"Salad is a first-world luxury..... Lettuce is a vehicle to bring refrigerated water from farm to table."

"If you have an intuitive sense that a food that’s 96 percent water is a waste of resources and a nutritional zero, you’re right.... Salad... uses too many resources for too little food to be a smart choice for either human or planetary health. It graces my table because I like it and because it can help me say no to seconds of lasagna. But that’s a solution to a first-world problem: too much food.... Lettuce lends its health halo to anything that gets put in a bowl with it.... If you buy a salad, and then remove the lettuce, you see what you’re really eating for lunch: sad little brown piles of croutons, dressing, shredded cheese, and chicken strips. Of course there are grain- or bean-rich salads, populated with bona fide nutritious vegetables like kale and broccoli.... But they’re the outliers. Most salads are nutritional and environmental losers."

From "Diet soda is fine, and 3 other food truths it’s time you believed" (WaPo).

"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.

What to do with the garden's overflowing supply of mesclun.

I had the idea of making smoothies... but what else goes in it? And would it be any good? Googling, I found, "Creative Ways to Use Tender Greens, Because Salad Fatigue Is Real" in Bon Appetit. The first idea is my first idea, the smoothie:

If you put kale in your smoothies, you'd better believe you can add tender greens, too. In fact, greens like mesclun and soft lettuces are sweeter than kale, and combine well with fruits and herbs. We'd steer clear of arugula, though—it can be assertively peppery.

That linked to "The Greenest Smoothie," which is one of those too-many-ingredients recipes. And there's one ingredient — frozen banana — that I think takes over a week of prep time if you haven't already ripened bananas and squirreled them away in the freezer. But I do come away with the idea that ginger and frozen pineapple could go in there. Matcha? Hmm. Why? I suspect Bon Appetit of needing to be special, not normal, and I just want normal.

I think I'm going to blend all that mesclun with some fresh orange juice, because orange juice is what I happen to have in the house. Isn't that the point of smoothies — using up your leftovers? Thought of like that, the blender seems like a garbage disposal. Noisy manufacturers of sludge.

My personal blog-survival challenge seems to involve lettuce.

Here's the Instapundit post. If you're not using AdBlock, perhaps you will get a different personal challenge.

"I like rice. Rice is great if you're hungry and you want 2000 of something."

Just a joke I ran across as I was searching for information about foods that are popular even though they are virtually flavorless. That happened because I was reading this Megan McArdle column, "Dining Out on Empty Virtue," about farm-to-table food, and I saw this (boldface added):

[E]ating locally sharply limits the variety of foods you can consume at one time. Things pop up in their growing season, then they are gone from our tables, if not our hearts and memories. This is how my mother grew up eating in the farm country of western New York, where summer was a glorious succession of excesses: three weeks of strawberry shortcake every evening, then farewell to strawberries for the rest of the year; that loss was, of course, somewhat consoled by the onset of purple raspberry pie. But eventually winter came, and it was back to root vegetables, home-canned beans and frozen peas, occasionally varied by the tasteless yet indestructible iceberg lettuce that could be shipped from the ever-fertile fields of inland California.

You see my point of view? I have almost no sense of taste. The fact that a particular food is popular in spite of a lack of flavor is very useful to me. I've seen iceberg lettuce disparaged for decades, but I'm thinking in a new way now. It might be that it's everywhere because it keeps well and can be shipped and stored relatively easily, but part of it must be that people like the texture and the inside-the-head sound. People with a normal sense of taste may prioritize flavor and even look down on those who are flavor dumb, without thinking much about those of us who are flavor blind.

Let's hate lettuce.

"It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate," says the currently most-read article at The Washington Post.

Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources.

In July, when I wrote a piece defending corn on the calories-per-acre metric, a number of people wrote to tell me I was ignoring nutrition. Which I was. Not because nutrition isn’t important, but because we get all the nutrition we need in a fraction of our recommended daily calories, and filling in the rest of the day’s food is a job for crops like corn. But if you think nutrition is the most important metric, don’t direct your ire at corn. Turn instead to lettuce....

Lettuce is a vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table....

Lettuce has nothing going for it. But — I'd caution — don't undervalue nothing. Nothing is a lot. It's more than everything that's worse than nothing. Chewing on lettuce might keep you from eating something fattening (like corn)(though it might lure you into eating something that would have no appeal were it not for lettuce's insidious cry for dressing).

But if your concern is not managing your calories — or, as some commenters point out, pooping —  and you care about the environment, the author is right. You should not — unless you grow your own — be eating lettuce. It's water.

A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (1-liter size: 96 percent water, 4 percent bottle) and is only marginally more nutritious.

And don't drink bottled water either. Drink tap water. Lots and lots of tap water. And pray for the forgiveness of your sins.

"My stations win by taking females out. Sometimes that’s enough to go from the number three station to the number one station in a market."

Said country music consultant Keith Hill, who has advised stations to play fewer songs by female artists. Criticized for discriminating against women, Hill wields metaphor and irony:

Metaphor: "They’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females."

Irony: "In a deep irony, it’s the demand of female listeners who aren’t thinking about it. They’re just responding to that flow of song after song, and if that mix has more females in it, they turn off quicker."

ADDED: Country songs are meant to stir you on an emotional level. I prefer a male voice. It's a sexual orientation! If that's sex discrimination, it's not the bad kind of discrimination.

