How iceberg won the lettuce wars
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
I absolutely despise canned vegetables. I'll give canned tomatoes & beans a pass, but everything else must go.
I favour San Marzano tomatoes for cooking. If they're not in a tin, and whole, they're not allowed to be sold as "DOP".
You can get San Marzano seeds and grow your own; no doubt they're very good. You can buy fresh San Marzano at a greengrocer; they're probably fine too. But San Marzano DOP are picked and tinned only in the foothills of Vesuvius.
You also can't get tinned chopped San Marzano DOP; they have to be whole. To be fair, chopping up a tin of San Marzano results in a soupy pulp, which is fine if you're making a sauce or soup, which is what they're best for. Tinned chopped tomatoes tend to be chopped whole - you get the cores as well as the pulp. I take out the cores when I chop them. I've always been picky with tomatoes.
I've never heard of tinned lettuce.
OP said they "give a pass to" two veggies and despise all others. So I read it as they were making an exception to their "no canned veggies" rule.
I can see myself getting in trouble for not eating it too. Dull gray, wet but with a fluid that can't really be called either water or grease, somehow soggy and yet wilted at the same time. Smelling of year old unwashed gym socks but with a flavor best described as mealworm extract concentrate.
Actually now that I think about it, I'm surprised it's not a thing.
Same here in the US. At least in the PNW, where we have a huge amount of apple growers. There are all sorts of Apple varieties in the supermarket, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Red Delicious are the least popular or close to it.
This is a bit of a lazy trope at this point - and somewhat self-fulfilling. There are lots of counter examples or fruits that only seem easy to grow and shelf stable in hindsight because we prioritized them. Fresh pineapples, bananas, avocados, grapefruit, etc. Same thing with nutrition - the nutrition only declined after they were grown en masse or switched to hydroponic.
Changing tastes account for a lot. People really thought these were superior products at the time. Also the rise of national media came with it recipe books - and consistent ingredients nationwide became desirable in its own way.
A lot of what you buy in a grocery store is grown hydroponically, so it really doesn't matter for flavor what you buy - you just pick how bitter of a green you want. But if you can pick up a fresh iceberg from your local farmer's market, it might surprise you how much flavor is in that bad boy.
Iceberg won out because our grandparents and great-grandparents considered it a superior ingredient. They grew up in a world where bitter chewy greens were common and iceberg stood out based on their tastes at the time.
I've always suspected the humble iceberg wedge salad is a restauranteur's ideal menu item: take a 50¢ head of lettuce, divide it into quarters, add toppings and sell it for a 60x or more markup.
I wouldn't be surprised if it had the highest margin of all the items on the menu :)
I don't mind shredded iceberg lettuce in certain uses if it's freshly cut and I trust where it's coming from. I like it on a sandwich or burger, for example. I still think I'd prefer other alternatives more but it has its own qualities to appreciate.
I agree that shredding it kind of ruins it, though.
Greek salad, Israeli Salad, Olivier Salad - all of the lettuce-less salads are far superior.
If I wanted to eat something that tastes like nothing and has no real nutritional value...I will eat nothing.
Kale had an incredible PR campaign that turned it from scraps to leading leaf.
Despite the incredible PR campaign, I still mostly feel that way about kale. I just don't really enjoy it. Not the flavor, not the texture. Might as well be eating weeds.
"Lettuce is perhaps the most expensive way to transport refrigerated water from farm to table."
Iceberg lettuce is the worst, as it has almost no nutritional value.
Also, I’ve never heard of or seen a “wedge salad”. Is that what it sounds like?
Yes. It's a wedge of a head of iceberg with dressing on it.
That's the thing you want to eat out of the fridge as a filler, cold with some sort of fat sauce (also directly out of the fridge, like a ranch or something) because otherwise it has no taste nor recognizable texture. Yes it's crunchy, but there are so many crunchy salads which are way tastier and better (like the "Sucrine", can't find an English name, that's not even the better, but that's readily available (fresh, not in a bag you need to refrigerate))
“I think when it comes to just sheer deliciousness, people always loved iceberg lettuce,” says Angie Rito, chef and co-owner at Don Angie." Wat. I guess that was a century ago, before the industrialization and selection of bland lettuces that are bland but can survive without darkening for a week in a plastic bag.
I'm always dumbfounded hearing about the American way to think about food, all you can readily buy is so industrialized, you miss so much.
I think you're dumbfounded because you don't understand how Americans think about food, except what you hear on the Internet. Which, I shouldn't have to point out, is mostly a load of horseshit.
America is the land of farms as far as the eye can see, growing all kinds of different foods. We have wonderful foods. I can go into a bog standard Kroger right now and there's an entire wing of the store with fresh fruits and vegetables, another area with hundreds of different cheeses from around the world. I can even buy common European brands of butter (though I prefer our local stuff). And this is a bland everyday American supermarket, not one of the many local farmer's markets.
Sometimes I wonder where Europeans get their crazy ideas about what it's like to live in America.
Iceberg is not a salad, it's a lettuce first of all. And this is not about being torn up to use for the "cheapest blandest salads" you're referring to, it's a wedge "salad" which is an entire large piece of solid iceberg lettuce dressed in creamy blue cheese and bacon. You say it has "no recognizable texture" but it's all texture, the entire point of a wedge salad is the amazing, crunchy, ribbed, fresh texture. Contrasting with the rich fat of the cheese and the crispiness of the bacon. It's a pairing made in heaven, just like strawberries and cream, or melon and prosciutto.
I'm always dumbfounded when people assume their own country/cuisine/whatever is so superior to another, especially when they don't even seem to understand the item in question in the first place.
It was a revelation when I moved to california and had my first real salad. it was intensely bitter with nutty and other flavors. Later I found out that arugala, endive, radicchio, are all great when properly dressed with a good salad oil, but they definitely have wayyyyy more flavor.
I'd be surprised if anybody could even really say what iceberg lettuce "tastes" like- to me it just tasts like crunchy water.
That's an idiosyncratic take. It tastes like ... water.