Super salads, sports cars and yuppies

Tuesday, February 24, 1998

Super salads, sports cars and yuppies

SALAD: No longer is pedestrian green lettuce allowed on posh
plates

What has happened to salad these days? Is there anyone else who
remembers the plain, old-fashioned, honest salad that graced plates
across the nation before the ³Greed is Good² decade that
was the ¹80s? Salad without pretense. Salad that said,
³Here I am ­ lettuce, tomato, cucumber, beetroot, raw,
cold. Eat me.²

Those were the days of days of crisp, pale green lettuce,
succulent, full-sized tomatoes that had ripened in the sun, bright
purple beetroot fresh from the tin, and cucumbers that unashamedly
made you burp. Days of homemade salad-dressing (mayonnaise is of
course a foreign word) or, perhaps, vinegar. Days when people were
not sure what French dressing might be, and, given the record with
their kisses, weren¹t too keen to find out. Salad days
indeed.

Salad of that sort is now just a memory. Like so many other
things, pre-¹90s salad was pushed aside by a brash, confident
new-comer: Yuppie Salad. Salad as Status Symbol.

As is vital for a status symbol, the Yuppie Salad comes in a
variety of grades. The primary indicator is the lettuce, or, more
accurately, the dominant leafy green stuff (lettuce being too
specific a botanical term). Just as no yuppie would drive a boring
family car, neither would the yuppie countenance fatally
unfashionable pale green lettuce. No. The yuppie eats ³Sports
Lettuce,² in dark green with crinkled spoilers around the
edges and, in more extreme cases, dashing purple racing stripes.
The suspension tends to be a little less firm. As a rule, the
darker the green, the more crinkled the edges, the limpier the
leaves ­ the more expensive the salad.

Crisp pale green lettuce is a family wagon with fake-wood
panels. Salad that appears to have been made from actual thistles
is a Porsche. A red one. In fact, there is a simple law of Yuppie
Salad: The more you pay for it, the more it looks like weeds.

The analogy with the automotive tastes of the yuppie is not
perfect. Thankfully, though, another parallelism lurks. No one has
yet bred phallic lettuce. When, as historical precedent says it
must, the current ³limpier is better² trend is reversed
and genetic engineering delivers a lengthy lettuce surrogate for
latent libido lurking loinwise, it will be the perfect complement
to the miniature tomatoes.

Indeed one can imagine such a salad being used to great
psychological advantage in the power lunch situation: A couple of
deft flicks with the fork to achieve the appropriate arrangement;
eye contact with the intended victim; a quick, but clearly
deliberate, glance at his trousers; a fleeting expression of smug
contempt; and finally a conclusive and impossible to misinterpret
crushing of the little red globes. I should think that the message
would be transmitted with unequivocal force and fidelity. His
stocks might well not be the only thing to slump alarmingly.

Of course, there are Yuppie Salad indicators other than
high-fashion lettuce and tiny tomatoes. The pretentious presence of
petals lurking yellow and orange amongst the greenery (and possibly
³purplery²) is a sure sign that neither nutritional value
nor flavor was the chef¹s main motivation in determining the
composition of the dish. What are they there for? There is rarely
enough floral debris to actually determine the flavor, and, when
there is, it is rather bitter, and disappointingly like you had
imagined flowers might taste. This was the reason you had not been
whipping out into the garden with the secateurs at dinner time in
the first place.

The number of varieties of green-stuff in the Yuppie Salad is
often large, and usually directly correlated with the price. This,
combined with the presence of stray petals and things that are
disturbingly thistle-like, leads to a plausible (and very
¹80s) theory of the origin of Yuppie Salad.

Imagine the Gordon Gekko of market gardeners. ³Traditional
lettuce cultivation,² he muses to himself whilst reading the
financial pages, ³requires rows of individual plants which
must be carefully planted, watered, weeded and harvested. All of
this is necessary to produce uniform, crisp, pale green lettuce.
Time-consuming. Labor-intensive. Costly. If only people
weren¹t so fastidious about salad greenery.² While on the
phone to his salad-broker, he ruminates on this problem. He
finalizes the deal to have his clients buy tomatoes from him by
number rather than weight, and then the solution hits him.
³Market it! Make them want a mish-mash of varieties! If car
manufacturers can make people think that it¹s the height of
style to drive around in an unreliable, gas-guzzling, giant penis,
this will be a breeze.²

It was. The rest is history. Gardener Gekko sacked his lettuce
tenders, tossed all the salad green-stuff seeds he had into a
paddock, and let it go wild.

Now he simply mows it when he has orders to meet.

The evolution of salad over time has taken a rather regressive
step. I remember the days when salad, with dressing on the side,
would precede a delicious filet mignon. Nowadays, social standards
have forced me to eat this pre-appetizer as a meal.
³Souplantation² and the like have made full-fledged
attempts at assisting our digestive tracts into deceiving our
stomachs that they are, in fact, full off of some weeds with an
occasional sliver of turkey on top. I, on the contrary, do not fall
for this ³healthy lifestyle.² I was always taught that
life is lived only once, hence the pleasing of taste buds both in
bed and at the dinner table is quintessential to existence. No
longer will I be intimidated to not order steak and fries at my
next lunch interview. Rather, I will proudly pronounce to my
server, that his or her bitter-tasting, over-priced green garbage
will not be visiting my stomach during that meal.

Well, how has the simple salad-eater responded to all this? Most
probably, with the usual insecurity. Petals and thistles? Gosh,
this must be a really posh place. Grass-flavored? Must be an
acquired taste.Inlender is second-year psychobiology student.