IN THE COURSE of the year 1984, the food industry in the United States launched 3,340 new products; another several thousand bright ideas and cunning new methods for preparing, combining, preserving, and packaging foods were patented and awaiting buyers and promoters. Novelties included Pizza in a Cone (bought frozen, to be heated in one’s microwave: obviates crusts and bending slices when eaten in the hand; flanges on the cone are provided to catch drips), Snack Pellets (long-lasting, compact, and amenable to any flavouring; can be shipped anywhere; need only to be fried and they puff up into a “finger food”), and many artificial flavourings such as Condensed Milk Taste (for fudge) and new varieties of liquid wood smokes (lending a barbecued taste and red-brown colour to anything: one factory already produces eight hundred thousand gallons of liquid smokes a year).
“New products are to a business enterprise what raindrops are to a parched lawn.” The principle, according to modern processing tycoons, applies to food as much as to anything else. A few ancient foodstuffs remain intractable to modern inventiveness, however. These are mostly vegetables which require, annoyingly, to be eaten “fresh.” Many vegetables respond, it is true, to dehydration, preservation in liquid, or freezing. But lettuce, one of the most popular foods in the modern western diet, remains so far difficult to change or to treat. Something has been achieved in the direction of toughness and staving off rot: modern hard crisp lettuce heads can survive much mechanized handling and achieve shelf-lives as long as three weeks. But on the farm, workers are, for the time being, still needed for supplementary weeding of the lettuce rows and to inspect the growing plants for harvest readiness, because lettuces in the field refuse, in spite of every attention, to mature simultaneously. Attempts genetically to square the spherical lettuce, such as have already given us the tough and boxy tomato, have failed: the lettuce head remains round and therefore awkward to wrap by machine. Even the search for a flat-bottomed lettuce has so far been in vain. Lettuces, especially leaf lettuces, still last a disappointingly short time after they have been harvested; and freezing one can quickly turn it into a limp and slimy rag.
But everybody in the western world loves lettuce, and regularly, even ritually, eats it. Lettuce is often the only green vegetable on the menu (as it is on ours), and for many people, it may be the only greenstuff commonly found in their diet. It provides an easy and pleasant way to alleviate any guilt arising from the realization that meat and carbohydrates have yet again dominated the meal. Curly lettuce leaves are a universally acceptable device for decorating other foods, and sandwiches rely heavily upon them for freshness, juiciness, and crunch. The leaf is non-fattening and usually eaten raw, and eating it is therefore virtuous for the body-conscious. Vitamins and minerals are at present such prestigious words that the advisers of food businessmen openly urge that the terms be used in ads and on packages wherever feasible; and lettuce, apart from water, contains almost nothing but vitamins and minerals.
Lettuce, in other words, has modern mythologies very much on its side. It merits respect from the food industry even though relatively little can be done to “enhance” it or to “move” sales of it. The nickname for lettuce in the trade is “green gold.” Iceberg lettuce, as grown in California for a mass market, is the basis of a vast and specialized industry, requiring enormous amounts of capital, complex organization for optimum speed of delivery, and detailed co-ordination with dealers and supermarkets across the North American continent. The Californian lettuce head has recently begun to reach international markets as well. If the irradiation of vegetables becomes an acceptable method of preserving them, lettuce might even begin a new phase in its long, unassuming, but doggedly successful economic history.
The word lettuce is from the plural of the French laitue (early French laictue), a derivative of the Latin lactuca, meaning “milky.” The sap of lettuce looks very much like milk, especially in wild varieties. Lettuce is one of 12,500 species of plants with milky sap or latex. When rubber supplies were low during the Second World War, Lactuca virosa, or the strong-smelling prickly lettuce, was investigated to see if its latex could partially replace that of the Brazilian hevea or rubber tree. The rubber yield of lettuce was unfortunately too low to be useful.
For thousands of years people have speculated on the powers and uses of lettuce sap. The earliest known meaning attached to the substance is its association in the mythology of ancient Egypt with semen. The lettuce of the Egyptians was tall and pointed, with leaves flattened against a central phallic stem. It was sacred to the god Min, in whose processions growing tubs or “gardens” of lettuce were ceremonially carried. Min’s main jurisdictions were over vegetation and procreation. His sacred animal was a white bull fed copiously on lettuces to increase his sexual potency.
The beginning of the annual Egyptian harvest festival was the Coming Forth of Min, when the god’s statues were carried out of his temples. Min was a stiff hieratic figure, with legs bound tightly together like those of a mummy. He was one of the oldest gods in the Egyptian pantheon, and his representation reflects a very early sculptural style. He had an erect phallus, long, thin, and elegant. He wore a skullcap with two tall feathers and two streamers hanging down his back, and wielded a flail in his raised hand. Min was repeatedly painted by his priests with a black bituminous substance, to symbolize the fertile soil of Egypt and the promise of vegetable regeneration to come. The Phar-oah ceremonially reaped grain at the harvest festival and then solemnly approached the god with an offering of two large lettuces, holding one in each hand. This scene is the subject of carved reliefs from Egyptian tombs of many periods; the earliest known example is about forty-five hundred years old. Pharoah ritually begot his heir at Min’s festival, probably identifying himself with the god as he did so. Later Min was returned to his shrine, which was quite small and surmounted by a tall leaf-shaped fan sacred to the god. Min’s house was surrounded by a garden full of lettuces.
There is still a popular belief in the Nile Valley that lettuce promotes fertility in males. This idea appears to have been preserved from the time of the ancient Egyptians, because for well over twenty-five hundred years a completely different opinion about lettuce has obtained in the rest of the Mediterranean region where the lettuce plant originated. A minor tradition makes lettuce an emblem for female sexuality (Alciati’s Emblemata libellus, 1546 and 1551, calls lettuce an amuletum Veneris), and the same idea is to be found in Sumerian texts of the third millennium BC, where the goddess Inanna’s pubic hair is compared to lettuce leaves. But on the whole, there has been staunch agreement for a long time that lettuce is cold, soporific, and the very opposite of aphrodisiac. “Lettuse,” as Andrew Boorde put it in 1542, “doth extynct veneryous [i.e., sexual] actes.”
Modern chemists confirm that lettuce juice, in particular the milky sap of the wild Lactuca virosa, does contain a hypnotic (inducer of sleep) or narcotic similar to opium. When lettuce runs prematurely to seed a chemical reaction takes place which increases the soporific effect. Lactucarium, or lettuce juice, has been used for centuries as a calmant in cases of insomnia, nervous disorders, rheumatism, coughs, colic, and seasickness. It was thickened and then dried into white cakes, to be prescribed to patients, together with poppy seed, before surgery and to alleviate pain. Crops of Lactuca virosa are still grown, notably in France, for making tinctures which are prescribed for coughs, and for bronchial and asthmatic conditions. The calming effect may also inhibit sexual desire.
Since sex in human beings is not merely a mechanical matter, the beliefs surrounding both aphrodisiacs and anaphrodisiacs help to determine our response to them. People have always tended to attribute to vegetation medicinal properties which correspond to the appearance of the plant in question. Plants with lung-shaped leaves, for instance, were eaten for bronchial complaints; consuming twinned fruit was thought to give rise to the birth of twins; and walnut-kernels look like little brains nestling in their nuts, which made them appropriate medicine for brain-fevers. The medieval version of this kind of thinking was called the Doctrine of Signatures. It held that the medicinal qualities in plants were made visible as “signatures of Natures owne impression,” and writers quite commonly express the wish that human beings bore similar imprints so that one could tell a person’s worth by some sign on his person.
The ancient Greeks knew a lettuce which they considered to be especially useful for inhibiting sex. It was squat and round (without a head however, for heads were bred later), and with very short roots. It was the opposite, that is, of the tall phallus-shaped lettuce. Pythagoras especially recommended this plant to his ascetic disciples, calling it eunuch, a word which literally means “keeping seductive women under control.” (The Persians had castrated male servants – eunuchs – to perform this office in the King’s harem.) Women, we are told, preferred to call the plant astutis, “incapable of an erection.”
