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How iceberg won the lettuce wars
- johnea 3y agoThe "lettuce wars"? Really?
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- nickthegreek 3y agoHated salads and most vegetables growing up. I don't think I had every heard of Romaine lettuce until I was in my mid-20s. I can trace what I thought was my hatred of vegetables back to just eating bad or canned versions of almost all of em. I'm lookin at you green beans.
- stephenr 3y agoPlease tell me canned lettuce isn't a thing...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI strongly doubt this, if it was they would definitely have served it for lunch in elementary school. I can see myself getting in trouble for not eating it too. Dull gray, wet but with a fluid that can't really be called either water or grease, somehow soggy and yet wilted at the same time. Smelling of year old unwashed gym socks but with a flavor best described as mealworm extract concentrate. Actually now that I think about it, I'm surprised it's not a thing.
- zdragnar 3y agoPickled lettuce is, though I've not tried it myself.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoIt isn't, but canned spinach is, and it's as disgusting as you might imagine.
- buildsjets 3y agoI'm strong to the finish, cause I eats me spinach, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!
- Paul-Craft 3y agoLol, take 1 guess how/why kid me discovered canned spinach is disgusting.
- legitster 3y agoThere are some really cool things you can do with canned spinach if you know how to prepare it. Creamed spinach is a basis for a lot of tasty regional dishes.
- mcpackieh 3y agoFresh and raw green beans are superb, but fairly unusual in stores. When I was a kid my family ate lots of them because one of my neighbors was a green bean farmer and gave away bags of fresh beans to everybody he knew. But the vast majority of beans he farmed went straight to a processing plant to be canned. Some got frozen, those are better than canned but far inferior to fresh.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agommm. Green beans fresh out of the garden, sauteed in butter & garlic would have been on the menu if the rabbits hadn't gotten to them first...
- bluGill 3y ago'Fresh and raw' exists in stores, but by the time they get home fresh is relative and they are not very fresh. Frozen is often best because it goes from field to freezer quick and thus locks in freshness. Not always though, you need to try each vegetable to see what works.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoI wonder if this is why my kids really like vegetables. They grew up eating them "supermarket fresh" and now the younger one likes having his own veggie plot in the garden. I absolutely despise canned vegetables. I'll give canned tomatoes & beans a pass, but everything else must go.
- actionfromafar 3y agoGiving beans a pass == letting beans go?
- cuttysnark 3y agoall they are saying, is give beans a pass (from canned vegetable jail)
- actionfromafar 3y agoI thought "giving a pass" meant "passing over", "not taking".
- cuttysnark 3y agoIME: "giving a pass [to]" is synonymous with "making an exception [for]". Whereas "passing up" or "passing on" (or as you said "passing over") would be closest to "not taking" or "skipping". OP said they "give a pass to" two veggies and despise all others. So I read it as they were making an exception to their "no canned veggies" rule.
- smegsicle 3y agoout of the jail and into the soup
- denton-scratch 3y ago> I'll give canned tomatoes & beans a pass I favour San Marzano tomatoes for cooking. If they're not in a tin, and whole, they're not allowed to be sold as "DOP". You can get San Marzano seeds and grow your own; no doubt they're very good. You can buy fresh San Marzano at a greengrocer; they're probably fine too. But San Marzano DOP are picked and tinned only in the foothills of Vesuvius. You also can't get tinned chopped San Marzano DOP; they have to be whole. To be fair, chopping up a tin of San Marzano results in a soupy pulp, which is fine if you're making a sauce or soup, which is what they're best for. Tinned chopped tomatoes tend to be chopped whole - you get the cores as well as the pulp. I take out the cores when I chop them. I've always been picky with tomatoes. I've never heard of tinned lettuce.
- hijinks 3y agomy grandfather had a farm and one of the crops was green beans. I use to just walk to the field and pick beans for a snack when I was little. They are so good like that.
