salad days: when to eat a pile of leaves, and when to avoid them

Ever try Googling ‘Dietitian’? If you do, you’ll see a grid of people with salad ingredients on their desks. How does this make sense? Not a single RD I know keeps a bundle of raw produce on their desk. That is impractical as hell. Plus, we don’t just blindly recommend salads to people all day. That’s a common misconception that needs to change immediately, if not sooner.

It’s odd working a job where people associate you with salads. Not good salads, either.

To be fair, it’s easy to make a shitty salad. I didn’t know about delicious, crave-able salads until I hit the second decade of my life.

As a kid, I thought salads were gross. It was the 90’s, buffets were raging. It was always the same combo of partially wilted iceberg lettuce, graying carrot shreds, flavorless, out-of-season cherry tomatoes, and a kiddie pool of ranch dressing.

It’s a salad stifled, made slightly more redeemable with croutons and a sprinkle of cheese, but with so much more potential. If you’re genuinely into this, keep enjoying it, by all means, but please know there is a whole world of balanced, interesting flavors and textures waiting for you, should you step over the threshold.

If not, I get it. I wasn’t even willing to try salads until my early 20’s, a time in my life that revolved around work, community college, high highs, and low lows. A studio arts student at the time, I’d just finished up the morning in my school’s ceramics workshop. A friend and I both had the afternoon off and met up at a spot along the river between Pittsburgh’s 10th St. and Birmingham St. bridges. A few steps off the train tracks and a quick descent brought us to a concrete slab platform along the river’s edge, about 10 feet above the water. The platforms were probably useful in commerce once, but at some point became relegated to grounds for youthful shenanigans, as evidenced by the colorful graffiti, cigarette butts, and empty bottles scattered around.

Then and now, that river’s not the kind you swim in unless you’re open to making yourself host to a colorful assortment of rashes. You’d sit on the slab, jaggin’ arahnd with friends, and watch the water glisten under the city’s buildings, traffic, and trees. The view was, and probably still is, an equal mix of grace and grit. Somehow it didn’t smell bad.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a safe setting, especially at night, but we were young with partially developed brains and oftentimes enough drugs in our systems to barely care. Here and there, people would bring instruments and sing. Depending on where we were along the river, sometimes we’d build small fires, either for ambiance or warmth.

This particular day was during the very beginning of Autumn, one of the best times to roam around Pittsburgh. We talked, rolled a few spliffs, lazily puffed on them, then lay on our backs and watched the leaves of all colors get rustled by the calm wind, listening to the water sound like water in the background. After I don’t know how long, my friend sat up and pulled an expertly wrapped sandwich and a small plastic clamshell of salad out of his backpack. He offered me some and I told him I didn’t do salads. He insisted. I was hesitant but also hungry and didn’t have anything to eat on hand.

In the plastic clamshell was a cluster of mixed greens, blue cheese crumbles, whole Kalamata olives, and sunflower seeds, all evenly coated in an herb-speckled sheen of dressing. Up until that moment I had never had blue cheese or olives before; I thought they smelled weird and looked kinda gross. I agreed to one small bite.

In that moment, I wasn’t intentionally trying to expand my taste palate, but this salad was on point. The blue cheese crumbles were tangy and paired perfectly with the smooth, salty olives. The crunch from the roasted sunflower seeds switched up the texture, added some depth of flavor, and it was all tied together by the herby, punchy, and perfectly balanced vinegar and oil dressing. My friend saw my eyes light up and said, “I know, right?”

New food experiences can open us or close us. That day by the river, a new world of flavors opened up to me. But now, working as a RD, just because I like salads more than I used to doesn’t mean that I promote suffering through them just for the nutrients.

Complex associations have formed around salads because they’re often considered one of the quintessential “healthy” food. Like most things in nutrition, though, it’s not that simple. There are near-countless enjoyable options for meals and snacks that can be both delicious and nourishing. Enduring a food you hate just because it’s nutrient-dense isn’t a healthy mindset. Having salads instead of a full meal to cut calories isn’t necessarily healthy either. Also, if gastrointestinal symptoms are present, a bowl of raw food can worsen symptoms like diarrhea, bloating, etc. To clear things up, I made some lists:

If you take nothing else from this essay, let it be this:

Next time you picture a dietitian, please don’t imagine a mindless salad-munching machine. Picture someone who understands the joy of eating, who has been extensively trained to help you find foods that nourish and satisfy, and who believes that trying new things, even reluctantly, can deepen our connection to food and nutrition. Because much like the rest of the human experience, our tastebuds only benefit from diversity.