When I was a little girl, I didn’t like salad … green salad … they had raw tomatoes! I didn’t know much about food and it never occured to me I could make it the way I wanted it with only the things that I liked. There were not many ingredeint choices like the mega salad bars of today and I had no idea there was a variety of salad fixin’s beyond lettuce, cucumber, green onion, radish and tomato. I don’t recall ever eating any kind of raw vegetable unless it was in my mothers Potato Salad. Though also called “salad”, I viewed it as distinctly different and still did not make the connection, probably becuse I didn’t see any lettuce or tomato! Green salad just had NO appeal to me. I think the only kind of lettuce I ever saw was Iceberg! I can remember the produce department with my mother and looking for lettuces. All there was was in a big pile of big heads of iceberg lettuces. The first time I saw romaine lettuce I was suprised to think of lettuce as being leaves! I remember Iceberg lettuce had either no taste or a kinda bitter one. It has not changed. It made no sense to me why someone would even want to eat it! Still doesn’t. I have heard it has little nutirents, unlike its very green leafy cousins, the leaf lettuces. When I was about 13, I discovered that if you put enough salad dressing on the icky salad, it was fairly tolerable. As I got older and realized it is importnt to eat salads and raw foods, I was happy I had gotten over the initial hurdle of repulsion and could at least eat one, even though it was mainly just a place to put the dressing that was all I really wanted. By my late teens I began to discover that nuts and seeds were good in salad, along with sprouts, cheese, boiled eggs and maybe even some meat. Salad took on a whole new appeal. It could be a whole meal and when I began eating as a vegetarian, it often did! Now, I am an omnivore. I eat like a vegetarian mostly, with meat a few times a week for protein and sometimes just because I like it, but the main food I try to eat every day now, with all kinds of raw veges, fruits, nuts and seeds, either with or without tomatoes and my own homemade dressings, is salad!