If one had unwittingly eaten an aphrodisiac and wished to escape its spell, a lettuce was always the obvious antidote. On the other hand, a character in an ancient Greek comedy, the Impotents (Astutoi) of Euboulos, warns his wife that she has “only herself to blame” if she serves him lettuce for supper. Lettuce in mixed salads could be counterbalanced by herbs which promoted sexual libido, in order to achieve a balanced after-effect. Rocket or arugula has for centuries been thought a powerful aphrodisiac and therefore appropriate to be eaten with lettuce. “Eat cress” was an ancient Greek rebuke in the guise of advice to dull and sluggish people – and watercress was another complement to salads based on lettuce. The Romans called watercress nasturtium. (The flower we now call by this name is the Peruvian cress, both the leaves and the flowers of which are excellent in salads.) The word nasturtium derives from the Latin for “nostril-torment,” which describes the action of pungent watercress; prickly nostrils were thought to portend a general influx of vigour.
Another “signature” may have strengthened the reputation of lettuce as a plant which induced sterility: the milk in lettuce was associated with women’s milk. Wet-nurses kept up their milk supply by drinking plenty of lettuce soup. The plant was often given in order to help a mother’s milk come after giving birth; interestingly enough, the American prickly lettuce was called “milk leaf’ by the Meskwaki Indians and prescribed by them for the same purpose. The calming effect of lettuce latex may indeed have helped the mother’s milk supply. Breast-feeding is a form of natural birth-control, and milk can therefore be perceived as an inhibitor of fertility. Young wives who habitually ate lettuce were warned that it might prevent them from becoming pregnant. Also milk, even vegetable “milk,” is easily perceived as “female” and not, therefore, a promoter of male sexual urges.
Lettuce is 90-95 per cent water, and is for this reason greatly prized in desert climates. Along the roads leading out of the city of Baghdad are many stalls selling lettuces. People stop their cars, buy lettuces, and consume them whole, just as they are. It is said that eating unsalted lettuce quenches thirst for much longer than drinking water does. (Lettuce has been known as a vegetable in Iraq since at least the third millennium BC; and the scribes of King Merodach-Baladan in the seventh century BC recorded lettuces growing on the terraces of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.)
Yet another reason for the anaphrodisiac qualities of lettuce is to be found in the system of humoral medicine, where lettuce is classed as cold, largely because of its liquid character. Humoral medicine dates back – in the west at least – to what is called the “hippocratic complex” of the ancient Greeks; the Arabs inherited it from the Greeks and Romans and taught it to the Spaniards, who carried it with them to Central and South America in the sixteenth century. There the “hippocratic complex” was accepted without any difficulty by the Aztecs and other Indian cultures because they already had extraordinarily similar sets of beliefs of their own. In China and Malaysia people have come, apparently independently, to the very same kinds of conclusions: the yang-yin system was discussed in the chapter on rice.
The world, according to this system, is divided into a series of diametrically opposing principles: up and down, light and dark, male and female, hot and cold, dry and wet, and so on. Harmony and balance must be found between these opposites, or turbulence and pain will be the result. Human health is, like everything else in the universe, a question of balance; sickness is the body out of kilter, and medicine a matter of compensating for excess and deficiency, chiefly by means of diet.
Some diseases and conditions of the body are “hot”: among these are fevers, burns, and pregnancy. A wise person will help his body by eating “cold” things to counteract his “hot” condition. Everything edible has a value: for instance, in the system prevailing among Nahuatl Indians in the southern valley of Mexico, all vegetables are “fresh,” that is, cold (because they are juicy and grow in well-watered ground and anything that has to do with water is preeminently cold), yet slightly warmed by the sun (obviously hot). Vegetables, then, are cold but not overwhelmingly so, and can be used to cool an over-warmed body. Exceptions to the rule about vegetables include peas, which are considered entirely cold, and chilis and onions, which are clearly hot. Hot soup is classified as “cold” because it is liquid; whereas ice is “hot” because it is hard, burns to the touch, and contact with it turns vegetation brown. Methods of cooking (boiling versus frying, for example) can temper the heat or the cold of foods.
Within this system, lettuce is invariably cold: juicy, eaten raw, a “cool” green in colour, requiring plenty of moisture in order to grow. Because it is cold, it goes with “female” in the schema of opposites, together with “wet,” “dark,” and so on: it is diametrically opposed to all that is hot, dry, bright, and masculine. Lettuce is “fresh” rather than dangerously cold, however: as John Gerard wrote in his Herball (1633), “Lettuce is a cold and moist pot-herbe, yet not in the extream degree of cold or moisture, but altogether moderately, for otherwise it were not to be eaten.” Even lettuce seeds were cold; pharmaceutical books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constantly call for the Four Lesser Cold Seeds, of endive, succory, purslane, and lettuce. (“Lesser” meant smaller than the Four Greater Cold Seeds, of cucumber, gourds, melons, and citruls or yellow melons.)
Insomnia (making one sweaty and giving rise to thrashing movements) is very hot – so lettuce is the obvious cooling remedy.
If you need rest,
Lettuce and cowslip wine probatum est
wrote Alexander Pope. Lettuce, therefore, is “sedative” from one medical point of view, and “cold,” therefore sleep-inducing, from another. But then, “cold” and “still” can easily be seen as homogeneous. “A dish of lettice and a clear Fountain,” wrote Jeremy Taylor in 1651, “can cool all my Heat.” Passion is fiery, and cooling lettuce will dampen the flame.
In the Greek myth of Adonis, the young hunting hero is born of the incestuous union of Myrrha with her father. After giving birth to Adonis, Myrrha was metamorphosed into the tree which gives the heady perfume, myrrh. The myrrh tree and its scent were thought of as hot, dry, and incorruptible-the food of gods, not men. Adonis died after being gored by a wild boar in a lettuce bed, where his lover, the goddess Aphrodite, had hidden him. (Phaon, in a different story, was a ferryman who was made young and beautiful by Aphrodite, and who made himself irresistibly seductive by rubbing himself with perfume. He was hidden by the goddess from the husbands he had cuckolded in a lettuce bed, and there among the herbs of impotency he died.)
The story of Adonis, according to the Classical scholar Marcel Detienne, is about what lies outside marriage: the hero, doomed to his premature death, is born of hot, dry, incestuous, and godlike myrrh, and ends his life in cold, wet, sub-human lettuce. (The Greeks called one lettuce variety adoneis.) The plants of marriage, completely different from either lettuce or myrrh, were the cereals which men raise by the sweat of their brow: cultivated plants, civilized, balanced and domestic. Adonis was a seducer, sometimes above marriage, sometimes below it, either godlike or sub-human, and doomed therefore to impermanence and no issue.
The Adonia in ancient Athens was a festival for courtesans. It took place during the Dog Days, the hottest time of the year. The courtesans would dance with their lovers on the flat rooftops of their houses, where they also grew miniature “gardens of Adonis”: pots planted with lettuce, fennel, wheat, and barley. After shooting up quickly, the plants would shrivel in the heat and were then thrown into a river or the sea. Spices, on the other hand, came to maturity under the Dog Star, and these the courtesans carried down from the rooftops and piled onto incense-burners in honour of Aphrodite and Adonis. The “gardens of Adonis,” Detienne explains, were like Adonis himself – not serious or built to last, not real agriculture, and not like marriage, which is what human beings are meant for.
