Food: A Love Story (13 page)

Sometimes restaurants will go the whole other way with salads. Instead of preparing it at your table, they’ll have you make your own. This really indicates how little people want salad. They have to trick us into eating it.

WAITER:
You want a salad?

MAN:
No. No, thanks.

WAITER:
You can go to the salad
bar
.

MAN:
Bar?
Wait. Are there going to be women there?

A salad bar just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, besides the guaranteed diarrhea. After all, there is virtually no difference between the germ levels of a salad bar and a kiddie pool. But why would someone want to make his or her own salad? I go out to dinner so I don’t have to make my own food.

“Over there is our salad bar and just next to it is our dishwashing bar.”

“Awesome!”

Salad bars always give the impression that the kitchen is having a garage sale. “We don’t need this potato salad anymore. Let’s see what we can get for it.” To make matters more confusing, the salad bar usually only has small plates.
“All-you-can-eat salad … off this drink coaster.” The plate size is probably intended to dissuade someone from overdoing it on salad. As if that would ever happen. I take it back. There is always one guy leaving the salad bar who doesn’t believe he’s allowed to make multiple trips. His plate is stacked. He looks like he’s emptying the garbage.

“Hey, buddy, you know you can go back up.”

“They might take it all away! I’m not getting ripped off!”

There are some items at the salad bar I don’t understand. The offerings at the beginning of the salad bar make some sense. It’s usually an assortment of things I’d never want to eat: lettuce, celery, and cauliflower. Then there are some premade salads, such as macaroni salad. Has anyone eaten any of that macaroni at the salad bar? There’s rarely even a spoonful taken out of there. It’s just a festering bowl of germs. That’s why they have that sneeze guard up there. To protect us from the macaroni salad. After the premade salads, there are toppings like nuts and raisins and then, for no obvious reason at all, suddenly a tub of chocolate pudding. Hey, I love pudding, but who is putting chocolate pudding on their salad? What is this,
Fear Factor
?

Taco Salad

My favorite type of salad has to be the taco salad. I enjoy the taste, but I find the whole concept of the taco salad deliciously ridiculous. On first glance the most impressive thing about the taco salad is that it is actually called a “salad.” When I hear the word
salad
, I think
lettuce
, and I’m pretty sure there is more lettuce on a Big Mac than in most taco salads. Really the only thing “salad-y” about a taco salad is the word
salad
in its name. The taco salad makes no effort to live up to the healthy perception of a salad. Interestingly enough, a taco is healthier for you than a taco salad. From what I can tell, the recipe for
a taco salad is pretty simple: dump eight tacos into an edible bowl. The edible bowl may be a key characteristic of a taco salad, but to me it serves no purpose. I understand salads are not everyone’s favorite, but dealing with a reusable bowl is not a deciding factor. Nobody is thinking,
I’d get the salad, but I don’t want to clean the damn bowl afterward!

Of course, the taco salad bowl is not only edible, it is deep-fried. Yes, an edible, deep-fried bowl to hold a “salad” that is mostly cheese and meat. I’m pretty confident that eating a wooden salad bowl is better for you. Taco salad? At least the ice cream cone is not called the ice cream
salad.
Maybe the deep-fried taco salad bowl indicates we have reached the end of things to deep-fry. I could just see the following discussion at the Deep Frying Convention.

CHAIRMAN:
Well, guys, we had a good run with the deep-frying. It all started with Stan’s mozzarella sticks. We had fun deep-frying the candy bar. Hell, we even deep-fried a zucchini, not that anyone wanted that. But unless we think of something new to deep-fry, we’re gonna have to shut down the deep-fryer test facility. Yes, Charlie?

CHARLIE:
What if we deep-fry bowls, dishes, tables, and chairs.

CHAIRMAN:
Ha, ha, ha. Charlie … wait a minute … a deep-fried chair?

I imagine it was a Charlie who came up with the taco salad. Tacos are one of the many beautiful gifts from Mexico, but the taco salad is filled with so much broken logic it must be an American creation. I imagine Mexicans must look at the taco salad and think,
¿Como se dice “
ridiculous
”?

How do you even order a taco salad with a straight face?

“Yeah, I guess I’ll just have the Taco Salad. I’m watching what I eat. Do you have a fork made out of bacon? Maybe a bologna napkin?”

Fake Salads

I’m not sure what exactly makes something a salad, but I know I usually don’t like it. I don’t think chefs even like salads, given that the chef’s salad is basically just deli meat. There are salads named after people (Caesar, Cobb) and places (Waldorf, Niçoise). Cultures have their own salads. There is the Greek salad, which I’m pretty sure is an Italian salad with unpitted olives and feta cheese. I’m still not sure how you are supposed to eat an unpitted olive without looking like a giant nibbling on a plum. The Greeks just do things differently. After all, they are lighting cheese on fire. I guess it’s mostly lettuce that designates something as a salad. I prefer the fake salads, like potato salad. I’m pretty sure the recipe for potato salad is four potatoes and a gallon of mayo. For some reason, mayonnaise can turn anything into a salad. Take eggs, add mayonnaise, you get egg salad. Take tuna, add mayonnaise, you get tuna salad. Take salmon, add mayonnaise, you get salmonella. You’d think we wouldn’t be allowed to combine fish and mayonnaise. They are two things that go bad ten seconds after you take them out of the refrigerator. If someone told you they just mixed mayonnaise and fish together, your first question should be “How long has that been out of the refrigerator?”

Any way you look at them, salads generally are just not that good. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Bill Shakespeare himself, another actor who did some writing, used the term “salad days” to mean “green in judgment,” which pretty much describes perfectly the people who actually like salads. The Bard has spoken.

