by Jim Gaffigan
WAITER: You want a salad?
MAN: No. No, thanks.
WAITER: You can go to the salad bar.
MAN: Bar? Wait. Are there going to be women there?
A salad bar just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, besides the guaranteed diarrhea. After all, there is virtually no difference between the germ levels of a salad bar and a kiddie pool. But why would someone want to make his or her own salad? I go out to dinner so I don’t have to make my own food.
“Over there is our salad bar and just next to it is our dishwashing bar.”
“Awesome!”
Salad bars always give the impression that the kitchen is having a garage sale. “We don’t need this potato salad anymore. Let’s see what we can get for it.” To make matters more confusing, the salad bar usually only has small plates. “All-you-can-eat salad … off this drink coaster.” The plate size is probably intended to dissuade someone from overdoing it on salad. As if that would ever happen. I take it back. There is always one guy leaving the salad bar who doesn’t believe he’s allowed to make multiple trips. His plate is stacked. He looks like he’s emptying the garbage.
“Hey, buddy, you know you can go back up.”
“They might take it all away! I’m not getting ripped off!”
There are some items at the salad bar I don’t understand. The offerings at the beginning of the salad bar make some sense. It’s usually an assortment of things I’d never want to eat: lettuce, celery, and cauliflower. Then there are some premade salads, such as macaroni salad. Has anyone eaten any of that macaroni at the salad bar? There’s rarely even a spoonful taken out of there. It’s just a festering bowl of germs. That’s why they have that sneeze guard up there. To protect us from the macaroni salad. After the premade salads, there are toppings like nuts and raisins and then, for no obvious reason at all, suddenly a tub of chocolate pudding. Hey, I love pudding, but who is putting chocolate pudding on their salad? What is this, Fear Factor?
Taco Salad
My favorite type of salad has to be the taco salad. I enjoy the taste, but I find the whole concept of the taco salad deliciously ridiculous. On first glance the most impressive thing about the taco salad is that it is actually called a “salad.” When I hear the word salad, I think lettuce, and I’m pretty sure there is more lettuce on a Big Mac than in most taco salads. Really the only thing “salad-y” about a taco salad is the word salad in its name. The taco salad makes no effort to live up to the healthy perception of a salad. Interestingly enough, a taco is healthier for you than a taco salad. From what I can tell, the recipe for a taco salad is pretty simple: dump eight tacos into an edible bowl. The edible bowl may be a key characteristic of a taco salad, but to me it serves no purpose. I understand salads are not everyone’s favorite, but dealing with a reusable bowl is not a deciding factor. Nobody is thinking, I’d get the salad, but I don’t want to clean the damn bowl afterward!
Of course, the taco salad bowl is not only edible, it is deep-fried. Yes, an edible, deep-fried bowl to hold a “salad” that is mostly cheese and meat. I’m pretty confident that eating a wooden salad bowl is better for you. Taco salad? At least the ice cream cone is not called the ice cream salad. Maybe the deep-fried taco salad bowl indicates we have reached the end of things to deep-fry. I could just see the following discussion at the Deep Frying Convention.
CHAIRMAN: Well, guys, we had a good run with the deep-frying. It all started with Stan’s mozzarella sticks. We had fun deep-frying the candy bar. Hell, we even deep-fried a zucchini, not that anyone wanted that. But unless we think of something new to deep-fry, we’re gonna have to shut down the deep-fryer test facility. Yes, Charlie?
CHARLIE: What if we deep-fry bowls, dishes, tables, and chairs.
CHAIRMAN: Ha, ha, ha. Charlie … wait a minute … a deep-fried chair?
I imagine it was a Charlie who came up with the taco salad. Tacos are one of the many beautiful gifts from Mexico, but the taco salad is filled with so much broken logic it must be an American creation. I imagine Mexicans must look at the taco salad and think, ¿Como se dice “ridiculous”?
How do you even order a taco salad with a straight face?
“Yeah, I guess I’ll just have the Taco Salad. I’m watching what I eat. Do you have a fork made out of bacon? Maybe a bologna napkin?”