When the festival of Passover was instituted by the Lord God in Egypt, Moses and Aaron were told exactly how the Jews were to commemorate the escape from bondage which they were about to experience: a lamb without blemish must be ritually killed and then eaten “not. . . raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire.” It must be accompanied with “unleavened bread, and with bitter herbs.” The bitter herbs in question are commonly agreed to have been chicory, watercress, sorrel, dandelion leaves, and lettuce. All of these were common plants and could easily be found in the wild. All of them, especially when wild, are bitter. It was only much later (200 AD at the earliest) that the bitterness was first said to symbolize the embitterment of the Jews when they lived in Egypt. They had no reason to dislike eating bread with bitter herbs, as any gourmet who has tried it will testify. The meaning of the ritual expressed most importantly the speed with which they had to leave: “with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste.” There was no time to let the bread rise or the vegetables cook. Only the simplest and quickest preparations were possible, and therefore ritually appropriate, for the meal of the Lord’s Passover.
Because lettuce is usually eaten raw, it constitutes, in the modern world as it did in the ancient, a “fast food.” This important office it holds in addition to its status as a fresh, green, crunchy element in sandwiches and hamburgers, and as the background to every kind of cold plate. The modern “salad bar,” offering variety as well as personal choice made on the spot, virtue for those who know it is estimable to “think thin,” and cash-and-carry speed, is a perfect expression of several of our basic cultural values. “Something salted” is the meaning of the word “salad” (from sal, the Latin for salt). So important is lettuce both as one of the ingredients in salads and as alone constituting a salad, that words related to salad have become more commonly used for lettuce in many languages than are cognates of the term lettuce itself.
In case salad is being served together with the meat, says Emily Post, the doyenne of etiquette, each person should be provided with a separate plate for it, otherwise the gravy might mix with the dressing into “an unsavory soup,” and the lettuce will wilt on the plate heated for meat. Wilted salad is utterly unacceptable: everyone wants freshness and either pliancy or crispness where raw leaves are concerned. (Lettuce can also be stewed and eaten as a soft vegetable, which converts it into something belonging to a quite different category.) The dressing we put on lettuce wilts it very quickly, which is the reason why salad must be tossed just before it is eaten.
The rigidity of lettuce depends on the hydrostatic pressure of the water in each of its plant cells. When the cells are full they become turgid and the lettuce is succulent, but when water intake is exceeded by water loss the cells collapse and the lettuce turns limp. (Iceberg lettuce, to which this rarely happens, has been especially bred for tough cell walls.) The osmotic pressure of vinegar or lemon juice and oil destroys the cell wall’s ability to hold in its water, which pours out to dilute the dressing; heat gradually weakens the membranes by coagulating their protein; freezing punctures them by forming sharp ice crystals inside the cells (something similar happens to human ears and fingers when they become frozen). Water can pass by osmosis right through lettuce cell walls and replenish the liquid inside them, which is why lettuces soaked in cold water firm up so satisfactorily, provided the cell walls have not been damaged.
The bitter taste of lettuce is due to an aromatic compound called lactupicrin, found in the sap. Wild lettuce can be very bitter indeed, but the cultivated varieties of the plant, Lactuca sativa, have little bitterness left in them, although their taste becomes more acrid as they become overgrown. The stalks of bolted (overgrown) lettuce, which reach sixty centimetres (2 ft.) high and more if they are left long enough, were once sliced and boiled in a sugar syrup to produce a popular candy, sweet but faintly bitter, like the angelica which is still commonly preserved in the same fashion. A favourite method of making leaf vegetables more succulent and less bitter is that of blanching them – tying up the leaves as they approach maturity so that they whiten as they grow. This used to be a common practice in raising lettuce.
Lettuce is a plant of the daisy or compositae family (its blossoms contain many small yellow flowers crowded together), and it almost certainly originated in the Mediterranean area, probably in Asia Minor. Wild lettuce still grows all over temperate and southern Europe, and is described by one botanist as “a humble, obscure, roadside weed, inoffensive but unattractive.” Cultivated lettuce quite often escapes from gardens and takes again to the wild. The three main kinds of wild lettuce, all of them capable of exchanging genes, are serviola or “prickly” lettuce (incorrectly but commonly called scariola, from which comes the word escarole for curly chicory or Batavian endive), the lettuce thought to have been one of the “bitter herbs” of the Hebrews; virosa, “smelly” lettuce, a larger version of serriola (it can grow over one and a half metres [5 ft.] tall) with a strong smell; and saligna, which means “like willow.” From these evolved, with considerable help from mankind, the cultivated lettuce, sativa.
Much of the lettuce grown in the ancient world was raised for its seed, from which a delicious vegetable oil was extracted; indeed it is very likely that lettuce was cultivated in the first place for its seed, large quantities of which have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs. Lettuce oil was one of the favourite salad oils in the Classical world, and it is still used for this purpose in Egypt and in other parts of Africa. In 1954, American scientists used seeds of the Grand Rapids leaf lettuce to show how light controls germination and dormancy in certain kinds of plants: red light promotes and far-red light inhibits the emergence of a shoot by means of their effects upon phytochrome, a protein plant pigment which is sensitive to light, at a photosensitive site in the seed. (In nature, most seeds are not covered by soil and germinate in the light.)
Lettuce is self-fertilizing by the sexual mode and hence has enormous gene plasticity. (It is not, like its relative the dandelion, locked into the evolutionary cul de sac of constantly similar asexual reproduction from an unfertilized diploid egg cell.) Lettuce is capable, therefore, of endless variety in size, shape, texture, and colour. Its versatility has made it the object of devoted attention by horticulturists through the ages. They have arrived at hundreds of varieties, which fall into four main classes. Asparagus lettuce or “celtuce” is grown for its thick succulent stem (the leaves are unpalatable); it is popular in China but grown in the west mostly as a novelty. Leaf lettuce is fragile and smooth-textured; it comes in many varieties including one with oak-leaf-shaped foliage and some tinged with red. The plant does not run to seed but produces a succession of leaves for cutting. Radicchio belongs in fact to the chicory family, but most people count it and use it as a sort of leaf lettuce. It was apparently found, until recently, only in Italy, as a specialty of Treviso in the Veneto region, although now it is being exported (with consequent deterioration in its quality) as a luxury product to many countries of the world. In its fresh and native state it is small and beautiful variegated red – one Italian poet calls it “a flower you can eat” – with a texture like a delicate romaine.
The third class of Lactuca sativa, head or cabbage lettuce, falls into two types: butterhead (with soft, thick, and oily leaves) which includes Boston, Bibb, and many prestigious European types; and crisphead (hard-headed and crunchy), of which the most famous variety today is Iceberg, known as Webb’s Wonder in Britain. Butterhead lettuces are what are called “truck crops” – nothing to do with trucks, but from the French troquer, “to barter or deal in small lots”: they cannot be transported long distances without suffering, so they have tended so far to be grown close to their customers. Even in North America, small market-gardeners still deal in these vegetables locally. Iceberg lettuces can put up with comparatively rough treatment, and have therefore become a huge economic proposition; giant food businesses truck these (in the automobile sense) for thousands of miles to reach their points of sale.
The fourth class, cos or romaine lettuce, is tall and crisp. The name romaine is said by many to have originated when the lettuce was introduced into France from Italy by the poet Rabelais in 1537; alternatively it is said to date from its arrival in Avignon with the Popes when they took up residence there. (The latter explanation seems to have the backing of Le ménagier de Paris, about 1390.) The name cos, which is usually taken to refer to the Greek island, may attach to this lettuce because the Romans found it on Cos, and because the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates came from there. A more likely explanation is that cos means “big” (gros in French), and is the same, though phonetically altered by common usage, as the first syllables in gooseberry and horseradish.
