earth.
A good Greek salad doesn’t have lettuce at all. It’s just cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, feta cheese, and olive oil.
Lettuce is good for you in that it gives you fiber, gut bacteria, and micronutrients. You don’t measure it necessarily like other food. It’s not about what protein you get from the lettuce.
If you don’t like lettuce, get kale and spinach, and instead of chewing them, put them in an extractor (like NutriBullet) with blueberries and bananas and hemp seeds. Then you simply drink a delicious smoothie and you get a ton of micronutrients and fiber and slow-absorbing water and it makes you noticeably healthier. If you are a meat-eating type of person, it is especially good for you, because you can drink 2 or 3 of these smoothies per day and then the rest of the time eat your meat-heavy meals and you are still getting a more-balanced diet. It is amazing how much kale and spinach you can completely hide from your tastebuds with an extractor.
Also, a great salad tip for meat-eaters is to recognize that you can make a salad with meat. Grill up some meat or fish with some mushrooms and onions and then just put that all on top of a nice salad and it is really good. The salad takes on the flavor of the fish or whatever you grilled. Salads don’t have to be some kind of bread-and-water type of thing.