Fake Salads
I’m not sure what exactly makes something a salad, but I know I usually don’t like it. I don’t think chefs even like salads, given that the chef’s salad is basically just deli meat. There are salads named after people (Caesar, Cobb) and places (Waldorf, Niçoise). Cultures have their own salads. There is the Greek salad, which I’m pretty sure is an Italian salad with unpitted olives and feta cheese. I’m still not sure how you are supposed to eat an unpitted olive without looking like a giant nibbling on a plum. The Greeks just do things differently. After all, they are lighting cheese on fire. I guess it’s mostly lettuce that designates something as a salad. I prefer the fake salads, like potato salad. I’m pretty sure the recipe for potato salad is four potatoes and a gallon of mayo. For some reason, mayonnaise can turn anything into a salad. Take eggs, add mayonnaise, you get egg salad. Take tuna, add mayonnaise, you get tuna salad. Take salmon, add mayonnaise, you get salmonella. You’d think we wouldn’t be allowed to combine fish and mayonnaise. They are two things that go bad ten seconds after you take them out of the refrigerator. If someone told you they just mixed mayonnaise and fish together, your first question should be “How long has that been out of the refrigerator?”
Any way you look at them, salads generally are just not that good. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Bill Shakespeare himself, another actor who did some writing, used the term “salad days” to mean “green in judgment,” which pretty much describes perfectly the people who actually like salads. The Bard has spoken.
WHOLE FOODS NATION
Health trends change and recalibrate every six months or so. When I was a little kid, cottage cheese—yes, cottage cheese—was considered healthy. My mom and my sisters would announce with a straight face, “We are being healthy by eating this tub of cheese curds.” I guess the logic was that to be thin, you should eat something that looks like cellulite. “If we eat it, we won’t get it on our thighs.” Dairy always seems to have a representative in the health trend cycle. Today the belief is that yogurt holds some special nutritional value for women. Apparently only women, because in most yogurt commercials you will find only women. There’s usually someone like Jamie Lee Curtis winking at the females watching. “Ladies, we need yogurt, right?” Jamie might be talking about calcium or helping ladies poop, but I’ve seen more men in tampon commercials.
Milk
Milk, of course, is dairy and seems to have its own ongoing role as a health trend subset. Cow’s milk is presently viewed, for all intents and purposes, as a poison. “Don’t drink cow’s milk. You should never drink the milk of another animal. Humans are the only animal that drinks the breast milk of another animal.” Then again, humans are the only animal with Internet access. We have all been told for various reasons that we are not supposed to drink cow’s milk. First, the suggested replacement was soy milk. After that it was discovered that soy milk is all estrogen and we are not supposed to drink it if we would prefer that our newborn sons have testicles. Then we were told to drink rice milk, which, understandably, was revealed to be identical to drinking a huge glass of liquid carbs. Then we were told to drink almond milk because, apparently, almonds make milk. However, if you have a nut allergy, you should drink hemp milk, which is supposedly like a nut-free almond milk made from rope. Eventually it will be unanimously decided that we should drink the healthiest milk of all, which is a natural form of milk that is big in Europe, called “cow’s milk.”
Bread
Health trends often originate from other cultures. A basic rule is that if the people of another culture are thin and consuming something regularly, then the thing they are consuming will become a health tre
nd. A great example of this is the Mediterranean diet. It’s a well-known fact that if you eat a Mediterranean diet, you are guaranteed to become thin, tan, and a great soccer player. It was this theory that led us to believe that the pita, the bread wallet, was healthy. “Pita is not bread. It’s from the Middle East, so it’s healthy. Cheese is bad, but when you put it in pita it’s okay, because pita is from the Middle East, where people are thin.” This is why when I smoke crack I always put it in a pita. Those evil perpetrators of health trends are always trying to find a way to make bread healthy. There is a type of “sprouted” bread that I believe is actually made of soil. The healthy bread trend may have reached its peak with the “gluten-free” trend. By now we all realize two things: (1) we are all allergic to gluten, and (2) gluten is apparently the thing that makes bread so delicious.