King Cambyses of Persia (about 550 BC), who had not only married two of his sisters but had murdered many of his relatives as well, was accused by a wife of having stripped all the leaves from his house as if it was a lettuce, and of having left only the stalk. She showed Cambyses the bare stem of a lettuce and asked him whether he liked it better with or without the leaves. Cambyses angrily kicked her for producing this tactless parable, causing her to have a miscarriage from which she died. Herodotus thus gives us the information that Persians, as we would expect, knew the lettuce well. Greeks cultivated it assiduously too, none more so than the philosopher Aristoxenos of Cyrene, who practised the system of thought called Hedonism. A passionate food-lover – almost as devoted as Pithyllos, described as “The Picky,” who kept his tongue in a bag between meals to preserve its sensitivity – Aristoxenos was so effete as to water his lettuces with salad-dressing the evening before he wanted to eat them, while they were still in the ground. The following morning he would pick them and exclaim that they were white pastries sent to him by Mother Earth.
The Greeks and Romans grew one kind of lettuce with flat stalks that were so tall, broad, and strong that they were used to make trellises and garden gates. The Romans had a great many named varieties of lettuce, and never failed to introduce their favourite kinds into the colonies of their empire. A result of this is that most European languages call lettuce by a name derived from the Latin lactuca. The medicinal uses of lettuce were highly regarded. The great physician Antonius Musa once cured the Emperor Augustus by prescribing lettuce, in opposition to a previous luckless doctor who had tried “hot” remedies. Musa was voted a statue in his honour, to stand next to that of the god of healing, Aesculapius, and Augustus ordered that supplies of lettuce be kept pickled in vinegar and honey so that they might be available as medicine when out of season.
Exactly when lettuces were induced, by intensive selection of mutations, to form heads or tight balls of leaves folded upon each other, is as yet a mystery. The Romans did not know head lettuces, and neither, as far as we can tell, did people living in the age of Charlemagne (about 800 AD). In all likelihood, it was monastic gardeners, responsible for supplying a largely vegetarian diet and possessing a good deal of centralised horticultural expertise, in part inherited from the Romans, who produced both head cabbage (developed from kale and collards sometime during the Middle Ages) and head lettuce. The earliest known mention of Lactuca capitata (with an illustration) is in the Kräuterbuch of Leonard Fuchs in 1543. Head lettuce is dependent on man for its survival because the plant’s tightly wrapped head restricts the development of inflorescence unless it is artificially aided.
It was the Dutch and Flemish who began market-gardening on a large commercial scale. From the early fifteenth century onwards, Amsterdam was famous for its vegetables as well as its dairy produce; the city went so far as to exchange its “night soil” (human waste) for garden produce in order to encourage agriculture, much as the Chinese have traditionally done for rice. Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, used regularly to send messengers to Holland when she required a salad; presumably the Dutch had plants to offer which were unobtainable in England. By the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch and Flemish were exporting all sorts of garden produce, including “salad herbes,” to other countries in northern Europe. An influx to England of Dutch, Flemish, and Walloon refugees after Alva’s reign of terror (1568-72), did a great deal to improve the agricultural practices of the English and to better their diet, which had never been strong on greens.
At the end of the seventeenth century, John Evelyn wrote a book on salads, called Acetaria (things in vinegared dressing): A Discourse of Sallets, in which he extols the reign of lettuce over the salad bowl. “And certainly ’tis not for nothing,” he wrote, “that our Garden-Lovers, and Brothers of the Sallet, have been so exceedingly Industrious to cultivate this Noble Plant, and multiply its Species; for . . . by reason of its so-poriferous quality, lettuce ever was, and still continues the principal foundation of the universal tribe of Sallets, which is to cool and refresh besides its other properties,” which include inducements to “morals, temperance, and chastity.”
In the early nineteenth century, Sydney Smith wrote his famous versified recipe for salad dressing, which ends with a paean of praise for the result:
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.”
Lettuce seeds must have been taken to America almost immediately after Europeans arrived there, perhaps even by Columbus himself, since there is a record of lettuce being cultivated in the Bahamas in 1494. One American variety reported at least as early as the nineteenth century was a red-tinged leaf lettuce “of no commercial importance” which was called Iceberg. The name was adopted long after, in the 1940s, to designate the wonderful hybrid forms which from 1926 on were turned out by research laboratories in and near the Imperial Valley, California. The most popular type of lettuce with the public in the 1920s was named New York, so a lot of trouble was taken to ensure that the new variety looked as much like New York as possible. At first these lettuces, bred to combat brown blight, downy mildew, cabbage loopers, fleabeetles, thrips, armyworms, rotting in transit, wilting while waiting, and other hazards to which lettuce is prone, were all called Imperial (Imperial F, Imperial 1-13, Imperial 17, Imperial 152, and so on). But Imperial is not a word with desirable connotations in America. The name Iceberg – cold, clean and hard – was a winner.
Because American dollars are green, “a wad of lettuce” is slang for a roll of dollar bills. (The idea is quite old: the Italians used to call a gift of money “one of Sixtus v’s salads,” because the sixteenth-century pontiff, whose father was a gardener, is said to have helped an old friend by sending him a head lettuce, which when opened proved to be full of paper money.) Today the lettuce industry of the United States, 70 per cent of which is located in California and 15 per cent in Arizona, supplies North Americans and Canadians annually with three billion heads of commercial lettuce, principally Iceberg. (Home-grown and market-garden crops are not being taken into account.) That amounts to nearly thirty pounds of lettuce per person per year, or more lettuces than quarts of milk or loaves of bread. Lettuce can deservedly be thought of as synonymous with money.
It is said, however, that the great lettuce business conglomerates, which are called “grower-shippers” because they cover both aspects of the industry, are companies endowed with “the spirit of gambling.” Their product is uniquely delicate, and economically risky. (Only strawberries, which are often mass-marketed by the same giant corporations as undertake lettuce, present comparable problems.) Cultivated lettuces are annuals, not perennials; they require constant reseeding, and the yearly clearing of the vast fields in which they are grown. Water-bills, tonnages of fertilizers, and quantities of insecticides and herbicides are enormous. Lettuces, even when sown together, grow at different rates, so that on any given day only a percentage of the heads (to be determined in the field) are ready for cutting. A field must be gone over recurrently. A good deal of research is being done into ways of transplanting the seedlings so as to increase uniformity of maturation.
A slight change in the weather can considerably speed or slow readiness for harvesting. The decision when to pick depends not only on the plants, but on the labour available and on the state of markets all over North America. Storage, even under refrigeration, can be for only a very short time, and distances travelled to points of sale are often in the thousands of miles; one small error in refrigeration levels can spell disaster. Lettuce from the south-west of the United States is supplied year-round to every region on the continent, and it must be shipped and received daily with positively no let-up. Demand for lettuce is what economists call “inelastic”: people habitually buy a certain amount of it, but cannot normally be persuaded to purchase more than they usually do. This means that the price of lettuce, if weather conditions are bad, can skyrocket, sometimes within hours (the price which people are, if necessary, willing to pay for it being quite high), or it can plummet if there is too much highly perishable lettuce about.
Given the demand for year-round availability of cheap lettuce, the organizational difficulty which this entails, the capital investment in machinery required by modern agricultural methods, and the relative scarcity of the land and climate required constantly to produce lettuce, the concentration of the industry was almost inevitable. The same kind of food concentrations have occurred in Florida (citrus), Texas (onions and meat), and the American Pacific Northwest (potatoes). In 1976 twelve lettuce grower-shippers controlled 51 per cent of the California industry, and twenty-nine firms held 77 per cent of it. The four largest firms owned 40 per cent of California and Arizona lettuce. The numbers of companies are growing smaller not larger, a factor which presumably mitigates somewhat the anxieties of gambling.
The human labour for the lettuce industry is drawn from the “surplus” (unemployed) of the big cities, from the local rural towns, and from migrants to the Pacific coast, mainly from Mexico. Male Mexican and Philippino braceros (from the Spanish brazos, “arms”) have worked the giant California lettuce fields since the 1920s; a continuing supply of labourers was assured by an agreement made between the American and Mexican governments in 1951. The rich soil required for the cultivation of lettuce harbours weeds in spite of herbicides; these have to be removed at least once during the crop’s growing period, and empty or double lettuces have to be rooted out. Lettuce-field workers have to be constantly on the move, travelling with the harvest, holding themselves ready to go wherever hands are needed. At harvest time, the braceros walk along the miles of lettuce rows, judging which heads are plump enough, and cutting them. The heads used to be loaded into bins which would be hauled to the packing sheds to be iced for rail transport. The lettuces were packed in wooden crates with ice in between the layers of heads. The boxes were then moved on roller conveyors to railway cars, into which they were stacked by hand.
