It is high summer, and even though cold beer awaits the hamburgers currently sizzling on the BBQ, I’m pleased to bring you more of the hard-hitting investigative journalism you expect from me. This journalism involves in-depth, rigorous reporting on issues often concealed from public view, holding those in power accountable and revealing wrongdoing.
Which brings me to lettuce.
As you know, the proper place for vegetables in genteel society is as a quiet accoutrement to the main course, which is to say, a minor accessory to what you really want for nom-noms. For example, when I say “lettuce,” you rightly think something along the lines of “side salad,” or maybe “topping with a slice of tomato.” What you don’t think is “sexy Egyptian fun-time drug.”
And yet that’s exactly what people thought about the common lettuce, three thousand years ago. Ancient Egyptian murals of Min, the god of fertility, depict a particularly, uh… erect version of the plant with, er… a thick stem and milky sap. Maybe send the kids out of the room for the rest of this hard-hitting journalism because the naughty hieroglyphics make it clear lettuce had certain connotations for Min and ordinary Egyptians, who ate the sacred plant avant nooky, as the French say.
Wicked lettuce led to more sex and violence when the Greeks learned how to grow it. The Greeks — I swear I am not making this up — used lettuce as a sedative and popular funeral decoration, associating it with male impotence and death all because Aphrodite’s lover Adonis was killed in a bed of lettuce by a boar sent by Artemis, who was envious of his hunting prowess, and/or by Persephone, who was jealous of his affection for Aphrodite, and/or by Ares, who was covetous of Aphrodite.
Exactly who killed whom and why are major plot points in the ongoing saga of what ought to be a nice, quiet salad ingredient.
Naturally, it doesn’t end there. The Romans believed lettuce could “increase stamina,” if-you-know-what-I-mean-and-I-think-you-do. Renowned all over the world for their contributions to language, law, engineering, architecture and military organization, the Romans used lettuce as the little blue pill of the ancient world.
Perplexingly, the Romans also served lettuce before meals to stimulate digestion, and again after dinner as a sleep aid. I’m not a pharmacologist, but even I know you can’t stimulate and depress at the same time, certainly not with all that sexual arousal, impotence, murder and funerals going on. Pick a lane, lettuce.
Lettuce travelled with the Romans into Western Europe and then east to China, at each step of the way receiving the kind of horticultural care/mental illness that gardeners in every culture like to bring to vegetables. That is to say, selectively breeding them for taste, colour, size and in later times, suitability for dangerous, cancer-causing pesticides and herbicides common to large-scale, industrial agriculture.
Given all that, the humble lettuce now comes in seven main cultivar groups: looseleaf, red leaf, romaine, little gem, iceberg, butterhead, summercrisp, celtuce/stem and oilseed. Each cultivar has THOUSANDS of varieties.
Over the ages, lettuce breeders have taken pride in coming up with interesting and unusual variety names, such as Angel’s Ear, Tom Thumb, Speckled Amish, Pomegranate Crunch, New Red Fire, Pablo, Elf Ears, Mayan Jaguar and Colin Owes Me Forty Dollars for Beer. These names evoke a sense of whimsy and unique characteristics, and remind one of their obligation to pay their share of the BBQ expenses.
In 2023, world production of lettuce was 28 million tonnes, with China alone accounting for 53% of the total. That’s a lot of lettuce. In fact, it’s the equivalent of 56 billion heads of lettuce, enough to make a Caesar salad the size of the Titanic — 17,000 times!
As part of my hard-hitting journalistic analysis of the issues and whatnot, I meant to look up Canadian agricultural statistics, but ran out of time. So I asked my friend Colin — currently laying out the condiments — if he knows the national lettuce statistics. He does not.
However, here are some hard-hitting lettuce numbers from British Columbia: we produce 5 million kilograms of lettuce annually, 60% of it head lettuce (like iceberg) and 40% leaf lettuce (like leafburg). Lettuce is commercially grown in fields and greenhouses in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island, as few people in the hinterlands of B.C. eat vegetables unless they are meat-based vegetables.
This brings us to the central point of today’s in-depth reporting, which is characterized by extensive research, interviews and analysis and takes weeks or months to complete. You know, the type of journalism that aims to uncover the truth, expose scandals and scrutinize powerful individuals and institutions.
The central point, out here on the deck waiting for my hamburger to come off the grill, is WHY!? Why, when we already have iceberg lettuce — the perfect variety known for its crunchy texture and mild flavour, making it a popular choice for salads and sandwiches — why do people spoil a good burger with arugula, radicchio or “other leafy green?”
Arugula is not technically a lettuce, and its weird, swamp pepper flavour and poke-you-in-the-tongue experience do not complement burgers and beer. Radicchio is a type of bitter chicory. BITTER. CHICORY. Those “other leafy greens” — you know the kind of rubbish marsh vegetables I’m talking about: kale, spinach and endive — are often grouped with lettuce due to their similar colour and shape, but they taste terrible. You know it; I know it. They should be against the law.
And yet, here I sit under the high summer sun, with a burger full of terrible lettuce.
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