It’s Starch Week at the Department of Salad!
Perfect salads for eating in your dark winter man cave—or woman cave. White beans and chard. Potato and salami. Plus: Let's put crunchy lemon Parmesan bread crumbs on everything.
IN OUR YOUNGER, MORE VULNERABLE YEARS, we found it necessary to correct people whenever they referred to salad as one particular thing, with very specific qualities and rigorous restrictions. Green. Dietetic. Congealed. Healthy. Cold. Light. Insubstantial. Rabbit food. Tossed. An afterthought. Low-calorie. Needs this. Must not have that. Insignificant. Composed. Nothing without a great dressing. And on and on, absolutely forever.
We’ve been down this road so many times in the last five years. In fact, it often feels like we’ve been shouting our celebration of the grand and fearsome multiplicity of salad into a black hole—not because it slows down, or gets crunchier, or shreds, or disappears on the way, but because it’s as if it was never there at all.
So here we are, on the cusp of the year 2026, still living in a world in which people continue to preface any “content” about salad with the words “Salad doesn’t have to be boring!”—a phrase that pretends it’s about to set salad free when all it’s really doing is reinforcing a tired premise.
Salad is already wild and unknowable and free. And let’s face it: People will say that about anything, especially if their goal is to convince the world that they, uniquely, have finally cracked the code to a more exciting version of (fill in the blank).
It all comes down to a need to categorize and compartmentalize everyone and everything on the planet, including ourselves. People often like to be told what box they go in, because it gives them a sense of belonging—even if the box is small and restrictive and a bit joyless and the people in it aren’t especially nice, including to them.
🥬 Please hit the ❤️ button at the bottom of this newsletter if you like it here! —Emily
I remember how that felt, when I was much younger: Include me, accept me, let me be one of you! Now that I’m older, I’m pretty sure that if you peeled off all of our labels, we’d mix everyone right back up.
We are all just random salad ingredients. And there is such relief and joy in knowing this.
So of course I shudder when I hear that men don’t like salad—not because men do or do not like salad but because that sentence assumes all salads are the same. That there is only one kind of salad to like or dislike. And that all men like to eat the same thing—and that’s just weird.