Soon the packing, as opposed to the gathering, of lettuce became the preserve almost entirely of North American “Anglo” labour; after considerable labour unrest in the late twenties and thirties, workers in the sheds were unionized, and by the end of the 1940s they were paid well. The Mexicans, both braceros (who were Mexican citizens) and native Mexican-Americans, stayed in the fields and were shamefully exploited. Their living conditions were appalling, they were poorly fed. Many of the braceros were sindocumentos, without papers and in the United States illegally, and they lived in terror of being caught and losing their jobs; there was no question of their complaining about cruel treatment.
In 1950 a revolution in lettuce technology occurred – and, as is usual with technological innovations, it benefited the grower-shippers rather than their employees, enabling them to overcome the inconvenience of having to pay their newly unionized packers well. Vacuum cooling had first evolved in Switzerland in the 1750s. An Italian physicist, G. B. Venturi, demonstrated how it worked in 1796 and the device was called the Venturi Tube thereafter. In 1948, Rex L. Brunsing of San Francisco had the brilliant idea of applying the Venturi Tube (which was being used mainly in carburetors) to the cooling of lettuce.
A steel tube fifteen metres (50 ft.) and two and a half metres (8 ft.) in diameter has pneumatically-operated doors at each end. It is filled with boxed lettuces and the doors closed, after which the air pressure inside is rapidly reduced. Free water is vaporized from the vegetables and carries the heat away with it; in a few minutes the temperature of the lettuces is reduced to the optimum −1°c.(30°F.). They are transported to pre-cooled trucks. No ice is needed, nor are heavy wooden crates. Vacuum cooling is much faster than refrigeration with ice. The portable steel tubes can be taken wherever convenient, which means that the ice sheds and the jobs that went with them were rendered obsolete. Packing could now be done right in the field by low-paid Mexicans, who were quickly taught how to trim the heads correctly, place them with the top layer’s butts up and the bottom layer’s butts down, and fill the boxes with the proper “squeeze,” neither too tightly nor too loosely. New smaller fibreboard cartons, eventually palletized for mechanical lifters, took the place of the old crates on roller conveyors. The work ceased to be paid on an hourly basis: the more lettuce you picked and packed the more you made. Piece-rates are notoriously the remuneration of the underpaid.
Soon after the arrival of vacuum cooling, a plastic film was perfected which enabled the companies to have their lettuces wrapped before packing and delivery to the supermarkets. This meant that higher-paid workers in urban areas no longer had to be employed to trim and wrap lettuce before display on the produce shelves, since the California and Arizona Mexicans did it so much more cheaply. The costs of carting waste lettuce leaves as city garbage were also cut. Today more than 20 per cent of Iceberg lettuces are sold “source-wrapped.” To the advantage of extra protection in transit is added what customers perceive to be the sheer prestige of buying something ready wrapped. (Unwrapped lettuce is referred to in the trade as “naked”.) A further benefit is the possibility, which all vegetable and meat producers covet, of providing a natural object, like a lettuce or a chicken, with a brand name: subsequent careful advertising can convince customers that one “name” means better lettuce than another. The lettuce wrappers are mostly women, partly because the job requires a good deal less travelling than lettuce harvesting does, and partly because a lot of the work is seasonal.
Public criticism of the way the braceros were being exploited in California began to mount in the 1950s. In addition, local Mexican-American farm workers increasingly began to see in the poorly-paid foreigners a threat to their own job security. By 1960, the grower-shippers realized that they had two possible ways of keeping control over the labour supply: either the use of the bracero system must become further legalized, or they must mechanize the lettuce harvest and sharply reduce dependence on human beings. Money for mechanization research was provided by the California State Legislature, and the programme got as far as producing a mechanical lettuce gauger, a machine which could do away with the hitherto human task of judging the size and firmness of lettuce heads. A first project for a lettuce harvester was also developed.
These inventions were not put into use, however, because in 1964 an agreement was reached between the American and Mexican governments by which migrant workers could become “green-carders,” with the right to reside legally, for the purposes of work, in the United States while remaining Mexican citizens, and even maintaining homes in Mexico where their families lived. The mechanization programme wound down as the cheap labour supply was further institutionalized.
But the farm workers of California were becoming restive: they found it harder and harder to obtain work, since, in spite of laws enjoining that American citizens should get preference in job vacancies, growers much preferred hiring the cheaper and more submissive, often still paperless, illegal, and therefore frightened braceros. The movement against the persistent exploitation of the braceros and the hard conditions of fruit and vegetable field workers generally began. Thousands of poor Chicanos, under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, “took on” the giant companies and formed their own union of workers from all the California farmlands, including the lettuce handlers. There followed the strikes, long marches, and non-violent resistance which captured the imagination of the world in the late sixties and early seventies. Middle-class students and intellectuals joined Chavez in the fight.
The great grape boycott against the intransigent grower-shippers began and spread all over the United States and into Canada. People gave up eating grapes, unless cartons could be produced which bore the black eagle designating their contents as having been picked by the California farm workers’ union. Eventually the grower-shippers saw their largest markets for grapes completely shut down: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, Toronto. The companies continued to refuse to accept the union, out of fear of having to raise wages. It had been the practice that workers were sent in to harvest only three days after vegetable crops had been sprayed with pesticides; rashes and stomach-aches were frequently reported among pickers. The union sought to increase the waiting period after pesticide application. They also wanted a health insurance plan and a fund created into which the companies would put two cents per man-hour, in order to cover workers’ immediate expenses in case their jobs were made redundant through mechanization.
In 1970, just as the grape-growers capitulated in the face of the grape boycott (the struggle had taken five tumultuous and expensive years), the lettuce workers began to strike for a similar settlement. The response of the growers was to call in the Teamsters, an entirely different kind of union, and try to have them force the farm workers to join the huge and powerful transport workers’ association instead of Chavez’s United Farm Workers. There were fights, shootings, beatings, and threats. Chavez struggled to maintain unity and the non-violent principles of his followers.
Consumers throughout the United States and Canada, who were just beginning to enjoy grapes again, were asked now to abstain from lettuce. This boycott was much more difficult to put into practice, since table grapes are eaten as a luxury, whereas lettuce is an everyday salad staple and irreplaceable as such. Yet many people boycotted lettuce. An injunction was brought by the California courts against the organizers of the lettuce boycott. Chavez defied it and was jailed for contempt. Publicity surrounding this event enormously increased the effectiveness of the movement; even exports of Iceberg lettuce to Europe began to suffer. Finally the injunction was declared unconstitutional and the Supreme Court of California supported Chavez’s union activities in the Salinas Valley lettuce dispute.
In May 1975, a California Bill of Rights for farm workers was passed. It remains to this day the most advantageous legislation which farm workers have achieved in the United States. Many of the objectives for which the union had fought for ten years seemed assured. In March 1977, the Teamsters signed a five-year agreement with the United Farm Workers to help rather than fight them.
A major source of contention between the union and the growers was the use in the field of the cortito, or short-handled hoe, used in thinning lettuces and in weeding. Growers argued that the short hoe was necessary to make workers bend closer to the lettuce; only then would they inspect it carefully enough. The other point of view was that bending over all day was inhumanly exhausting and painful: a long-handled hoe would save enormous amounts of labour. The union won the dispute, and the short-handled hoe was eliminated in 1975.
