Bags Of Lettuce
Product review: Bags of lettuce. Okay, calling them “bags of lettuce” is kind of being a dick about it, but most of the “salad mix” you buy is just that. In fact, you can even buy a bag of “iceberg lettuce salad mix”, which is essentially half a head of iceberg lettuce ripped into pieces for you. That’s quite the luxury, paying three times as much simply because you can’t be bothered ripping up your lettuce yourself. I can’t imagine why anyone would need someone to tear their lettuce apart for them. Perhaps there are extremely weak people, with no upper body or hand strength, even to pull apart lettuce. Besides, if you are going to make a salad, you need to put at least a few more things in there besides lettuce. Are you buying everything pre-cut?
I know what you’re thinking, what about paraplegics, or people you have lost their hands, perhaps in an ironic farm related accident? Well, I’m assuming that if they made it as far as the produce aisle in the grocery store, they can handle ripping up some lettuce.
No, pre-ripped iceberg lettuce is for overweight people who don’t even really have a clue about salads anyway. They don’t even know what lettuce in its natural form looks like. They have only seen it shredded, on sandwiches and tacos. They are buying a bag in the hopes that it will start them on a new and healthy lifestyle. All this from a bag of lettuce, that they might actually use to make one salad. They will eat it, feel disillusioned and unfulfilled, then order a pizza twenty minutes later. Some brands sell a bag of lettuce as a “garden salad starter kit”, which simply means there are some shredded carrots sprinkled throughout the bag. The only other people who might buy them is someone(again, who has never made a salad in their life) who is having a cookout and needs to have a token salad for the annoying fuck attending who doesn’t eat meat. Dumping a bag of lettuce in a bowl is the ultimate “fuck you” to someone who wants a vegetarian alternative at a barbeque.
But wait, you say. You mentioned how it is a luxury, so surely some wealthy bankers or captains of industry are buying them, so as not to sully their hands with the labor of the working class. Surely they would gladly pay extra for the high class experience of having their lettuce torn to shreds by peasants. No, you idiot. Rich people do not buy bags of lettuce. They don’t go to the same stores that you do. In fact, they don’t go to any stores and buy their own food. They certainly don’t eat garden salads with iceberg lettuce in them. They are elitist bastards, who resent you, and anyone like you, and you should get that through your head now. You have more in common with the migrant workers who pick and package the lettuce, comrade. Soon, when the revolution comes, you don’t want to be on the side of corrupt and obscenely wealthy who cannot even prepare their own lettuce!
Okay, I’ve said too much.
I realize that I am already a good ways into this thing and all I’ve talked about is iceberg lettuce, a salad mix that I have never, and do not plan on ever purchasing. I will say one last thing though. Iceberg lettuce is a stupid name. It doesn’t look like an iceberg. It does not come from the arctic. In fact, it turns out that it got its name because back in the olden days of lettuce, it was packed in piles of crushed ice. I realize that the world was a little bigger and full of mystery back then, and many people didn’t travel as much and all, but that is not even close to what an iceberg is. I do almost wish that icebergs were big piles of crushed ice with produce hidden inside. It would be like a healthy but disappointing pinata or Kinder Egg.
Anywho, salad mixes come in a whole bunch of varieties, but honestly, it’s all mostly a bag of leaves. Baby spinach, arugula, mizuna, radicchio, oakleaf, endive, whatever. Then there is the vague sounding “baby lettuce.” That just sounds cruel, like the veal of the vegetable kingdom. They all contain combinations of these and more, with appealing names that sound much better than “bag of leaves.” Spring Mix, which as far as I can tell is available all year round, is just a few of the aforementioned leaves thrown together. Field Greens, which actually sounds kind of horrible, like I wandered into a vacant, undeveloped lot in a housing development and started eating whatever I found growing there. Italian Blend, which is basically chopped up romaine lettuce with some radicchio thrown in. It’s really no different than the bag of iceberg lettuce I was so angry about, but I will occasionally find myself purchasing it. And yes, I do hate myself for it, thank you very much. Luckily, I am filled with such self loathing for many bigger reasons, so I hardly notice it.
