Why Salad is Overrated

Salad might be delicious, but it's not particularly healthy, nutritious, affordable, or good for the environment.

That's an argument from Tamar Haspel, "Unearthed" columnist with the Washington Post newspaper. Tamar says her latest column, "Why Salad is So Overrated" provoked outrage from her salad-loving readers, but she was just trying to get people to think about the effects of their vegetable buying decisions.

Tamar's main problem with salad is, it's mostly water. 

Picture a head of iceberg lettuce on the left, and a 1 litre bottle of Evian on the right. Percentage-wise, those two things have almost exactly the same amount of water. They're both 96% water. In the case of Evian it's 4% bottle, in the case of lettuce it's 4% vegetable.- Tamar Haspel, Washington Post columnist

Tamar says even if you choose another lettuce like romaine, or even spinach, the amount of nutrients in the leaves is not worth the cost and resources of transporting water from the farm to the grocery store. 

When we're thinking about this problem we have, which is that we have more people on this planet every day and all of us have to eat, obviously we're all thinking about how our agricultural system can operate better to do that. And land that is used to grow vegetables that are essentially nutrition-free, is the low hanging fruit as stuff that could be repurposed for things that are higher in nutrition.- Tamar Haspel, Washington Post columnist

While Tamar isn't suggesting governments ban the growing of lettuce or outlaw salads, she does encourage consumers to think about how much water and wastage goes into lettuce, before making a purchase.