There was further unrest in the lettuce fields of California in 1979, when non-union labour was hired. The union struck and $5 million worth of Iceberg lettuce rotted away; prices rose to a dollar a head in California supermarkets. After two months the grower-shippers signed contracts. In spite of these attempts at accommodation the growers remain to this day almost solidly opposed to the farm workers’ union. The other option – mechanization – still remained open to them. For several years, research had been going ahead which would allow the grower-shippers to bypass the union. After all, machines do not mind pesticides, and machines, as the growers say, “reduce uncertainty” and “increase productivity.” Above all, machines don’t strike.
By 1975, almost as soon as the workers had negotiated rights to the long-handled hoe, the growers had their first two mechanical harvesters ready. One of these machines emits gamma-rays and the other X-rays through the lettuce; any head which is sufficiently dense triggers a signal to the knife, which cuts it off at the base. Rubber fingers close on the head, lift it and drop it onto a conveyor which carries it to be mechanically packed and vacuum cooled. Four rows of lettuce can be harvested at a time, and at least seven hundred cartons packed in an hour. Drawbacks to the machines are that they are extremely expensive and their great weight causes them to compact the soil. If they come into general use, they will increase concentration of ownership since only ever-larger corporations would be able to find the capital necessary to buy and maintain them. Full mechanization is still only a threat but already it has meant that hundreds of thousands of farm workers throughout California, thousands of them lettuce handlers, have lost their jobs during the past decade.
Mechanization and the effect it has on employment is, of course, one of the great problems of our age. The big machines make the rich richer and rob the poor of their livelihood. Owners of factory farms argue that hand-picking a harvest is at best a gruelling task; doing away with it ought to be considered progress. To which one response is that picking carrots from a garden patch for oneself and one’s own small vegetable stall is not hard: what is unbearable is sweating in a vast plantation doing the same thing all day long in order to make money for someone else. The task is dehumanized, in other words, long before the workers are displaced; farming has been artificially readied for the machine.
Perhaps the most important realization of all, although it is an uncomfortable one, is that the social ills attendant upon mechanized farming are the fault of the whole of society, and not only of the growers. The growers, after all, are trying to provide us with the two things we now demand: food which costs an unprecedentedly small proportion of our income, and the availability of the full range of all the varieties of food at all seasons of the year. For these reasons each kind of vegetable is raised in vast quantities where it will grow most efficiently; it is then shipped at the cost of enormous energy (to say nothing of detriment to the taste and nutrition of the food) to wherever the cities sit, voracious yet helplessly dependent upon the suppliers and their huge tonnages of food. The transport costs of a Californian lettuce bought in the eastern United States or Canada amount to 22 per cent of the whole. The entire growing process, including pesticides, herbicides, ploughing, and weeding, costs only 10 per cent; the rest is for harvesting, packing, cooling, loading, inspecting, storing, and retail profits.
There is no sign of this intense specialization and mechanization letting up. A new way of selling lettuce provides an example of recent trends: Iceberg lettuce is now being marketed ready shredded. It is cooled, then cored, chopped into “bite-sized” pieces, and packed into ten-pound (4.5 Kg) polyethylene bags, often together with cut carrots and cabbage. The air is then sucked out of the bags and replaced with gases (“modified atmosphere”) which inhibit discolouration of the cut edges. Absolutely none of this is done by hand: shredded lettuce is a mechanizer’s dream. The product is sold to fast-food chains, hospitals and prisons – and flown as far away as Hong Kong for use in fast-food franchises there.
In one limited but significant area new opportunities of work have opened up for farm workers in recent years. It should serve to remind us of the extent to which we, the public, control all the industrializing trends in the food business. For complex and far-reaching reasons (many of them not all that edifying), North Americans and Europeans have decided to become food-conscious. We have discovered Cuisine, at one and the same moment as we have found our Bodies. The trend-setting middle classes are already totally converted to wine with meals and cooking with olive oil (in countries where these have not traditionally been the custom), and to elegant food presentations, home bread-making, and exotic recipes of every conceivable kind and complexity. The new all-round Conspicuous Competence which is incumbent upon the middle classes also demands cooking skills of a high order for those who wish to rise and to shine.
Salads have become increasingly “creative,” with the addition of “special” ingredients like arugula, radicchio, mâche, and herb mixtures almost unknown internationally less than five years ago. Iceberg became a dirty word overnight to large numbers of new gourmets. The crispy technological wonder was suddenly tasteless, nutritionless, and also much too easy to get (difficulty of access being one of the hallmarks of status). Nothing would henceforth do but Boston, Leaf, Bibb, and delicate European varieties – all the soft lettuces, which have in the past been considered incapable of travel and easily ruined in the handling.
But we reckoned without the ingenious agri-businessmen, not only in California but also in nineteen others of the United States, who do not even attempt to be lovable: they merely study our desires and set out to meet them. Middle-class neighbourhoods in the big cities now receive abundant quantities and varieties of the most delicate and refined lettuces, marketed by the giant food companies. They are picked by hand (no machine could manage these) and carefully packed in good strong boxes, by the million. They often travel as far as Iceberg lettuces have ever done: Boston lettuce from California is now quite commonplace in the eastern United States and Canada.
“Gourmet” lettuce remains, nevertheless, a small proportion of overall output and consumption. There is no question that the culinary improvement, in its absolute sense of increased availability of lettuces with excellent flavour and textures, has been enormous; and the demand has been so competently met that status has already moved elsewhere. Meanwhile, our own self-centred fastidiousness may be achieving at least some stay of execution for the farm workers whose previous suffering and fear were equally the result of our unheeding greed.
But, at the same time, another development has occurred in lettuce technology. The grower-shippers are beginning – particularly in the specialized new “gourmet” lettuce industry – to experiment with getting rid of soil, let alone workers, altogether. Lettuces are increasingly being grown in plastic foam cubes under bright lights. Nutrients are dissolved in water which is provided, in computer-calculated amounts, to every plant. Far less water is needed than for the irrigation of soil. It is possible to grow lettuces on almost vertical slabs of plastic foam, making them easy for a person to pick while standing up, or for a machine to take over the job. The practice saves plenty of space.
Air blows constantly through these lettuce-factories, cool in summer and warm in winter. It is therefore no longer necessary to confine lettuce growing to the silt-valleys of California with their mounting salt-pollution problems. The new factories can even be set up close to huge lettuce-consuming northern cities. The difficult standards of gourmet cuisine would appear to have been met head-on: production close to the point of sale in order to ensure freshness; the provision of delicate varieties which are impossible to harvest by machine; the ability to provide small crops of any type, to order, and almost immediately.
But the businessmen’s triumph is to be short-lived, if the reactions of French gourmets to hydroponic lettuce are anything to go by. A recent French article on lettuce complains that all this technology results in a small, feeble, tasteless product; you can tell these sad creatures by their insistently green colouring, brought about by gases blown over them to activate chlorophyll production. They are so fragile that sellers are forced to wrap them individually (so much for the prestige, in France at least, of individually wrapped produce). The genuine gourmet, this article sternly concludes, will accept only lettuces grown in rich dark soil and in the open air; they must be eaten immediately after picking – if possible while they are still warm from the sun. And, apart from the romaines and some of the tougher leaf varieties, the very best lettuce is hardly worth bothering about at all, at any season other than springtime.
Lettuce is an appetizer; lettuce clears the palate. At what point, then, should it appear on the menu – at the beginning or at the end? The ancient Romans puzzled a good deal over the issue. The great Greek gastronome, Archestratos, had recommended that lettuce be eaten “after the dinner, the toasts, and the smearing of perfumes” – in other words, after the meal and before the serious drinking or symposium began. Lettuce – cool, female, inert – would create a solid basis in the body before the “hot” vapours of alcohol began to take effect. (The same principle underlies the common belief that taking a glass of milk before setting out for a party will stave off drunkenness and a hangover: milk is calming, nourishing, female, and innocent in character, and always the opposite of hot, strong, masculine substances like blood, wine, or spirits.) The Romans began by following in general the Greek example, but in the time of Diocletian (first century AD) they decided to eat lettuce before the dinner, since a good deal of drinking took place during it, and since it was commonly agreed that lettuce makes you feel hungry.
