Salad Overrated
As the world’s population continues to grow, we have an increasing need to farm better and eat better, and for those of us who are attempting to determine how to do those things there are many foods that we point to as being problematic. Almonds due to their use of water. Beef, due to its greenhouse gases. Corn, due to monoculture. In all of those cases, the finger-pointing does have some truth to it. However, none of them are really the true villain.
However, there is one food that has practically nothing good about it. It takes up a lot of valuable crop acreage, needs fossil fuels to be refrigerated and shipped all over the world, and only adds crunch to our dinner plate.
I am talking about Salad, and there are three major reasons why this food item needs to be rethought.
Salad vegetables are very low in nutrition. The Lettuce is the biggest thing that is wrong with a salad, and the major problem with lettuce is that is a big waste of resources.
When I wrote an article that defended corn on the basis of the calorie-per-acre metric, several people wrote and told me that I had ignored nutrition. They were right, I did. It isn’t because nutrition is not important, but it is due to the fact that we receive all of the nutrition that our bodies need from a small percentage of our recommended daily calories, and then the rest of our daily food is filled up with crops such as corn. However, if you believe that the most important metric is nutrition, don’t get angry at corn. Turn to lettuce instead.
Researcher Charles Benbrook is one of the individuals who wrote to me about nutrition. He and a colleague of his named Donald Davis worked together to develop a nutrition quality index – which is a way of rating foods based on the amount of 27 nutrients that they contain. Four out of the five vegetables with the lowest rank (based on serving size) are ingredients found in salads: celery, iceberg lettuce, radishes, and cucumbers (eggplant is the fifth one).
The nutritional value of those foods may be explained partly by one basic fact: they are mainly water. It is true that water is prominent in almost every single vegetable (with one of the least watery being the sweet potato and 77 percent), but the four salad vegetables heading the list are at 95 to 97 percent water at least. There is as much water content in one head of iceberg lettuce as there is a 1 liter bottle of Evian (4 percent bottle, 96 percent water) and is just marginally more nutritious.
For example, look at collard green. This vegetable is 90 percent water. That still sounds like quite a bit. However, compared to lettuce, for each pound worth of collar greens there is about twice as much non-water stuff, and that is where all of the nutrition is at However, it is also more likely that you will eat a lot more of them since you cook them. A big serving of lettuce definitely feels like a real vegetable. However, when it is sauteed )not that I recommend that you do that), you will discover that two cups worth of romaine will cook down to just a few bites.
The expense issue is the corollary for the nutrition issue. The ingredients to make a green salad – let’s say a head of lettuce, bunch of radishes, and a cucumber – at my supermarket will cost around $3. For that same price, I could buy over two pounds of sweet potatoes, broccoli, or almost any frozen vegetable, which would all be more nutritious side dishes to have with roast chicken.
Lettuce is a way of transporting water that has been refrigerated from the farm to your table. When we make the switch to vegetables that have twice the amount of nutrition such as green beans, tomatoes or collards – we not only free up half of those acres that are growing lettuce currently, but we back on the amount of fossil fuels as well as other resources that are needed for storage and transportation.
Skip the salad, save the planet.
Salad actually tricks dieters into making bad decisions. Many products in restaurants that pass for salad are basically the same thing as those calorie-dense evil foods that make us fat, but with some lettuce leaves also tossed in. So the next time that you are thinking about ordering a salad, think about it for a minute: imagine your salad without any radishes, cucumbers or lettuce, which from both a calorie and nutrition standpoint are irrelevant. What is left is usually a ton of ranch dressing, a couple of carrot shavings, and a pile of croutons.
When we call something “salad,” we all immediately think of it as being healthy. Pierre Chandon refers to it as a “health halo.” Chandon is a marketing professor at INSEAD, which is an international business school located in Fountainebleau, France. He says that as soon as people get an idea that something is healthy, they don’t pay attention any longer to portion size or the actual nutritional content of the food.
I am not the first person to point out that food items at chain restaurants that are labeled as “salads” are frequently as bad, or even worse, than burgers or sandwiches or pastas in terms of calories. For example, at Applebee’s, the Oriental Chicken Salad is 1,400 calories, with the grilled version being just 110 calories less. The Grilled Chicken Caesar is still 800 calories, and has the fewest calories of all of the salads that are on the regular menu.
Salad, of course, is not always a bad choice to make, and Applebee’s does have some special menu items that are less than 500 calories (there is a similar menu category offered by many chain restaurants). The Thai Shrimp Salad offered by Applebee’s is just 390 calories (although there is more sodium in it compared to Oriental Chicken Salad). There are other restaurant chains that have good salad selections as well. Sweetgreen, which is fairly need, have more actual vegetables in their salads and less fried items.
Bret Thorn a longtime restaurant industry observer and Nation’s Restaurant News columnist says about salads, that chefs are aware of the psychology of diners. They are doing a type of psychological health washing for themselves, not only with salads, but also with labels such as “natural” and “fresh,” and foods that are “seasonal” and “local.” Thorn also points outs that chefs are not public health advocates or nutritionists. The food they make is what customers are willing to pay for.
And what we really like to buy are things that are sweet or salty or creamy or friend or all of the above. That doesn’t mean that some salads can’t be a very good option for a nutritious meal. All it means is that it is very easy to be fooled.
Salad causes our food supply to have some repercussions that are quite unfortunate. Lettuce has a few dubious No. 1 ranks in the world of food. To begin with it is the leading food waste source, with over 1 billion pounds of salad going uneaten every year. It is also the main culprit for the foodborne illnesses that we get. The Centers for Disease Control reports that from 1998-2008 green leafies were responsible for 22 percent of total food-borne illnesses.
In the CDC category, “leafy vegetables” also does include other types of green such as spinach and cabbage. However, the reason this category is so dominant is due to the fact that greens are eaten raw frequently. Such as salad.
However, that doesn’t mean salad doesn’t play an important role in our food supply. Salad is something I really like, and many times having a large bowl of salad available on the dinner table has prevented me from taking a second serving of lasagna. Yummly, a recipe app, shows that salads that are made at home are not the same thing as those purchased in restaurants. The app’s lettuce-based salads collection per serving average is 398 calories (although some do get into the territory of Oriental Chicken).
I definitely don’t plan on giving up an iceberg wedge, with blue-cheese dressing, bacon and radishes. But as we are searching for ways to reconfigure our food supply so that we can grow crops in a responsible manner and feed people in a nutritious way, we need to stop thinking of salad as being a wholesome and healthy staple, and begin to view it as resource-demanding luxury.
