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I spent the past six days at a lake house with 17 other dudes for a bachelor party, and I feel like some fetid death that’s been puked out by a feral cat. Our diet the entire week consisted of frozen pizzas, frozen lasagna, pizza bagels, bacon and eggs, hot dogs, cheese puffs, some deep dish pizza because oddly there was a Pizzeria Uno’s in town, and so much beer and liquor.
Like so much fucking beer. My stomach was a churning mess the whole time. The last thing I ate yesterday was a half an Italian Sub, a half a pastrami sub and two hard boiled eggs. I want. To die.
But there was light, hope. This morning, I was looking forward to my lunch. I was gonna walk down the street, a nice, solo, outdoor stroll, and get a salad. A clean, healthy, green salad. Something that wouldn’t make my body feel entirely ruined. ‘Cept, now, after reading this Washington Post article, I know salads are trash.
Damn fuck shit.
Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources.
[Organic consultant Charles Benbrook] and colleague Donald Davis developed a nutrient quality index — a way to rate foods based on how much of 27 nutrients they contain per 100 calories. Four of the five lowest-ranking foods (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, lettuce and celery. (The fifth is eggplant.)
You’re just filling your body with dump plants. Lettuce, it appears, is essentially pointless.
A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (1-liter size: 96 percent water, 4 percent bottle) and is only marginally more nutritious.
Worse than being pointless, lettuce is a death machine, killing people and the planet.
Lettuce has a couple of No. 1 unenviable rankings in the food world. For starters, it’s the top source of food waste, vegetable division, becoming more than 1 billion pounds of uneaten salad every year. But it’s also the chief culprit for foodborne illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, green leafies accounted for 22 percent of all food-borne illnesses from 1998-2008.
Damn, WTF lettuce? I thought you were cool. Salad, too, is a a waste of money (but all of us who have ever been to a Sweetgreen know that).
The makings of a green salad — say, a head of lettuce, a cucumber and a bunch of radishes — cost about $3 at my supermarket. For that, I could buy more than two pounds of broccoli, sweet potatoes or just about any frozen vegetable going, any of which would make for a much more nutritious side dish to my roast chicken.
Don’t even bother. Just eat the chicken. That’s all you need. Delicious, delicious roast chicken and nothing else ever. You’ll live to a thousand.
Me? I’m gonna go crawl in a hole and die. I’ll see you tomorrow.