- tshaddox 3y agoI don't know, I hated veggies until college, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly attributable to the fact that I lacked the patience for so-called "acquired tastes" until I matured a bit. I'm comfortable saying that I just grew up, rather than explaining it as "I didn't change, vegetables just actually used to be bad when I was a kid, and now they're good."
- angry_moose 3y agoPretty much the same story as the Red Delicious Apple, Imperator Carrot, and Pascal Celery - the variety that was easiest to grow and was most shelf stable won out, at the expense of taste or nutrition.
- soperj 3y agoI haven't had a red delicious in decades. Also apparently they used to be delicious. Most carrots I see in grocery stores here are Nantes.
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- vladvasiliu 3y agoWe still have a variety of tasty apples here in France (don't know about their nutritional worth, though). But what totally kills me is seeing apples being hauled in all the way from freaking Chile, while the same variety is in season locally.
- bluGill 3y agoFew eat Red Delicious apples in the US either, they have been going out of style for decades as people realize other varieties have more flavor. They are the cheap option that are just popular enough for stores to still stock, but they get less space every year.
- hgomersall 3y agoThey seem to be a staple of corporate fruit bowls though.
- bluGill 3y agothey are cheap and the people buying are not the people who will be eating them. Often nobody eats them they are decoration that will be thrown away when the event is over.
- jihadjihad 3y agoI don't know, I like iceberg more than mesclun mix. A wedge of iceberg plus some tasty things and served with steak/chicken/pork chops goes great. Shredded iceberg is irredeemably awful. But a whole big wedge of it? I've never complained when served it, at least.
- nsxwolf 3y agoWedge salads are great. But, how do they get properly washed? Do you have to disassemble the layers, wash them, and put it back together? Or is it just the outer leaves you have to worry about?
- dsr_ 3y agoAn iceberg head is much like a cabbage head: pull off the outer leaves and you've removed the dirt.
- JohnFen 3y agoI know it's terribly low-class of me, but iceberg lettuce remains my favorite lettuce. I agree that shredding it kind of ruins it, though.
- derbOac 3y agoFor what it's worth, I prefer romaine or other lettuces or greens in salad, but can appreciate wedge-type iceberg salads as well. I don't mind shredded iceberg lettuce in certain uses if it's freshly cut and I trust where it's coming from. I like it on a sandwich or burger, for example. I still think I'd prefer other alternatives more but it has its own qualities to appreciate.
- reneherse 3y agoThe old timey steakhouse standard-- and they're delicious on a hot summer day. I've always suspected the humble iceberg wedge salad is a restauranteur's ideal menu item: take a 50¢ head of lettuce, divide it into quarters, add toppings and sell it for a 60x or more markup. I wouldn't be surprised if it had the highest margin of all the items on the menu :)
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- denton-scratch 3y ago> I think when it comes to just sheer deliciousness, people always loved iceberg lettuce That's an idiosyncratic take. It tastes like ... water.
- crazygringo 3y agoYeah. I love to use iceberg lettuce, but it's 100% for texture and freshness. It has virtually no flavor at all. But that's what makes it such a great vehicle for other delicious flavors to put on top of it. I have to assume that's what the author meant to say, because I had the same double-take at that sentence.
- JohnFen 3y agoIceberg absolutely has a flavor to me, and I enjoy it. It's slightly sweet, slightly grassy (in a good way). It is very mild, though, and easily hidden if you add other flavors to it.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoAm I the only one who thinks lettuce is just...overrated? Greek salad, Israeli Salad, Olivier Salad - all of the lettuce-less salads are far superior. If I wanted to eat something that tastes like nothing and has no real nutritional value...I will eat nothing.