There are a multitude of other combinations, and I don’t feel like listing them all here and providing snarky asides for them all, so we will move on to the real problem with all these salad mixes: Packaging and display.
First off, let’s tackle the display part. They are usually displayed in the store in racks specially designed to hold the bags. These racks have a piece of clear plastic in front, which displays the front of the bag, and a spring loaded plastic backing piece that pushes them to the front, so when you take one, it pushes the rest forward. It’s like a bulldozer compacting trash at the city dump. The problem is, whatever kid they pay to stock the shelves doesn’t really care that the bads are filled with crisp and tender leaves that bruise easily. They just want to load them all in and get on with their day. The bags end up jammed in as tight as they can be, and this causes damage to the produce inside. On occasion they are jammed in there so tight I have to really yank on the bag to free it. Sometimes it seems like an angry gorilla, or perhaps a yeti with a chupacabra poking it painfully in the back has stocked the salad mix racks, yowling in pain and forcing the bags in as fast and tightly as possible just so it can be done, and fling this irritating chupacabra into the frozen food aisle and out of its life. Perhaps I am thinking about this too much.
But anyone who knows anything about greens, especially ones that have already been picked and cut, knows that the moment they are cut, it is a race against time before they wither and turn black, and start to smell like a compost heap. So displaying them in the store already starts the decay process.
That is accelerated by the packaging. Moisture accumulates on the inside of the bag, and the leaves will stick to that moisture, and the rot will begin. I go through several bags every time I buy any, making sure there is no wet leaves stuck to the inside of the bag, already losing their color. It is the salad mix equivalent of black mold.
Then there is the search and comparison of the sell by dates. The older bags are always in the front. You need to go at least three bags deep to get the newer ones. Regardless of the date, if you take the first one in the rack, your salad will be bad by the time you get it home. Even if you take the ones in the back, and the sell by date gives you a week or more, you will only have half that time to make an acceptable salad with it. After the first few days, you will have varying degrees of wilt and dark spots.
Sometimes, they will have a dollar off coupon stuck to the bag, a real bargain. Do not buy these, no matter the sell by date. They are timebombs, ready to go off at any second. You might not even make it to the checkout. Often, just moving the bag from the shelf to your cart is enough to make it destabilize and fall apart, like that Nazi’s face in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The store is doing anything to cut its losses and sell that bag, even though they know that it will turn to slime at any second. The only way you should purchase these is if you rip the bag open right there in the produce section and eat it immediately. Take the empty bag to the checkout, and stare them in the eye while they ring it up, defying them to question your actions.
I think it is important to mention here that I mostly buy these salad mixes to feed to my pet rabbit. I rarely buy them with the intention of having them on hand to make future salads. Perhaps if I am making a specific salad that night, but that is the only time. You see, I was one of those people who would occasionally fool themselves into believing that I would start eating more salads if I had the ingredients at hand. I finally learned that is never the case.
Even as I would first return home with salad mix, and a bunch of other vegetables to cut up and put in the salad, I would somehow convince myself that just buying all the ingredients was enough of an effort and a positive step for the day. Now I should just order some takeout, and tomorrow I would embark on my healthy, low calorie lifestyle. It would be easier to do with all the ingredients already here, I would reason. Then I would play a weeklong game where come dinnertime, I would realize that I was missing one thing I wanted for my salad, or that I didn’t have any low calorie dressing, so I would push it off for another day. Then one of my ingredients would spoil, so I would have to wait another day to replace that, because I couldn’t possibly make a salad without the exact right things in it.