Granola Bar
Inevitably, health food trends will lead to the corruption of a healthy item. Granola is considered healthy, and we know this mostly because it tastes like gravel. Granola is the classic example of something tasting so bad it must be good for you. Scientists never even had to do research. A scientist just tasted granola: “Oh this must be good for you, since it tastes like it should be on the bottom of a fish tank.”
Because of the fact that granola has the same consistency as ground-up animal teeth, the granola “bar” was developed. It could be that some granola-health-inspired entrepreneur named Bob had the following experience.
BOB: Hey, kids are eating candy bars, right? All we have to do is shape granola like a candy bar and then kids will eat the granola. They’ll be eating something healthy and not even know it. Idiots. Ha, ha, ha.
Then a week later his director of operations came in.
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS: Uh, Bob, kids are not eating those granola bars.
BOB: Well, all we have to do is put chocolate chips in the granola bars. The kids will be eating healthy and not even know it. Idiots. Ha, ha, ha.
Then a week later his director of operations came in again.
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS: Uh, Bob, kids are now picking the chocolate chips out of those granola bars and tossing the granola.
BOB: All we have to do is cover the granola bar in chocolate and caramel. Fill it with nougat and get rid of the freaking granola! Do I have to tell you how to do everything?
That man’s name was Bob Kudos. Whenever I eat a Kudos bar, my next thought is, “Well, I might as well finish off the whole box. If I’m going to eat healthy, I’m going to eat really healthy.”
Kale
We want to eat healthy to feel better, but what we truly desire is to increase our life spans. We all want to live longer, but how much longer? You ever talk to an old person? I mean a really, really old person. They always have this exhausted look on their face that says, I can’t believe I’m still here! I would’ve eaten so much more ice cream. Why did I ever consume kale?
Ten years ago nobody ate kale. Then someone (probably a kale farmer or Satan) discovered that kale had some health benefits, and off kale went. Now we are in the middle of a full-fledged kale trend or, as I call it, a kale epidemic. There are kale chips, kale shakes, and even kale salads. I don’t know much about grammar, but I think kale salad is what they call a “double negative.” Kale is a superfood, and its special power is tasting bad. If tasting horrible is an indication of something being healthy, kale is the healthiest thing out there. Kale tastes like bug spray. Once I looked at a can of bug spray, and printed right there on the can was “Made with real kale.” The mantra of the kale lobby is “Kale is so good for you. Kale is so good for you.” So is jogging, but I’m not going to do that either. I’m not against things that are healthy. Well, not in principle. My issue with kale is a simple one. Kale is not edible. It is amazing the lengths we will go to in order to be able to stomach kale: “All you have to do is freeze-dry it, cover it in cayenne pepper, put it in a shake, and bury it in the ground.” It doesn’t matter what you do to kale: it still tastes like bitter spinach with hair. I suppose some people don’t care what it tastes like. “Kale is so good for you.” As for me, taste is too important. They could find out kale cures cancer and I’d say, “No thanks, I think I’ll just do the chemo. I’ve tried the kale.” I guess the thing I can’t stand the most about the kale trend is the bragging that is associated with eating it. People seem to bring up eating kale as if it’s something that’s going to impress me.
GUY: I just ate kale.
ME: I don’t care.
Announcing you ate kale is like the bringing-up-the-SAT-score of vegetables. Nobody asks, but annoying people find a way to work it into a conversation. Haven’t we evolved as a species so we would no longer have to eat things like kale? I’m sure that cavemen thousands of years ago were grunting in a field, “One day, son, we no longer forage for weeds. There be long metal fire sticks for me to kill big beast, and then me eat porterhouse steaks and me no longer sound like Cookie Monster. NUM NUM NUM.” Recently at a school event for parents, one of the moms was nice enough to make a bean soup. Being a fan of free food, I grabbed a bowl, tasted it, and did the obligatory “This is great!” The soup mom then said with a big condescending smile on her face, “I snuck some kale in there.” I nodded politely, but I felt like throwing my bowl at her. This soup mom was trying to impress me with a plant trend that will likely have the life span of a fruit fly. Well, one can only hope.