The North American custom has traditionally been to eat salad greens before the meal, and the Roman decision is often invoked as a precedent. Emily Post thought the practice began with restaurants, which “wished to keep the customer happy while his entrée was being prepared, and people simply became accustomed to it.” The waiting customer would whet his appetite while satisfying his impatience to begin eating. Lettuce is also served in America as a side dish, as a kind of vegetable to accompany the meal, but kept separate because of the heating of the main-course plates, and because of the dressing. Raw lettuce serves as a counterpoint to a hot cooked dish. The dressing would often be dispensed with entirely, since gravy can provide lubrication enough. As we shall see, an oily film over lettuce leaves has not been thought invariably appealing in northern European cultures.
In the 1930s, a crisis was provoked in the American lettuce industry because the promotion of canned and prepared foods bit largely into the domain of lettuce, the swiftly and simply prepared vegetable. Lettuce was in great danger, warned the industry, of becoming “merely a garnish” on the dinner tables of America. A campaign was launched, with contributions from all the grower-shippers, to avert this threat. Advertising emphasized the monumentality of lettuce bowls and the delights of tossing the leaves. The campaign may have done much to spread the use of salad dressings and the central lettuce bowl (as distinct from individual side-dishes of salad) in North America.
The French, on the other hand, serve fairly substantial though often cold hors-d’oeuvres first, and lettuce after the main course, to clear the palate before dessert. Lettuce tossed in dressing is a kind of interval, a pause to enable us to change the direction of our expectations. The rising of one’s hostess solemnly to perform the tossing further heightens the caesura effect. Lettuce salad is half-way between the seriousness of the entrée and the frivolity of dessert. Its simplicity reminds us of the delights of the natural, particularly when a meal has involved considerable artistic skill, while its coolness begins to prepare us for the end of the drama of dinner: we collect ourselves in anticipation of the final confectionary flourish. A meal at which fruit is served for dessert is a much more everyday, informal affair, which repeats and re-emphasizes the “natural” theme enunciated by lettuce.
It was the custom in the past that the youngest daughter of the household had to turn the lettuce in the dressing with her fingers, maintaining the “fresh, green, female” mythology of lettuce. Dressing a lettuce made the anaphrodisiac plant “salad” (literally, “salted”); the sexual connotations of salt could add an extra erotic dimension to the girl’s performance before the mixed company at the dinner table. The French used to say of a still young and beautiful woman, elle retourne la salade avec les doigts (“she turns the salad in her fingers”).
Lettuce comes directly from the garden, simplicity and innocence itself, and its role is to “set off – the intricate or solid structures achieved through culinary skill. Lettuce, then, must be pure, that is unspotted, unbrowned, unwilted, natural, and uncontaminated by artifice. Its green colouring is one of our symbols of innocence, springtime, and paradisal gardens. Both tenderness and crispness, two typical qualities of lettuce leaves, mean to us life, spriteliness, health, and youth.
For modern food industrialists, the myth of lettuce is a headache – one among many arising from food mythologies in general. They work incessantly to provide us with what we say we want – only to come up against walls of incomprehensible prejudice and ingratitude. What do we expect? Food must be transported to the millions living in vast concrete cities, it must cost as little as possible, and it must be prevented from going bad while it waits for a sale. Why are people annoyed by the idea of pesticides, chemical additives, colouring agents, shape-holding powders, mouth-feel enhancers, artificial flavours, and shelf-prolongers generally? Insects, bacteria, rotting, sprouting, wilting, off-flavours, and oxidation are some of the main enemies encouraged by mass-production, lengthy transportation, and age. Food suppliers expend billions of dollars and all the intelligence and know-how which the scientific community can muster to fight back against these. In 1985, the food industry in the United States was said to have outspent all other commercial enterprises – and expenditures were growing faster than those of any other trade.
And now we have something new. Imagine being able to keep cooked meat, without refrigeration and without spoilage, for seven years. You could send it anywhere, and store it until someone was willing to buy it. This wonderful capability is already ours, if only the public could be made to see reason. The process is called irradiation. Scientists have been experimenting with it for thirty-five years, and food processors are absolutely convinced that this will give them opportunities hitherto undreamed of.
There are two ways food can be irradiated. The first uses gamma-rays or X-rays produced by a radioactive source such as Cobalt 60 or Cesium 137. The source would be housed in a cell with thick concrete walls, and/or kept at the bottom of a pool of demineralized water to protect workers from exposure to the rays. Conveyor belts would carry the food through the irradiation cell; the strength of the radiation dose would depend on the speed of the food’s movement through the cell, and the distance between the food and the source. In the rival system, linear accelerators shoot electrons from commercially-produced radioactive substances. Until recently the electrons could be made to penetrate only the surface of products, but a new compact accelerator, which uses the electron beam to produce X-rays, is said to be faster and more powerful than the cell method. Also, its supporters point out, the accelerator can be turned off when not in use, and does not itself create radioactive waste, as the irradiation cell does. We are not told how the commercial producers of the radioactive substances required will get rid of their waste.
There are disadvantages to contend with when high doses of irradiation are used: colours change, smells arise, and flavours deteriorate, especially in bland foods with a high moisture content like milk products and vegetables. New chemical substances called “radiolytic products” are known to appear in irradiated food, and to increase proportionately to the dose of radiation delivered. Processors stress, however, that irradiation could do away with many chemical additives, and effectively kill trichina in pork. And the “positive” side of the degradation that occurs in protein and carbohydrates is that meat is thereby tenderized.
Irradiation kills bacteria and insects, prevents mould and off-flavours in aging food (when precisely the right amounts have been applied), delays ripening so that fruits and vegetables can conceivably be kept for months before eating, and prevents potatoes and onions from sprouting. Scientists have given the measurements of irradiation particularly unfortunate names: one hundred ergs per gram make one rad; one thousand rads make one krad (kilorad); one million (106) rads make one Mrad (megarad). Sprouting in potatoes is prevented by the application of five to fifteen krads. Russia has been irradiating its potatoes ever since 1958; Canada began in 1960. Even in these countries, however, irradiation is not common practice, for potatoes and onions do last quite a long time before they sprout. Up to one hundred krads would be required for bacteria destruction and long shelf-life assurance in lettuce and other vegetables. Meat and poultry, in order for the method to be “commercially viable,” would have to be irradiated with between two and four Mrads. Irradiation equipment is enormously expensive; it would not be economically viable unless huge tonnages of vegetables were constantly fed into it. In other words, irradiation would greatly concentrate the already oligarchic food industry.
In 1981, the World Health Organization produced a report entitled “Wholesomeness of Irradiated Food.” The food industry was elated – the moment, they thought, had come to irradiate. South Africa, the Netherlands, Belgium and Israel have actually gone ahead and routinely irradiate vegetables, fruit, prawns, frogs’ legs, and spice. The South Africans label irradiated products with a logo advertised as “the symbol of quality and safety.” In 1983, permission was given in the United States to irradiate spices: and already plans are afoot to triple the dose permitted in spice, making it three Mrads (three million rads) strong.
Nevertheless, in spite of what the food industry sees as a breakthrough, it sorrowfully reported in 1985 that “there is not a single canister of irradiated spice on the retail shelf in the United States.” France had cleared some foods for irradiation, but no one there was using the method commercially. The United Kingdom continued to allow only low rad levels, except in hospitals for the special sterile diets prescribed for some patients.