So fine, now you know how pathetic I am. Do I care? Obviously not, judging by this essay, and a hundred more just like it that I foist upon friends and strangers alike. I feel like I am not the only one wasting salad ingredients. They are often out of stock on many of the salad mixes when I go to the store. In most stores, there are several brands of salad mixes, including the generic store brand, so someone is buying all these salad fixins’. Yet most of the people I see are like me, overweight, out of shape, and definitely not subsisting on salads. I have a suspicion that many of these bags are going home, hanging out in a fridge for a week or so, then going straight into the trash. It’s okay if you don’t want to admit it, even to yourself, I will shoulder the shame for all of us.
The thing is, I really love salad. I do. No matter how much I love them, most of the time they seem like a lot of work, and that they provide very little fulfilment. Not nutritionally, so much, just in filling you up, or even looking like anything more than a big bowl of leaves. Sometimes a salad just feels like giving up. Failure. Then again, not eating a salad feels like failure at times. Salads, like life, are hard and complex.
The salad mix pictured here is in a big plastic container. It is 16 ounces of greens, compared to the bag, with is 5 ounces. I pay $3.67 for the big container, with three times more greens than the $3.00 bag. As I said, I buy them for my rabbit. I would never even begin to gamble with so much salad material if I was responsible for eating it. My rabbit can eat a pile of greens bigger than herself in one sitting. I don’t know how the hell she does it. It would be the equivalent of you jumping into a pile of leaves on your front lawn, then eating most of them. Even with that amazing ability, the salad mix sometimes spoils.
My mother will buy the big containers too, and she will go to the trouble to take the leaves out of the container and put them between paper towels, and into ziplock bags, trying in vain to prolong the inevitable. That is a mom thing. They are always freezing bread, and cutting the mold off cheese. When you are younger, you have no problem throwing away perfectly good food. As you get older, some genetic code kicks in, and you treat your food like a precious commodity. You become like a hobo, or a plane crash survivor in the Andes, sniffing your perishables, and deciding if they are still somehow not too rotten to eat.
I guess I will sum up my review by saying that if you are going to buy these things, follow through on your intentions of eating them, and quick. Don’t be fooled by their fancy names, if you think salad tastes like a bunch of leaves and grass, you are right. Like Mexican or Italian food, a lot of it is made up of the same few basic ingredients arranged differently. Unless you are committed to making and eating salads, don’t guilt and shame and fool yourself into wasting the money. And if you insist on it, maybe get a rabbit, although that comes with a whole host of other issues.
I know what you’re thinking, what about paraplegics, or people you have lost their hands, perhaps in an ironic farm related accident? Well, I’m assuming that if they made it as far as the produce aisle in the grocery store, they can handle ripping up some lettuce.
No, pre-ripped iceberg lettuce is for overweight people who don’t even really have a clue about salads anyway. They don’t even know what lettuce in its natural form looks like. They have only seen it shredded, on sandwiches and tacos. They are buying a bag in the hopes that it will start them on a new and healthy lifestyle. All this from a bag of lettuce, that they might actually use to make one salad. They will eat it, feel disillusioned and unfulfilled, then order a pizza twenty minutes later. Some brands sell a bag of lettuce as a “garden salad starter kit”, which simply means there are some shredded carrots sprinkled throughout the bag. The only other people who might buy them is someone(again, who has never made a salad in their life) who is having a cookout and needs to have a token salad for the annoying fuck attending who doesn’t eat meat. Dumping a bag of lettuce in a bowl is the ultimate “fuck you” to someone who wants a vegetarian alternative at a barbeque.
But wait, you say. You mentioned how it is a luxury, so surely some wealthy bankers or captains of industry are buying them, so as not to sully their hands with the labor of the working class. Surely they would gladly pay extra for the high class experience of having their lettuce torn to shreds by peasants. No, you idiot. Rich people do not buy bags of lettuce. They don’t go to the same stores that you do. In fact, they don’t go to any stores and buy their own food. They certainly don’t eat garden salads with iceberg lettuce in them. They are elitist bastards, who resent you, and anyone like you, and you should get that through your head now. You have more in common with the migrant workers who pick and package the lettuce, comrade. Soon, when the revolution comes, you don’t want to be on the side of corrupt and obscenely wealthy who cannot even prepare their own lettuce!