Whole Foods
If there is one main source of health food propaganda that exists today, it is Whole Foods. Our local Whole Foods store even sells T-shirts that have kale printed on them. I suppose this does help us identify people nobody wants to talk to. It seems that they are just bored at Whole Foods. “All right, what else can we sell these half-wits? Just hand me a plant. Not that one. That’s poison ivy. Wait … can we make milk out of that? Just grab the other green plant thing, say it’s healthy, and charge fifty bucks for it.” If you are someone who shops for healthy food in a large metropolitan area, you probably spend all your money at Whole Foods, or “Whole Paycheck,” as it has become known. They should just have a garbage can at the entrance of Whole Foods with a picture of a wallet positioned over it. “How many items do I get? Two? I’ll get the grapes for five hundred, and, Alex, I’ll have the loaf of bread made of wood for ten. I’ll put the rest on my Amazon wish list.” I think the business idea was “It’s like Costco, but instead of bulk, you get nothing.” If you’ve ever looked at your receipt upon leaving Whole Foods, you’ve thought to yourself, Wow, I’m really not good at managing money. Unfortunately, you only remember how expensive Whole Foods is when you get there. “These prices are ridiculous … oh, I’m too lazy to go to another store.” You win again, Whole Foods. You win again.
MORE WATERY WATER
Two-thirds of this planet that we call Earth is made up of water. Well, that’s what I’ve always been told and seen in photos. I think that’s what all that blue is on the globe. I’ve never personally checked if it’s all actually water. The Indian Ocean could be filled with blue Jell-O and I really wouldn’t know. Anyway, my point is, we got a whole lotta water on dis here planet. Not all of the water is potable, whatever that means. We all know that access to drinkable water is a very serious issue in many parts of the world. Luckily, in most parts of the United States we have clean, drinkable water available from just about every faucet. Yet we all buy bottled water because tap water, we have been told by the bottled-water folks, is scary. These anti-tap-water people act as if bottled water didn’t at one point come from a tap. It’s not like there was some French guy next to a stream individually filling bottles. “Le one, le two … Jean-Paul, hand me another bottle … le three.” In my scenario, the French guys don’t speak French very well. Anyway, how did we get to the point where we’re paying for bottled water? I imagine it was some weird marketing meeting over in France.
PIERRE: How dumb do I think the Americans are? I bet you we could sell those idiots water.
JEAN: Pierre, the Americans are pretty
dumb, but they’re not going to buy water.
PIERRE: Oh, yes they are. Let’s just tell them the water is from France. They took that enormous lady statue from us, didn’t they?
And we bought it. Evian is even naive spelled backward. I don’t know if you were like me, but when they first introduced bottled water I thought it was so funny. Bottled water? They’re selling bottled water?! Well, I guess I’ll try it … This is good! This is more watery than water. Yeah, this has got a water kick to it. For some reason they have nutritional facts printed on the side of the bottle of water. I’m no chemist, but I’ve got a rough idea of what’s in water. I kind of expect to turn the bottle and see a recipe printed on there. “Oh, that’s how you make ice cubes. Apparently you just freeze this stuff. (reading) Oh, but you need a tray. That’s how they get you. They probably want you to buy their tray. That’s how they get you.”
For some reason bottled water from another country is more appealing.
“Oooh, Norwegian water! They got better water than us. They’ve been drinking water a lot longer than we have. They are better at it.” The Norwegians have a special relationship with water. They ski on it.
We need water. Seventy percent of our body is made up of water. Well, I think. I don’t have time to do research about water. The fact is that water is important. We know we should drink tons of water every day. Like six glasses or something. As a result, we are searching for ways to make water more palatable. Flavored waters are everywhere. The most popular is VitaminWater, which is basically adult Kool-Aid. “I know it’s three bucks a bottle, but this Kool-Aid water has vitamins in it. I’m saving so much money on vitamins!” Supposedly coconut water is like nature’s Gatorade. I’m not sure what the difference is between coconut water and spoiled water. Coconut water, which I think is water from a coconut, has surged in popularity. One time while in Jamaica I witnessed a coconut being sliced open and then I drank the one ounce of coconut water. So there have to be at least twelve coconuts used to make one twelve-ounce bottle of coconut water. That’s a lot of coconuts to use to get something that tastes that bad.
