I Hate Lettuce

“Lettuce! Huh! What is it good for?”

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Like war, but to a significantly lesser degree, I believe that lettuce exists for no reason. It’s tasteless, barely has any culinary uses, and can be easily replaced by different, better vegetables. It’s a useless, stupid plant that has been co-opted by big corporations to produce a reliable source of income and give no benefits to people in return. I hate lettuce!

Welcome to a brand new episode of my hot takes, where I get angry for no particular reason at something stupid! Since I’m out of stories to post and Spectral Crown is done, I’m trying something new for weeks where I’m short on time. I would try and do a Photobomb post, but I have even less time than that. So it’s my disdain for lettuce instead, a weight that I’ve been carrying around for years and have never had a chance to properly share about. Until now. I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to get this off my chest. The stress of it was killing me.

Lettuce is such a stupid plant. It has zero cultural relevance, honestly. There are, like, no cultural foods or food genres that have lettuce as some central component, except for maybe Egyptian, since that’s where lettuce started? Except who knows if that extends to modern Egyptian food today? The only cultural touchstone that seems to include lettuce that I could find is the salad. And what is a salad, anyway? It’s just vegetables in a bowl. I like salads! I love topping salads with different unique vegetables and fun dressings and sometimes croutons and shit like that. Salads are a great source of vitamins and minerals! But why the fuck is there lettuce? It’s just filler! Fodder and a vessel for dressing! It exists to take up space.

Lettuce has the taste and consistency of crunchy water. Sure, some people are into that, but at least celery has some flavor. Lettuce has nothing. It’s got some vitamins and minerals, yeah, and is probably high in fiber, but when you compare that to other vegetables? It kales [sic] in comparison! I haven’t willingly eaten lettuce in a salad in probably four or five years, and you want to know why? Because I just replace it with spinach instead.

Sure, spinach doesn’t actually have the mystical health properties that Popeye would have you believe, but it’s still a hell of a lot better than lettuce. If my brief confirmation-of-bias led google search is anything to be believed, then spinach has some levels of most important vitamins and minerals, plus things like carbs, protein, and healthy fats, plus the standard fiber that you get with any leafy vegetable. What does lettuce have? Some of these. Just some of them. Eating lettuce when you could be eating spinach is like going to a library and borrowing a book that’s missing a quarter of the pages, shrugging your shoulders and saying “eh, I’ll get the gist of it.” I love spinach! Every salad should use spinach instead of lettuce. It doesn’t even change the flavor of the salad all that much! Instead, I think spinach enhances the flavor of salad.

Not only that, spinach is such a more versatile food than lettuce, anyway. You can boil it, you can bake it, you can put it in stir-frys, you can throw it at your cat to piss them off, you can include it in chocolate or something probably I’m sure there’s someone somewhere who has tried. There’s just so much more to do with it than plain old lettuce, which is really only good for one thing, and maybe the occasional breadless wrap. I’ll give lettuce that one thing, at least; it makes a much more efficient wrap than spinach does. I cannot imagine trying to wrap my burrito in spinach. That would be… terrible. An absolute travesty. I’d get all my beans everywhere. But still! For everything else, I go with spinach.

Even cabbage, which is basically just angry, dense lettuce, has more uses than lettuce does. Coleslaw? Sure, I hate it and it’s just a sad American substitute for flavor, but go ahead. Kimchi? Yes, absolutely, throw that cabbage around. Basketball? I’d play basketball with a head of cabbage. But my personal favorite has got to be sauerkraut, perhaps the most perfect food. It is crunch vinegar, with all the benefits of eating a fermented snack. I drink vinegar on its own, anyway. So of course I would love to chew on it, too, and sauerkraut lets me do exactly that. Throw some caraway seeds in there? Or maybe some sweet sauerkraut? It’s *chef’s kiss* spectacular.

Why the hell, then, is lettuce more popular than either spinach or cabbage? Now, here’s where we get into speculative territory. As this article points out, at the very least iceberg lettuce became popular in 20th century America because it was easy to grow, ship, and sell, profiting a big corporatiion. It fit right in with a growing America’s desire for convenience and ease. But what about since then? Well, I think that the picture hasn’t changed a whole lot. If you’re familiar at all with the general status of the American food and agricultural industry, you know that it’s largely controlled by a handful of big corporations, like Monsanto. Fuck Monsanto. I hate them. I think that these corporations have been keeping lettuce popular because it’s super cheap to grow and people will always buy it, but also because they can sell the seeds, too.

See, these big companies profit because they want people to buy new seeds and new breeds of plants every year instead of just saving seeds, like farmers did for thousands of years (that link didn’t work for me, but maybe you’ll have more luck? It’s about the Seed Savers Exchange). These companies will produce new strains of plants every year, just like the latest top fashion, and sell the same plant with a new coat of leaves every year forever. And people will buy them every year, because, unfortunately, for the average person, that’s the only way to get more seeds. Big farms or people with farming expertise may have other ways to get seeds, or have the resources to save them from one year to the next, but the average home gardeners? Got to go out to Home Depot and buy some seeds from the poor bastard behind the counter.

And that’s the hard part about lettuce in home gardens; it’s super easy to grow, and people know exactly what to do with it. If you grow fifty heads of lettuce, you’ve got one good way to get rid of them. But fifty tomatoes? What the hell do you even do with fifty tomatoes before they go bad? I love home gardening, and I think that everyone should do it. Or if you can’t start a garden in your home, then everyone should have access to a community garden. Grow whatever you want, of course; if you want to grow lettuce, I won’t judge you. This rage is more hyperbolic than literal. Grow and eat the plants you like! But these companies have got us all over a barrel about how to get our seeds, and lettuce is one of their staple products. They know it sells, and they know it sells well. Lettuce is a lifeline of big corporations. And since I hate big corporations, I therefore also hate lettuce.

But my gripes with the American agricultural industry are far larger than the scope of this hate-fueled rant about the worst leafy vegetable. I just really, really dislike lettuce, and I hope now you understand why. It is the vegetable equivalent of white bread, of plain white rice, of unseasoned chicken. Lettuce is boring, but it’s so, so easy to replace it with things that are better. I will eat lettuce if it’s given to me, or it comes in a side salad at a restaurant or something, but I will never willingly choose to cook with lettuce. Nay, I will never compromise my morals that way. Forget the devil’s lettuce; the devil himself probably grows actual lettuce for fun, and he laughs every time that Monsanto creates a new lettuce breed. I’m telling you, Monsanto is evil. You’ve gotta believe me, man.

I hope that I have made my case as to why I so strongly dislike this plant, this Lactuca sativa. But what do you think? Is lettuce your favorite vegetable? Am I way off base here? Is iceberg lettuce actually basketballs in disguise? Can you go bowling with a head of lettuce? Is it the best thing before sliced bread? Was this post way too out of left field? Let me know in the comments! Or just think your thoughts quietly to yourself, smirk as your close this page, and return once more to a life where someone’s opinion on the internet is just something out in the ether. I’m fine either way! Just don’t eat the lettuce.