- jylam 3y agoAs a french, I'm deeply horrified. I mean, Iceberg is basically the cheapest blandest salad you can buy. That's the thing you want to eat out of the fridge as a filler, cold with some sort of fat sauce (also directly out of the fridge, like a ranch or something) because otherwise it has no taste nor recognizable texture. Yes it's crunchy, but there are so many crunchy salads which are way tastier and better (like the "Sucrine", can't find an English name, that's not even the better, but that's readily available (fresh, not in a bag you need to refrigerate)) “I think when it comes to just sheer deliciousness, people always loved iceberg lettuce,” says Angie Rito, chef and co-owner at Don Angie." Wat. I guess that was a century ago, before the industrialization and selection of bland lettuces that are bland but can survive without darkening for a week in a plastic bag. I'm always dumbfounded hearing about the American way to think about food, all you can readily buy is so industrialized, you miss so much.
- Angostura 3y agoYeh - as a Brit, I concur. Romaine, for me.
- JohnFen 3y agoIceberg definitely has a flavor. Very mild, to be sure, but it has one.
- dekhn 3y agoiceberg lettuce is, as you say, a sandwich lettuce, not a salad lettuce. It has a very clear crispy texture (as you say). Radicchio is only crispy in the center part. It was a revelation when I moved to california and had my first real salad. it was intensely bitter with nutty and other flavors. Later I found out that arugala, endive, radicchio, are all great when properly dressed with a good salad oil, but they definitely have wayyyyy more flavor. I'd be surprised if anybody could even really say what iceberg lettuce "tastes" like- to me it just tasts like crunchy water.
- stronglikedan 3y agoAnd even worse, hardly any nutrients compared to other leaf veggies.
- cuttysnark 3y agoFunny memory from childhood: kale used to be used for decoration on buffets and on served plates—you weren't expected to eat it. Kale had an incredible PR campaign that turned it from scraps to leading leaf.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> you weren't expected to eat it Despite the incredible PR campaign, I still mostly feel that way about kale. I just don't really enjoy it. Not the flavor, not the texture. Might as well be eating weeds.
- Doxin 3y agomashed potatoes with kale isn't too bad. Especially if you add very small chunks of salted meat. It's definitely not as amazing and versatile as popular culture makes it out to be though.
- abruzzi 3y agoIceberg is the primary reason I didn’t like salads for most of my life. Then I discovered that you can eat fresh spinach, not boiled, and I started eating salads. Also, I’ve never heard of or seen a “wedge salad”. Is that what it sounds like?
- akwiejrt 3y agoSo the article makes the economic argument, that it's easy to grow and ship. Which has been the main/economic argument all along. They don't compare it to anything else except kale, which has been a fad the past decade that I've never really understood. (I like kale for several different uses, but the zeitgeist has been absurd.) The article makes no mention of the dozens of different varieties of lettuce or hundreds of varieties of other greens that have higher nutritional content and an incredibly broad variety of flavors. It doesn't even talk about the many other uses of iceberg lettuce beyond wedge salads. Pretty shallow article overall. Perfect for social media.
- legitster 3y agoHonestly, the economic "it's cheap to sell!" is a pretty superficial trope in most of these articles, and in this case it's probably dead wrong. Kale or chard are usually much easier to grow and last longer than iceberg. Iceberg won out because our grandparents and great-grandparents considered it a superior ingredient. They grew up in a world where bitter chewy greens were common and iceberg stood out based on their tastes at the time.
- jjkaczor 3y agoListened to a news story at some point over the last couple years, as there were lettuce shortages in North America due to the drought in the US Southwest, and one quote stayed in my mind: "Lettuce is perhaps the most expensive way to transport refrigerated water from farm to table." Iceberg lettuce is the worst, as it has almost no nutritional value.
- legitster 3y agoAt any given time we have 2-3 different types of lettuce in the fridge. But I lean a lot more towards iceberg these days than I used to. It keeps the longest and is the most versatile (maybe save for Romaine). And yes, that supreme crunch. There is no amount of spinach you can put on a sandwich to make itself noticeable. A lot of what you buy in a grocery store is grown hydroponically, so it really doesn't matter for flavor what you buy - you just pick how bitter of a green you want. But if you can pick up a fresh iceberg from your local farmer's market, it might surprise you how much flavor is in that bad boy.