Growing movement against lettuce the blandest of all vegetables

Home Top

Tyler Perry shares touching video tribute he made for Bobbi Kristina Brown's funeral - featuring unseen personal snaps and set to the tune of her mother Whitney Houston's 'You Were Loved'
Boy, 10, suffers severe brain damage after 'he and his family were cleared to return to home following botched termite fumigation'
'I am sorry our league had to endure this': Tom Brady breaks silence and writes Facebook post about 'Deflategate' scandal
Al Roker's 'Wake Up With Al' Weather Channel show cancelled after stormy emails between him and boss
Broken bones, dislocated shoulders and cadets taken away in an ambulance: 30 West Point students injured as annual PILLOW FIGHT turns nasty
Tragedy as body of missing George Washington University student, 19, is recovered in South Africa after he disappeared while swimming five days ago
Drug-addict couple arrested after 'living in squalor with boy, 3, who cannot speak and girl, 1, who was born in a bathtub and never taken to hospital'
Why did Chrissie Hynde date one of the Hells Angels who raped her? She enraged feminists by blaming herself for the attack. But the full story's even more shocking
Police arrest man connected to home invader that was killed by 11-year-old boy who shot him dead with one bullet while home alone with his four-year-old sister
To save your marriage, UNFRIEND your partner on Facebook: Therapist warns that social media can be toxic to a relationship
Whole Foods' security guard is fired after 'slamming a customer into concrete pillars before choking him unconscious in bloody attack when he tried to pay with food stamps'
Conservative presidential candidates go to battle over religious rights of Kim Davis and blast judge for locking up any-gay marriage clerk
Attorney for jailed county clerk claims marriage licenses issued to gay couples without her signature are VOID - as he compares her to Martin Luther King Jr
Just desserts! Woman throws a tantrum in take-away restaurant and screams at staff over color of their peppers... but gets her comeuppance as she walks out
Woman arrested for smuggling cocaine in her BRA at Florida airport
Jim Parson's college friend who he thanked in 2010 Emmys speech is arrested for improper relationship with student
Migrants march into the night: Germany and Austria announce they WILL let refugees into their countries after thousands walk the 100 miles to the border in desperate bid to start a new life
Revealed: How the five wealthiest Gulf Nations have so far refused to take a single Syrian refugee
Humanity washed ashore: Outpouring of grief continues for Syrian toddler Aylan, three, after images of his dead body on a Turkish shoreline shocked the world
Is El Chapo hiding in Costa Rica? Net closes on the world's most wanted drug lord after his son forgets to switch off location data in Twitter picture
More than 100 students and teachers struck down by mystery illness at North Carolina high school
Two Rikers Island guards charged with beating an 18-year-old inmate with an IQ of 65 in a supply closet
Are these the worst behaved kids EVER? Reality series reveals children's most awful tantrums, fights and lies in home-video footage shot by horrified parents
UCSD Neurosurgeon accused of using marijuana while on the job

Lettuce might be low in fat, sugar and salt but same is true of cardboard
Leading American food writer Tamar Haspel has pointed out its futility
Says it takes up space on farms that could be used for more nutritious veg
Restaurant salads can also be laden with too many belt-busting calories

Published: 19:38 EST, 4 September 2015 | Updated: 19:49 EST, 4 September 2015

161

View
comments

Undoubtedly there are some people who enjoy eating lettuce in the same way that others drool over bacon, crave chocolate or relish a good cheese platter.

But I’m not one of them.

I couldn’t bear those school meals of what was optimistically called ‘salad’ — a plate of pickled beetroot, eggs boiled to within an inch of their lives and leaves of dull, insipid lettuce.

As an adult, my heart sinks when a perfectly decently pub meal of scampi and chips is served with a dollop of half-hearted greenery.

Lettuce might be low in fat, sugar and salt — and useful for bulking out sandwiches — but the same could equally be said for cardboard

Most lettuce — not the leaves styled and photographed in the pages of glamorous food magazines — has almost no flavour, hardly any texture, little nutritional value and is about as exciting as a wet weekend in Hastings.

And while lettuce might be low in fat, sugar and salt — and useful for bulking out sandwiches — the same could equally be said for cardboard.

I used to think I was alone in my disdain for lettuce. But a leading American food writer has triggered a global food debate by pointing out its futility.

Tamar Haspel argues that the nutritional value of lettuce is so small — and its cost to the environment so big — that we should stop thinking of it as a wholesome staple foodstuff and instead regard it as a waste of space and resources.

Lettuce, she claims, takes up valuable space in farms and greenhouses that could be used for something more nutritious.

So is she right? Is lettuce little more than a waste of space?

Its nutritional benefits are certainly tiny. That’s because a typical iceberg or cos is made up almost entirely of water.

Most vegetables are water, of course. A potato is around 80 per cent water, while a carrot is 87 per cent.

Lettuces are 96 per cent water but most vegetables have high water contents including potatoes at around 80 per cent and carrots at 87 per cent

But lettuces are 96 per cent water. That’s about as much as you get in a bottle of Perrier by weight (which also has minerals such as calcium chloride, magnesium chloride and potassium bicarbonate).