Okay, I’ve said too much.
I realize that I am already a good ways into this thing and all I’ve talked about is iceberg lettuce, a salad mix that I have never, and do not plan on ever purchasing. I will say one last thing though. Iceberg lettuce is a stupid name. It doesn’t look like an iceberg. It does not come from the arctic. In fact, it turns out that it got its name because back in the olden days of lettuce, it was packed in piles of crushed ice. I realize that the world was a little bigger and full of mystery back then, and many people didn’t travel as much and all, but that is not even close to what an iceberg is. I do almost wish that icebergs were big piles of crushed ice with produce hidden inside. It would be like a healthy but disappointing pinata or Kinder Egg.
Anywho, salad mixes come in a whole bunch of varieties, but honestly, it’s all mostly a bag of leaves. Baby spinach, arugula, mizuna, radicchio, oakleaf, endive, whatever. Then there is the vague sounding “baby lettuce.” That just sounds cruel, like the veal of the vegetable kingdom. They all contain combinations of these and more, with appealing names that sound much better than “bag of leaves.” Spring Mix, which as far as I can tell is available all year round, is just a few of the aforementioned leaves thrown together. Field Greens, which actually sounds kind of horrible, like I wandered into a vacant, undeveloped lot in a housing development and started eating whatever I found growing there. Italian Blend, which is basically chopped up romaine lettuce with some radicchio thrown in. It’s really no different than the bag of iceberg lettuce I was so angry about, but I will occasionally find myself purchasing it. And yes, I do hate myself for it, thank you very much. Luckily, I am filled with such self loathing for many bigger reasons, so I hardly notice it.
There are a multitude of other combinations, and I don’t feel like listing them all here and providing snarky asides for them all, so we will move on to the real problem with all these salad mixes: Packaging and display.
First off, let’s tackle the display part. They are usually displayed in the store in racks specially designed to hold the bags. These racks have a piece of clear plastic in front, which displays the front of the bag, and a spring loaded plastic backing piece that pushes them to the front, so when you take one, it pushes the rest forward. It’s like a bulldozer compacting trash at the city dump. The problem is, whatever kid they pay to stock the shelves doesn’t really care that the bads are filled with crisp and tender leaves that bruise easily. They just want to load them all in and get on with their day. The bags end up jammed in as tight as they can be, and this causes damage to the produce inside. On occasion they are jammed in there so tight I have to really yank on the bag to free it. Sometimes it seems like an angry gorilla, or perhaps a yeti with a chupacabra poking it painfully in the back has stocked the salad mix racks, yowling in pain and forcing the bags in as fast and tightly as possible just so it can be done, and fling this irritating chupacabra into the frozen food aisle and out of its life. Perhaps I am thinking about this too much.
But anyone who knows anything about greens, especially ones that have already been picked and cut, knows that the moment they are cut, it is a race against time before they wither and turn black, and start to smell like a compost heap. So displaying them in the store already starts the decay process.
That is accelerated by the packaging. Moisture accumulates on the inside of the bag, and the leaves will stick to that moisture, and the rot will begin. I go through several bags every time I buy any, making sure there is no wet leaves stuck to the inside of the bag, already losing their color. It is the salad mix equivalent of black mold.
Then there is the search and comparison of the sell by dates. The older bags are always in the front. You need to go at least three bags deep to get the newer ones. Regardless of the date, if you take the first one in the rack, your salad will be bad by the time you get it home. Even if you take the ones in the back, and the sell by date gives you a week or more, you will only have half that time to make an acceptable salad with it. After the first few days, you will have varying degrees of wilt and dark spots.