The problem seems to be, according to the food processors, that irradiated food would have to be labelled as such. Market research has discovered that the American and most of the European public, unlike the Dutch or the South Africans, do not want to find out that their food has been irradiated, and modern food laws require that the public be told just that, wherever that is the case. No food distributors feel they dare try it. The difficulty created for them by these laws, and the intransigence of people’s prejudice against irradiated food, dumbfounds the industry. They have argued (so far in vain) that irradiation is a treatment, not an ingredient or an additive, so they should not have to explain on a label what they have done to the food. So far irradiation label designs have been heavy on such symbolism as innocent green leaves and golden circles. The stickers are small enough to preclude statements like “this food has been irradiated.” There are attempts being made to exchange the unfortunate term “irradiation” for “ionization,” which most people understand less than they do irradiation, and would therefore (it is reasoned) worry about less.
The processors feel that irradiation is just around the corner, even though a Coalition to Stop Food Irradiation has been formed in the United States, and objectors are digging in their heels in other countries also. People appear to have learned not to embrace absolutely everything that is new. They are suspicious, and they doubt whether concrete walls and ponds of water, or safety gadgets in powerful accelerators, will always prevent gamma-rays and electron beams from attacking people as they attack bacteria. What are “radiolytic products” anyway, and why should we believe that the human frame was built to thrive on them? And what would happen to all the radioactive waste generated by routine food irradiation procedures?
Furthermore, the food processors have not succeeded entirely in appropriating for themselves the short but potent word “fresh.” Freshness is one thing modern food supply systems deny us. Fresh corn is corn picked only when the water is already boiling in the pot, ready for the cobs as soon as they are snapped from the stalk. Freshness is a garden lettuce brought inside with soil clinging to its roots, dew on its leaves, and the risk of the odd caterpillar or bug. Fresh in supermarket parlance means “not rotten,” or “this food was fresh when something was done to it to prevent it from deteriorating.” But real freshness, for most people – and gourmets and food nutritionists concur in this – has a value in itself. Fresh food tastes better, and is almost always nutritionally better too. Of course we cannot expect supermarkets to give us anything really fresh; but it annoys us when they pretend they can.
Another dirty word for the American public, one advertising analyst warned recently, is “natural.” People no longer trust anything with a label on it which says it is “natural,” she tells us; we wonder, apparently, why we should have to be told such a fact. Advertisers should use “fresh” or “wholesome” instead. More than either low prices or nutrition, 95.9 per cent of the people who were surveyed for this particular report wanted freshness. People wanted dates on packages, so that they could know how long their food had waited on a shelf. Perhaps they will one day rejoice to find, along with the irradiation label, a date showing that their cold cuts are seven years old. The prospect does not look likely at present, but we can depend upon it that food processors will continue their efforts to make this dream a reality.
People demand that food should be the colour they like it to be. The anomalies that arise out of our insistence on the “correct” appearance of food are numberless. Excellent oranges which remain green when ripe cannot be sold unless they are first dyed or gassed an orange colour (it being always easier to dye a thing than to teach a person). People often refuse to eat dark chicken meat; bleach a leg, debone it, and they buy it as cheerfully as they do their favourite breast-meat. Lettuces must be a pure fresh green. Yet more and more often, lettuce leaves are presented at salad bars already torn off the stalk and cut into pieces, and cut lettuce quickly turns brown.
The food processors looked about and found that if you spray sulphite (salt of sulphurous acid) onto lettuce, the browning effect disappears; a salad can wait all day and still look as if it has only just been prepared. This was a boon to every snack bar and restaurant. Supermarkets began to sell “serve-yourself” lettuce leaves by the pound, ready cut up for salads. Six sulphiting agents were declared GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) for spraying on salads, fruits, vegetables, and shellfish, and for dissolving in beer and wine. Soon faintness, shortness of breath and other allergic reactions to the new preservative were being reported in asthmatic people; more than a dozen people died as a result of sulphites. Even non-asthmatics developed rashes and stomach-aches. Demands were made that sulphite-treated products should be labelled and that if supermarkets or restaurants use the chemical, the fact should be posted. Sucrose fatty acid esters were also approved recently by the American government for sprinkling on fruit and vegetables. The coating, which contains only sugar and beef fat, slows ripening and wilting. But the very idea of it has enfuriated vegetarians, who have demanded posting for this product too.
It is true that laws enjoining food merchants to proclaim the presence of food additives are almost impossible to enforce. As one businessman put it, “When was the last time you saw a label for a waxed cucumber?” Having accepted the principle that food must inevitably be “fixed” in order to survive long enough to feed us, decisions about how far we should go in allowing food to be processed, and what we should disallow, become constantly necessary and endlessly complicated. The original decision, of course, was to divorce ourselves as completely as we have done from the source of our food, and thereby to make ourselves utterly dependent on agri-business, transport capabilities, and on the technological manipulation which serves both.
Once upon a time there was a greedy nun who came across a large and succulent lettuce in the monastery garden. She could not be bothered to say grace or to pause and bless the plant before seizing and eating it, with the result that she swallowed a small devil who happened to be sitting on one of the lettuce’s leaves at the time. When she was finally cured of the fit which followed, the little devil came out of her mouth and addressed the exorcist in an aggrieved tone: “Why blame me? What have I done? I was sitting on this leaf, and she came along and swallowed me up.” The story appears in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (594 AD). For the parable-minded, it contains a lesson about greed, haste, and ingratitude, about cleanliness, and also about the possibility that all might not be well, even if our lettuces look fresh and green.
The story is also a clue to the fact that lettuces were well known at that date. Historians often claim that people ate almost no vegetables during the Middle Ages. This seems very unlikely, since vegetables grow easily and cheaply, and many people must have had access to a garden patch. Lettuces counted as “herbs”; and were probably also included among the food-plants which the English called “worts” – more correctly “cabbages,” but the word may often have meant something like our “greens.” Their status was not high, and they were, therefore, seldom thought worth mentioning – unlike meat and pastries, with their high price, complicated preparation, and conspicuous rank among the dishes presented at a meal. A person ashamed of his poverty and low status was made to feel “as potherbs among made dishes.”
The English, it is true, have had an abiding contempt for green vegetables:
Owre Englische native cannot lyve by Roots,
By water, herbys or suche beggerye baggage . . .
Give Englische men meate after their old usage,
Beiff, Mutton, Veale, to cheare their courage,
wrote William Forrest, in The Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise in 1548. The claim, of course, is made on behalf of “princes,” but another sixteenth-century document shows English maidservants despising French servants for eating so many vegetables and so little meat. In the seventeenth century, as we have seen, there was an upsurge of interest in green vegetables and salads. But right into the twentieth century smart English boarding schools for boys seldom provided their pupils with milk, fruit, or salads, largely because these were considered unnecessary luxuries, feeble and female foods which were unlikely to help in turning out real men.
Salads in our culture have always been considered women’s food. This taste preference is, of course, invisibly bolstered by the ancient categorization of lettuce as “female.” French lettuces seem most often to be given girls’ names, such as Aurélie, Laura, Estelle, or Blonde de Paris. Light, green, and frilly lettuce goes with white wine, fish, chicken, soufflés, airy desserts, and refined dishes like strawberries and cream; red meat, potatoes, pies, red wine, and heavy puddings have been thought typically “male.” Machines in modern life have robbed men of a good deal of the ancient necessity to prove themselves rough, tough, overbearing, and entitled to a rich and solid sustenance. As being lean becomes more difficult and more desirable, salads (and by “salads” we chiefly mean lettuce) become increasingly prestigious.
Both men and women, alike in this now as in so much else, agree that low-calorie, vitamin- and mineral-rich, cholesterol-free salad is what we ought to want. A recent survey has established that the top five “taste trends” in the United States are (in this order): salads, seafood, chicken, fresh vegetables, and fruit. The salad eaters, the report continues, were 45.1 per cent of them wine drinkers; they ate in restaurants often, were either single or came from households where the woman had a job, were heavy spenders, saw themselves as adventuresome, and undertook lots of jogging and weight-lifting. In other words, lettuce, once the standby of the rustic poor, has become an emblem of urban middle-class prestige and affluence.