WHOLE FOODS NATION

Health trends change and recalibrate every six months or so. When I was a little kid, cottage cheese—yes, cottage cheese—was considered healthy. My mom and my sisters would announce with a straight face, “We are being healthy by eating this tub of cheese curds.” I guess the logic was that to be thin, you should eat something that looks like cellulite. “If we eat it, we won’t get it on our thighs.” Dairy always seems to have a representative in the health trend cycle. Today the belief is that yogurt holds some special nutritional value for women. Apparently
only
women, because in most yogurt commercials you will find only women. There’s usually someone like Jamie Lee Curtis winking at the females watching. “Ladies, we need yogurt, right?” Jamie might be talking about calcium or helping ladies poop, but I’ve seen more men in tampon commercials.

Milk

Milk, of course, is dairy and seems to have its own ongoing role as a health trend subset. Cow’s milk is presently viewed,
for all intents and purposes, as a poison. “Don’t drink cow’s milk. You should never drink the milk of another animal. Humans are the only animal that drinks the breast milk of another animal.” Then again, humans are the only animal with Internet access. We have all been told for various reasons that we are not supposed to drink cow’s milk. First, the suggested replacement was soy milk. After that it was discovered that soy milk is all estrogen and we are not supposed to drink it if we would prefer that our newborn sons have testicles. Then we were told to drink rice milk, which, understandably, was revealed to be identical to drinking a huge glass of liquid carbs. Then we were told to drink almond milk because, apparently, almonds make milk. However, if you have a nut allergy, you should drink hemp milk, which is supposedly like a nut-free almond milk made from rope. Eventually it will be unanimously decided that we should drink the healthiest milk of all, which is a natural form of milk that is big in Europe, called “cow’s milk.”

Bread

Health trends often originate from other cultures. A basic rule is that if the people of another culture are thin and consuming something regularly, then the thing they are consuming will become a health trend. A great example of this is the Mediterranean diet. It’s a well-known fact that if you eat a Mediterranean diet, you are guaranteed to become thin, tan, and a great soccer player. It was this theory that led us to believe that the pita, the bread wallet, was healthy. “Pita is not bread. It’s from the Middle East, so it’s healthy. Cheese is bad, but when you put it in pita it’s okay, because pita is from the Middle East, where people are thin.” This is why when I smoke crack I always put it in a pita. Those evil perpetrators of health trends are always trying to find a way to make bread healthy. There
is a type of “sprouted” bread that I believe is actually made of soil. The healthy bread trend may have reached its peak with the “gluten-free” trend. By now we all realize two things: (1) we are
all
allergic to gluten, and (2) gluten is apparently the thing that makes bread so delicious.

Granola Bar

Inevitably, health food trends will lead to the corruption of a healthy item. Granola is considered healthy, and we know this mostly because it tastes like gravel. Granola is the classic example of something tasting so bad it must be good for you. Scientists never even had to do research. A scientist just tasted granola: “Oh this must be good for you, since it tastes like it should be on the bottom of a fish tank.”

Because of the fact that granola has the same consistency as ground-up animal teeth, the granola “bar” was developed. It could be that some granola-health-inspired entrepreneur named Bob had the following experience.

BOB:
Hey, kids are eating candy bars, right? All we have to do is shape granola like a candy bar and then kids will eat the granola. They’ll be eating something healthy and not even know it. Idiots. Ha, ha, ha.

Then a week later his director of operations came in.

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS:
Uh, Bob, kids are not eating those granola bars.

BOB:
Well, all we have to do is put chocolate chips in the granola bars. The kids will be eating healthy and not even know it. Idiots. Ha, ha, ha.

Then a week later his director of operations came in again.

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS:
Uh, Bob, kids are now picking the chocolate chips out of those granola bars and tossing the granola.

BOB:
All we have to do is cover the granola bar in chocolate and caramel. Fill it with nougat and get rid of the freaking granola! Do I have to tell you how to do everything?

That man’s name was Bob Kudos. Whenever I eat a Kudos bar, my next thought is, “Well, I might as well finish off the whole box. If I’m going to eat healthy, I’m going to eat
really
healthy.”

Kale

We want to eat healthy to feel better, but what we truly desire is to increase our life spans. We all want to live longer, but how much longer? You ever talk to an old person? I mean a really, really old person. They always have this exhausted look on their face that says,
I can’t believe I’m still here! I would’ve eaten so much more ice cream. Why did I ever consume kale?

Ten years ago nobody ate kale. Then someone (probably a kale farmer or Satan) discovered that kale had some health benefits, and off kale went. Now we are in the middle of a full-fledged kale trend or, as I call it, a kale epidemic. There are kale chips, kale shakes, and even kale salads. I don’t know much about grammar, but I think kale salad is what they call a “double negative.” Kale is a superfood, and its special power is tasting bad. If tasting horrible is an indication of something being healthy, kale is the healthiest thing out there. Kale tastes
like bug spray. Once I looked at a can of bug spray, and printed right there on the can was “Made with real kale.” The mantra of the kale lobby is “Kale is so good for you. Kale is so good for you.” So is jogging, but I’m not going to do that either. I’m not against things that are healthy. Well, not in principle. My issue with kale is a simple one. Kale is not edible. It is amazing the lengths we will go to in order to be able to stomach kale: “All you have to do is freeze-dry it, cover it in cayenne pepper, put it in a shake, and bury it in the ground.” It doesn’t matter what you do to kale: it still tastes like bitter spinach with hair. I suppose some people don’t care what it tastes like. “Kale is so good for you.” As for me, taste is too important. They could find out kale cures cancer and I’d say, “No thanks, I think I’ll just do the chemo. I’ve tried the kale.” I guess the thing I can’t stand the most about the kale trend is the
bragging
that is associated with eating it. People seem to bring up eating kale as if it’s something that’s going to impress me.