Nothing at the supermarket is as bad as bagged salad

Supermarkets have a conjurer’s trunk full of tricks to keep you spending. You think you’re coming to get dinner, but you’re faced with a multitude of strategies that have been refined over decades. It’s psychological warfare.

The smell of baking and the aisle full of treats near the checkout are the least of your worries. They share bread, milk and eggs, so you have to wander around to find the essentials, increasing the risk of a bottle of wine or brownie ending up in your cart. Expensive items hide at eye level; you have to bend for the good deals. Often, fruits and vegetables pass through the entrance. Put some greens in the basket and you’ll feel less guilty about stocking up on Pringles and Yumnuts later. And the less said about pernicious loyalty programs, the better.

None of this is as bad as bagged salad. Since the 1980s, the British customer has gradually been led to believe that no meal can be complete without a small packet of salad, poured into a bowl and placed on the table. Pasta, pie, steak: whatever you cook, you need the little bag. Even if you eat a vegetarian dish, which in itself is a kind of salad, you must have another salad on the side.

Leaf mixtures have evolved from slices of iceberg to combinations of all kinds of shoots and leaves. Nowadays, some people even taste something. My favorite is M&S’s Rosa Verde, a mix of lamb’s lettuce and butterhead.

The principle behind them is unchanged. You place a small votive salad bowl on the table for guests to choose from, to atone for other sins they commit during the meal. At the end of the event, when they have passed through the door, the host will dispose of the remaining leaves. There are always leftovers of salad, abandoned like flowers left by a grave. “Well, that was a success,” the host will say, or at least think, as he scrapes the sad leaves into the trash can.

Leftovers – 40 per cent of all bagged salads bought in Britain, according to some reports – remind us that what we eat has little to do with reality and everything to do with appearances. Most lettuces have limited nutritional value – iceberg has virtually none – even if they appear green. In this sense, you are much better off giving your guests just one carrot each. But the benevolent presence of a pile of verdant leaves implies that you are a health-conscious household. Never mind the plastic waste, you’re signaling that you’re not one to settle for potatoes and cheese.

Asda recently introduced leaves from “vertical farms”, adding a techno-futuristic element. The symbolic salad is also an opportunity to highlight your bourgeois bowls; maybe something you learned in Portugal or KwaZulu-Natal. It’s not the salad that people love so much as the idea of ​​being a salad lover. And the kind of person who insists on eating a salad is the one who has traveled abroad and returned with dishes.

All of this explains why sales have reached such heights, despite the obvious problems. Britain now spends more than £1 billion a year on leafy salads and chilled vegetables, more than double the 2008 figure. Bagged salads are bland, unnecessary, bad for the environment and often of little nutritional value: it’s no wonder we never have enough of it. them.

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