Sometimes, they will have a dollar off coupon stuck to the bag, a real bargain. Do not buy these, no matter the sell by date. They are timebombs, ready to go off at any second. You might not even make it to the checkout. Often, just moving the bag from the shelf to your cart is enough to make it destabilize and fall apart, like that Nazi’s face in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The store is doing anything to cut its losses and sell that bag, even though they know that it will turn to slime at any second. The only way you should purchase these is if you rip the bag open right there in the produce section and eat it immediately. Take the empty bag to the checkout, and stare them in the eye while they ring it up, defying them to question your actions.
I think it is important to mention here that I mostly buy these salad mixes to feed to my pet rabbit. I rarely buy them with the intention of having them on hand to make future salads. Perhaps if I am making a specific salad that night, but that is the only time. You see, I was one of those people who would occasionally fool themselves into believing that I would start eating more salads if I had the ingredients at hand. I finally learned that is never the case.
Even as I would first return home with salad mix, and a bunch of other vegetables to cut up and put in the salad, I would somehow convince myself that just buying all the ingredients was enough of an effort and a positive step for the day. Now I should just order some takeout, and tomorrow I would embark on my healthy, low calorie lifestyle. It would be easier to do with all the ingredients already here, I would reason. Then I would play a weeklong game where come dinnertime, I would realize that I was missing one thing I wanted for my salad, or that I didn’t have any low calorie dressing, so I would push it off for another day. Then one of my ingredients would spoil, so I would have to wait another day to replace that, because I couldn’t possibly make a salad without the exact right things in it.
So fine, now you know how pathetic I am. Do I care? Obviously not, judging by this essay, and a hundred more just like it that I foist upon friends and strangers alike. I feel like I am not the only one wasting salad ingredients. They are often out of stock on many of the salad mixes when I go to the store. In most stores, there are several brands of salad mixes, including the generic store brand, so someone is buying all these salad fixins’. Yet most of the people I see are like me, overweight, out of shape, and definitely not subsisting on salads. I have a suspicion that many of these bags are going home, hanging out in a fridge for a week or so, then going straight into the trash. It’s okay if you don’t want to admit it, even to yourself, I will shoulder the shame for all of us.
The thing is, I really love salad. I do. No matter how much I love them, most of the time they seem like a lot of work, and that they provide very little fulfilment. Not nutritionally, so much, just in filling you up, or even looking like anything more than a big bowl of leaves. Sometimes a salad just feels like giving up. Failure. Then again, not eating a salad feels like failure at times. Salads, like life, are hard and complex.
The salad mix pictured here is in a big plastic container. It is 16 ounces of greens, compared to the bag, with is 5 ounces. I pay $3.67 for the big container, with three times more greens than the $3.00 bag. As I said, I buy them for my rabbit. I would never even begin to gamble with so much salad material if I was responsible for eating it. My rabbit can eat a pile of greens bigger than herself in one sitting. I don’t know how the hell she does it. It would be the equivalent of you jumping into a pile of leaves on your front lawn, then eating most of them. Even with that amazing ability, the salad mix sometimes spoils.
My mother will buy the big containers too, and she will go to the trouble to take the leaves out of the container and put them between paper towels, and into ziplock bags, trying in vain to prolong the inevitable. That is a mom thing. They are always freezing bread, and cutting the mold off cheese. When you are younger, you have no problem throwing away perfectly good food. As you get older, some genetic code kicks in, and you treat your food like a precious commodity. You become like a hobo, or a plane crash survivor in the Andes, sniffing your perishables, and deciding if they are still somehow not too rotten to eat.
I guess I will sum up my review by saying that if you are going to buy these things, follow through on your intentions of eating them, and quick. Don’t be fooled by their fancy names, if you think salad tastes like a bunch of leaves and grass, you are right. Like Mexican or Italian food, a lot of it is made up of the same few basic ingredients arranged differently. Unless you are committed to making and eating salads, don’t guilt and shame and fool yourself into wasting the money. And if you insist on it, maybe get a rabbit, although that comes with a whole host of other issues.
Comments
Post a Comment