Salads To Soothe Your Inner Monster
An Autumnal Seven-Layer with Tahini Cream. A Plate of Herby Greens and Persian Prizes.
ASIDE FROM THE SHOCKING STATE OF THE WORLD, and the welfare of all mankind, few things cause more generalized anxiety here at the Department of Salad than my own terrible personality—which seems to get magnified daily, as the news continues to reveal the surprising fact that we’re probably all awful.
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times—but without the best times.
On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know I’m not alone with my collection of increasingly bad character flaws: I’m just being human, like everyone else! So I try to forgive myself for my crankiness, impatience, and free-floating fury.
On the other hand, I spend half my waking hours worrying and complaining about the way things are going here on Earth, which means I spend very few waking hours being one of the helpers, to quote Mr. Rogers.
Also: I’m starting to believe in The Rapture.
Nobody’s perfect, of course. But isn’t one of the easiest and most essential jobs we have—as members of the Family of Man—simply to try to be good? And not even Mother Teresa good or Albert Schweitzer good. A person could probably score pretty high on the human morality meter simply by making a sincere effort to avoid hurting others. Your success rate doesn’t really matter.
Unfortunately, it appears that we’re all playing by wildly different, multi-tiered rulebooks. And that a disproportionate number of us seem to see ourselves as already good—and therefore not under any real pressure to, you know, try to be better. And I worry that I may be one of them.
For instance, I live in an area where you’d expect a lot of people to be generally happy and grateful for the life they have. But a not negligible number seem to use their situation not as an opportunity to lift up others in these difficult times, but as permission to be monsters and fussbudgets about minor discomforts—an attitude that hangs in the air like a pretty but menacing storm cloud.
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And since I’m also a jerk, I react badly to these clouds when it would be much easier—and wiser—to ignore them and use my energy constructively. Instead, I have taken to hiding out as much as possible. When I do venture out, I feel like a minor character in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, trying to stay out of the way of all the maniacs, some of whom yell into their phones on speaker, treat waiters badly, and exhibit other displaced byproducts of psychic trauma.
Driving to my favorite market, it has happened more than a few times lately that a woman in a giant SUV or some other hulking vehicle will honk her horn and bear down upon my bumper like Aunty Entity on her way to the Wheel of Punishment.
When this happened recently, I tried to be generous: Perhaps she had severed a limb and was bravely driving herself to the hospital emergency room! I hope she’s okay. 🙏 But then she swerved past me and screeched into the Starbucks drive-thru. 😑 All of my fragile goodwill drained from my heart and pooled into my clogs, and now I was grouchy and awful and irrational, too.
I try to remember that it is easy enough to be lovely when the world is lovely. And that only under enormous duress do we become our absolute worst.
But then something miraculous happened. When I finally made it to my favorite giant indoor farmers market, which was teeming with humanity from many cross-sections of our local population, no one was being abominable!
Instead, everyone was focused on stocking their restaurants, planning parties, feeding their families, making a meal for a friend, or writing a salad newsletter. People listened intently as they tapped on melons, examined the beautiful pears and apples like fascinated museum-goers, and lifted kabocha squashes with the kind of tenderness and respect I wish we could all use on one another. They waited their turn at seafood and stood peacefully in the long lines for flowers and coffee and pastries; they smiled and talked about how to pick a watermelon (according to a friendly chef: look for thick webbing or “sugar spots” and a deep yellow rather than white field spot).
It all made me feel unexpectedly hopeful! This is who we can be! I was suddenly amazed by how much I can love this insane, gorgeous world even as it insists on tormenting us the way it often does.