When you spend 50p on a 800g iceberg, you’re buying 768g of water — or about three quarters of a litre. It would be a lot cheaper to get it from the tap.

As Tamar Haspel damningly puts it: ‘Lettuce is a vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table.’

With so much water, it’s not surprising that the nutritional value is so pitiful.

Icebergs are the worst offender. A large 72g serving of crunchy leaves has ten calories, 3g of fibre and 1g of protein.

It contains only 3 per cent of an adult’s recommended daily intake of vitamin C, seven percent of their vitamin A requirement, one per cent of their calcium needs and two per cent of their iron.

A generous 40g serving of English round lettuce — and we’re talking about an overflowing cereal bowl amount here — has six calories, 0.4g of fibre, half a gram of protein and only marginally more vitamins.

In contrast, rocket, spinach and watercress have far more nutrients and fibre, while a 80g serving of cooked broccoli has just 25 calories and contains 3g of fibre, 84 per cent of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin C and 24 per cent of your vitamin A, in addition to iron and calcium.

Other vegetables are a lot cheaper, too. For around £2 you can get a lettuce, a cucumber, some radishes and watercress from the supermarket — the basics of a simple salad.

The typical Caesar salad, minus the lettuce, is a fattening bowl full of fried bread, olive oil and chicken

But for only a few pence more, you could buy a far more nutritious red cabbage, a large helping of broccoli and a packet of frozen peas.

Not all lettuces are equal, however. The more colourful and flavoursome they are, the more nutritious they tend to be. Cos (or romaine) is one of the better varieties.

A 40g serving offers 70 per cent of an adult’s recommended vitamin A and 16 per cent of their vitamin C, along with 1 per cent of their calcium needs, and 2 per cent of their recommended iron.

According to the British Leafy Salads Association, cos lettuces are rich in potassium and also contain carotenoids, immunity-boosting nutrients.

Alison Clark, of the British Dietetic Association, insists that lettuce still has a place in a balanced diet. ‘When much of the population is overweight or obese, adding bulk to a meal or sandwich is useful,’ she says.

‘It helps with feeling full to have these low-calorie foodstuffs. In a sandwich, it means you have to chew more. Eating more slowly is helpful because it takes around 20 minutes for the stomach to send a signal to the brain to say: “Stop eating, I’m full.” ’

But dietitians are concerned about the way lettuce is sold —specifically, the high fat and calorie content of some restaurant and ready-made salads.

For example, many dieters plump for a Caesar salad. Seeing it packed with leaves, they think it will help cut down their calorie intake. But often they are fooling themselves.

Two years ago, Tesco reported that 68 per cent of its bagged salads are never consumed

At the Ask Italian restaurant chain, a delicious-looking chicken Caesar salad contains a belt-busting 726 calories — nearly as much as a pizza, according to their website.

Strip away the leaves, and you’ll see why. The typical Caesar salad, minus the lettuce, is a bowl full of fried bread, olive oil and chicken.

‘In some chains, salads are dressed with phenomenal amounts of fat and salt which can negate the benefit of having the salad,’ says Alison Clark. ‘People are fooled into thinking it’s healthy.’

Home-made salads can also be deceptively fattening, too. Smother your English round salad with mayonnaise or dressing, and the number of calories goes up 20-fold. Two tablespoons of dressing drizzled over a plate of leaves can add up to 200 calories.

There’s another reason to shun lettuce and that’s its impact on the environment.

Salad crops are notoriously greedy for water. That’s fine in a summer like this where there’s been no shortage of rain, but in drought years, and countries were water is scarce, salad-farming guzzles the stuff up.

A single head of lettuce requires around five gallons of water to grow to maturity. Add to that the fossil fuels needed to get the nutritionally poor leaves to the wholesaler, the supermarket and then to your home, and the impact on the environment emerges as even greater.

Salad crops are notoriously greedy for water and a single head of lettuce requires around five gallons to grow to maturity

Wouldn’t it be better to use precious fields, water and fuel to grow something a little more nutritious and rather more tasty?

In any case, it’s not as if we actually eat all the lettuce we buy.

According to the Government’s waste agency WRAP we throw around £270 million worth of lettuce in the bin each year — mostly because we buy it in bags which have a fridge life, once open, of only a few days.

Two years ago, Tesco reported that 68 per cent of its bagged salads are never consumed.

But bagged lettuce isn’t just wasteful — it can have even less nutrition than an unbagged one. In some packets of supermarket lettuce, levels of vitamins drop after the leaves have been picked, washed in chlorine and packaged, according to food writer Joanna Blythman.

Yet despite the lacklustre taste, poor nutrition and waste, our love affair with this limp and pointless vegetable continues.

Not all lettuce is terrible, though. If home-grown, it will usually have more flavour than the mass-farmed versions. And there are ever more interesting and colourful varieties to brighten up the salad bowl.

It’s time to turn over a new leaf and look for better alternatives — tastier food with more nutrients and which does less harm to the environment. Food that tastes good even when you don’t smother it in oil and vinegar and mayonnaise and deep-fried croutons.