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It's a bit more than a "vehicle for carrying chilled water from the farm to the table".
Romaine lettuce is being removed from shelves in North America right now because of E. coli contamination. The Centers for Disease Control advises Americans not only to dispose of them, but also to "wash and disinfect the drawers or shelves of the refrigerators in which the Roman is stored." They have not yet figured out exactly where the contamination is occurring, but most of the lettuce we currently eat is grown in California.
The people of TreeHugger on the East Coast might think of drinking a plastic bottle filled with California water, but in fact, if you eat lettuce, that's what you do. Tamar Haspel wrote a controversial article in the Washington Post in which she noted that lettuce is 97% water:
An iceberg lettuce head has the same water content as an Evian bottle (1 liter format: 96 percent water and 4 percent bottled) and is only slightly more nutritious.
But shipping a bottle of Evian is easier. Katherine explained how: "In the 1950s, iceberg lettuce was the most consumed lettuce in the United States, with an average per capita consumption of about 20 pounds.The refrigeration technology was developed to the point that iceberg lettuce was even shipped to US soldiers in Vietnam. " Haspel writes:
Lettuce is a vehicle for transporting chilled water from the farm to the table. When we move to twice-nutritious vegetables, such as cabbages or tomatoes or green beans, we not only release half of the cropped area for lettuce production, we reduce fossil fuels and other resources needed for transportation and storage.
When my wife Kelly Rossiter wrote about TreeHugger's food, we followed a 19th-century Ontario diet, both local and seasonal. Instead of salads, we ate root vegetables, stuff that she had kept and kale, far too much kale. Potatoes were as good a vehicle for transporting garlic and fat from plate to mouth as any green salad, and probably healthier. Haspel writes:
I will not be the first to point out that items labeled "salad" in restaurant chains are often as bad, if not worse, than pasta, sandwiches or hamburgers when it comes to calories. Take Applebee's, where the oriental chicken salad weighs 1,400 calories and the grilled version is only 110 calories less.
Haspel was interviewed on CBC's The Current on this article, and she's hilarious. But she also notes that one of the problems with lettuce is that it served raw; cooking kills bacteria, which is why we do it. But if you cook a lettuce head, you have almost nothing left.
At the Guardian, Emma Sturgess took over the history of Haspel and titrated his version Do you like salad? You're an imbecile. It highlights the waste:
The main problems are the production of water, the means of preparation, washing and packaging, the resources used during transport and storage in cold stores and the probability of a party eventually ending up in the trash. According to the Wrap Sustainability Group in 2012, lettuce accounted for 270 million pounds of preventable food waste, while leafy salad represented 150 million pounds. It's hard to find anyone who has a good say about bagged salad, unless it's a producer's or a producer's. bagged salad retailer.
If you really believe that the media is false news, you now have the opportunity to eat all the lettuce. https://t.co/FcECWp6Jn3
– Jane McManus (@janesports) November 21, 2018
In the meantime, we are currently doing the third lettuce reminder in one year. Maybe it's time to realize that lettuce is stupid.
It's a bit more than a "vehicle for carrying chilled water from the farm to the table".
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