Head 2 Head
Souprise, souprise: salad is terrible
There comes a point in every person’s culinary odyssey when they’re asked a very crucial question– soup or salad?
Let’s look at what happens when you sit down at a restaurant. You get drinks, and then the waiter asks the life-changing question. If you pick salad, look at option 1. If you pick soup, look a option 2.
- “Oh my god, this salad is awful. I’m awful. What am I doing with my life? I need to stuff my mouth with as many appetizers as I can find. I need to feel the void this salad has created in my soul and my stomach. Not that it matters, everything peters off to the same inevitable end– death.”
- “This soup is the best thing I’ve ever experienced. I’m naming my child after this soup. Little Minestrone will grow up to be big and strong and carry on my family name. My own wedding wasn’t as good as this soup is. I’m just full enough that I don’t want an appetizer, but not full enough that I can’t eat my entrée.”
This question is quintessential to the dining experience. It can make or break your night. Do you want a house salad? Italian or ranch?
Trick question. You want soup because no one really wants a salad.
Eating a salad is like putting a topical filter on your profile picture to support a cause– you do it because it makes you feel good about yourself, not because you want to improve something. You probably order Coke Zero instead of regular because you’re “on a diet.”
News flash: loading bacon bits and ranch onto blades of grass isn’t healthy. It’s just you lying to yourself and saying you’ll lose weight when you know you won’t. Stop slacking and go run a mile.
Salads aren’t even satisfying. Or good. A salad is barely an appetizer, let alone a full meal. It’s something to occupy your mouth with while you wait for your real food. It keeps you busy. It’s a filler meal. When you’re eating it, you don’t have to make awkward small talk with your date.
English poet and William Cowper said that “variety is the spice of life.” He was right. There are so many varieties of soup, it’s not even funny.
Soup is very serious business, after all. Like the sandwich, which is commonly and astutely paired with soup, it comes in many flavors and types. It’s the chameleon food. Salad follows a cut-and-dry formula. Some kind of lettuce, some vegetables and a dressing. Sure, it gets the job done, but there’s no fun in a cookie-cutter meal.
Going to a Japanese restaurant? You may be tempted to order a ginger salad. You know, the same ingredients as always with a different dressing on top.
Or you could get miso soup. Or Eggdrop soup. Or coconut soup. It’s like a rainbow of endless broth-based choices, and they’re all delicious.
We’re just scratching the surface here. I haven’t even mentioned the plethora of chowders and gumbo that fill dinner menus everywhere.
Humans have been eating soup and its derivatives for centuries. Poor peasants in the 1500s had trouble getting food, but they could chop some chicken up and drop it into a broth.
If you asked a commoner what they wanted to eat, they would not voluntarily say “salad.” They would cry out for soup and beg for something that would fill their shriveled stomachs and keep them warm. It was an easy-to-make food for the disenfranchised citizens of less civilized times.
Somewhere in the past, two cavemen might have had a discussion. Rog O’Connell and his compatriot, Thag Allen, might have sat down to argue over what was best — the three blades of grass Rog has been gnawing on for an hour, or the mix of water and animal bone that Thag prepared for himself. It’s a tale as old as time, but Thag was definitely right.
Lettuce argue: salad is first-rate
I woke up this morning, took a shower, stumbled into the car, made it through school, worked through debate practice, hustled during hockey practice and ate dinner.
After long days like these, do you know when I feel the most refreshed? After eating my dinner, which is salad. Just the crunch of the leafy greens is enough to get me through the rest of the evening.
Just after eating salad, I feel about 50 times healthier than I did before. This boost gives me motivation to finish homework, and I know I can always rely on a crisp salad to get me going instead of resorting to an unhealthy coffee or Red Bull.
When I was young, the thought of eating anything but macaroni and cheese was just repulsive. Later, I was able to add hot dogs and pizza to my menu.
At that point in my life, I couldn’t believe that someone would eat something that comes from the ground. Furthermore, if eating food covered in dirt wasn’t bad enough, humans actually pay to eat plants. To my young and immature self, these people would be better off eating the grass in their lawns and saving the money they spent buying more plants.
As I grew older and wiser, I gradually began integrating some vegetables into my picky diet: corn, spinach and broccoli. It was not until over the past summer that I truly realized what I was missing out on when I tried eating baby spinach.
After that inaugural meal, I started to eat plates of only baby spinach. Then I’d start eating whole containers of lettuce mixes.
Before I continue, I want to clarify. Kids– I am a high school student who hated veggies. Now, I know this may come as shock to you, as it was for me, but your parents are actually right this time.
Salad is delicious. Just eat some macaroni and cheese with a handful of baby spinach on the side, and you’ll have to admit that there is no better side to macaroni than salad.
But guess what. The same is true for pretty much every single food ever. If you have never tried salad, go for it with an open mind. Here’s a quick rule for the rest of your life: usually, if a food comes off the ground, it is actually very healthy for you. It is not gross and covered in dirt like you may think (though this does not apply to beets).
Stoners like talking about how pot should be decriminalized because it is natural. You want something natural that gives you a good feeling and is legal in all 50 states? Eat a salad.
Some people out there (ahem, Walker) can’t appreciate a good mix of nature, so next to their sandwich, instead of a salad, they “eat” a food commoners call soup.
Wow. Do you know what sounds delicious? A mixture of hot meat water and rejected food parts, and what’s even more is we’re going to call it “soup.” Because who doesn’t like a burned throat for dinner?
And what do you do to soup, anyway? Do you eat it or drink it?
No one really knows, and a verb mix-up could lead to a major social faux pas. Picture yourself hanging around your high-society friends, when soup rears its ugly head into the conversation. You then start to describe the experience of consuming soup at a particular restaurant.
You dote about the tastefulness of this restaurant before you begin to talk about how distasteful their soup was.
“The waitress brought it and set it right on the table in front of me, and she said, ‘Careful hun, it’s right out of the pot!’ It looked pretty nice, so I picked up my spoon and… took a bite? Um… drank a spoon?”
At this point in the story, you fade out and shamefully cast your eyes to the ground. Your friends just look at you blankly. After a few more seconds of agonizing silence, one of them says, “Soup? You ordered soup? Soup is for commoners.”
It’s that moment you realize that you don’t fit in, you have no friends and you should just adopt 50 cats and eat ice cream every day. This is why we can’t have nice things: because of soup.
So the next time you find yourself in a sandwich store looking for a nasty, foul-tasting side for your turkey bacon melt, feel free to check out the soup menu.
On the other hand, if you want to enjoy your meal and feel revitalized and healthy, try a salad. You will be pleasantly surprised, because there is no feeling like a crunchy bite.