THE actual summer, with the sun and its heat, is nearly here which means delicious, healthy salads – or so Big Salad wants you to believe. This is the unpalatable truth.
Myth: Salads are light and perfect for summer.
Reality: Summer does not mean you automatically want to eat watery leaves. They might help you stay hydrated on a life raft at sea, but so does drinking the blood of a seagull. Do you serve jugs of chilled seagull blood just because it’s July? No.
Myth: Salads are cheap.
Reality: Not once you factor in the wastage rate of 70 per cent or higher. No matter how sincerely you intended to eat it, salad goes limp after two days and starts emitting foul brown liquid after four. Nobody wants diarrhoea plants.
Myth: You’ve just not found the right dressing.
Who mixes vinegar, raw garlic and mustard and eats it voluntarily? How do you explain Heinz Salad Cream except Satan jizzing into a squeezy bottle and wholesaling it to Asda?
Myth: Salad will make a nice change.
Reality: You’ll be enthusiastic about the first, and only the first, salad of summer. You’ll enjoy halving olives and tearing up basil leaves. Then follows the rage-inducing chore of getting bits of shell off hardboiled eggs and spilling anchovy oil all over the worktop because of the little can’s stupid design. All for a delicious bowl of cold, wet slime.
Myth: You’ll lose weight.
Reality: Lettuce tastes of nothing until you do the American thing of adding bacon, fried croutons and enough creamy dressing to make it ‘chunky caesar soup’.
Myth: Salads are perfect garden party food.
Reality: Demonstrably untrue. Barbecued meat is perfect garden party food. Meat is delicious and society’s hypocrisy about alcohol abuse means you can get shitfaced at 1pm if holding a paper plate with a chicken drumstick on it. Life does not get better than that.
Myth: It introduces kids to healthy eating habits for life.
Reality: Getting your kids to eat salad is almost as hard as eating it yourself. Prying their mouths open with a metal ladle and force-feeding them is faff you don’t need after a day at work. But it will inculcate a lifelong terror of salad.
Myth: You can enjoy raw flavours.
Reality: Only fruit like oranges taste okay raw, and nature’s version is still inferior to Terry’s. Have you tasted a raw mushroom? Mushrooms forced the evolution of cows to make butter to fry them in. The religious take the view that God created both, but salads with horseradish are strong evidence against the existence of a loving deity.
Myth: Salads are for everyone.
Reality: Salads are the worst kind of sneering elitism. Snobs scour the Guardian for salads involving papaya and bulgur wheat just to feel superior to lower-class pig-people. Then they instantly bin it, tucking into a delicious Le Creuset pot roast instead, because they are lying, duplicitous, salad-eating scum.