"In a proper sandwich, the cheese is adjacent to the bread to create a moisture barrier against the lettuce."

Rabbit, lettuce...

In the Meadhouse front yard, just now...

At the Wet Lettuce Café...

... because Lem wanted a café and because I think some of you might need a break from all the legalistic argle-bargle. And it was Lem who asked "Is Argle-Bargle another way of saying bullshit?" And the answer is most definitely yes, and as you know, I'm immensely interested in the concept of paraphrasing. In other words, I want to be the Professor of Paraphrase. And by the way, did you know that the song "Fly Me To the Moon," was originally titled "In Other Words"? And that Frank Sinatra sings the line "In other words, darling, kiss me" in these other words: "In other words, baby, kiss me"? Why does "darling" seem so old fashioned? Does anyone use the endearment "darling" anymore (other than sarcastically, as in "yes, darling")?

Okay, you get the message: Talk about random stuff. Be amusing and delightful. Or something.

At the Rain Lettuce Café...

... nobody leaves you alone.

Rains destroy lettuce crop...

... at Meadhouse:

At the Salad Days Café...

... let us try to get along.

"Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

Roy Edroso cuts and pastes some of my very best material onto his blog, but leaves me out of his Village Voice column "Dog Soldiers: Rightbloggers Meld with Mitt over Obama Mutt Meal Story." He just doesn't know how to "meld" my material with his "rightbloggers" shtick. It's too meta (and meat-a) for him to grind up into the usual sausages the folk at VV use to metaphorically masturbate.

But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

At the Lettuce Café...

... this will be good for you.

How do you manage the day's last spurt of energy?

"The way I do it, there are still 56 minutes left to watch two episodes of The Brady Bunch on TV Land and I [have] enough energy to go downstairs and make a ham and swiss with horseradish, tomato and lettuce on artisian bread during the first commercial break. If I watch The Brady Bunch first, and Marsha's in it a lot, then we're down to two minutes."

"I know what you're doing! You want to buy right-wing lettuce seed!"

Just something I said, seconds ago.

"The loser lettuces..."

"... romaine and — dare I suggest it — iceberg."

Me and Meade in Bachelor Gulch with Bachelor (the dog).

Caption contest:



(I swear I did not retouch the expression on the dog's face.)

I have many other pictures of Meade and the dog — whose name is Bachelor — but this one came up with a hilarious expression that had me thinking of the famous Obama ass-gawk photo. A camera can catch a single instant that gives an impression that something happened that no one actually present and viewing the whole scene in real time would have perceived.

The dog and Meade actually got along tremendously well. The dog liked me too, see:



Now, how did we get a dog? The hotel has a dog that you can borrow for walks — it's a "Loan-a-Lab program." Here's the hotel, nestled in Bachelor Gulch:



So, what's the story with the name "Bachelor Gulch"?

The lush mountain valley known as Bachelor Gulch rises out of the Eagle River Valley, home to the Rocky Mountain towns of Vail, Avon and Edwards. From the Ute Indians who originally settled in the “Shining Mountains” and western valleys of Colorado to a group of spry old bachelors in the early 1900s whose namesake remains, “Bachelor Gulch” as it became known has always been home to many memorable residents. The legends and lore of these bachelors became the inspiration for the secluded mountain resort and the surrounding community on Beaver Creek Mountain.

Many of these original bachelors were miners who first came to Colorado in search of silver and other precious ore. They settled in Bachelor Gulch in search of a better way of life and because they were able to purchase land, which was made possible by the Homestead Act of 1862. Seven of these most colorful men who settled The Gulch were John Anderson, Gunder “Gundy” Berg, Ed Howard, Charley Mays, John Mertz, Ferdinand Smith and Carrothers – a man whom so little is known about that he’s only recognized by his last name in historical references.

John Anderson’s original cabin can still be found around the corner from The Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Daybreak Ridge. Berg’s and Mertz’s homesteads no longer stand, but the stories of these bachelors holding court at the general store while children raced their horses down the street for their entertainment are legendary. Howard was deaf and it was said that a crowing Rooster perched atop his bedpost couldn’t wake him from his sleep. Smith was actually nicknamed Crippled Smith as Smith was lame – so that people would not confuse him with another Smith who lived up the Valley. Charley Mays was the favorite of the local children, making them lunch pails from his tobacco cans. The area’s most elusive bachelor Carrothers, local lore recounts only as having poor eyesight and making bad decisions as a result.

The bachelors stayed in the area until the 1920s when high altitude lettuce farming or “green gold” took root in Bachelor Gulch. The next generation of homesteaders found an easier way of life in the mountains, making a good living by growing lettuce. The climate was ideal and the soil was very rich with nutrients. However, the Great Depression of the 1930s affected the farmers who sold their land to two local ranchers who used the area for herding cattle and grazing sheep. The land remained privately owned for nearly 40 years until the vision for Bachelor Gulch as a vacation resort began to form.

So what do you think: an early gay community? "Spry" ≈ gay. And, of course, "bachelor" ≈ gay.

***

Hotel footnote: The Ritz Carlton is a pretty cool place to stay. We enjoyed toasting marshmallows in the firepit and eating our way through the tasting menu at Spago — among many other things.

Lettuce is selfish.

It belongs on a list of "socially unacceptable foods."