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Can you live on salads alone?

Of, course, yes. Salads can be powerhouses of nutrients depending on the ingredients

Walk down the salad aisle You can toss up as many varieties of salad as possible with a little bit of imagination

If you’re not one of those who dismiss salads as “cattle food”, you’ll be happy to be in this restaurant. The chain eatery famous for salads is crowded this afternoon. Being here is naturally refreshing, an experience you coul d convert into a week-end ritual. It’s right opposite a movie theatre and has a serve-yourself salad bar, so visiting makes complete entertainment-after-eating-out sense. You pay a flat amount to pile your plate, number of trips to the buffet not counted. Salad bars seldom advertise themselves as cozy joints for quiet candle-light dinners, and rent out corners for kids’ raucous birthday parties, but for a healthy, guilt-free fill, they are great places.

Follow 11-year-old Naren to check out how colourful your plate can get. He has lined his with a bed of greens – spinach, romaine, watercress, oak leaf (yes!), lettuce and red cabbage. This is layered with hard-boiled eggs, strips of carrots, cucumber and beet. Preferring to bite into something crisp before descending into the veggie garden, Naren sprinkles the salad with roasted sunflower seeds, banana chips and fried potato strips. He proceeds to decorate the mound with onion rings and floats the hill in boiled peas, soya beans and corn. His younger sister, a chubby girl, chooses pasta, egg pieces, cheese and boiled veggies for her meal. Their mom nibbles at pieces of fruit after polishing off a miniscule plate of carrot-tomato-cucumber-radish salad modestly covered by a drop of dressing. She’s debating if she should fork in the corn muffin.

It’s a quick meal. Plate in hand, you walk down the salad aisle selecting from cooked and raw vegetables, cooked beans, salads, pasta salads, dressings and soups. For those who are serious about their daily carbs, there are bread sticks, muffins and herbed rice. Still have that “empty” feeling? Roll in noodles with toppings, or slosh some pudding into a bowl. There’s no way you’ll go hungry here.

Can you live on salads alone? If you’re lucky to live down the road from specialist salad bars, yes. “Salad derives its name from the Latin word “salare”(to salt),” says Praba Iyer, an expert chef and cookery teacher, “as salt is the most important ingredient in salad dressing. It is a course of a whole meal made up of raw leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach and arugula tossed with cooked or raw vegetables, fruits, cheeses and nuts and mixed in with a dressing of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Salads can be powerhouses of nutrients depending on the ingredients. Walnuts, pumpkin seeds, hard boiled egg and cooked beans (garbanzo, pinto, kidney and black beans) increase the protein and omega3 fatty acids.”

Salad has a proud history. It’s “herba salta” or “salted herbs,” obviously because dressings contain lots of salt. Salad gained its status during the Greek and Roman civilisations and was thought of as necessary nourishment. Romans grew salad leaves, and ate them minced. Emperor Dominican served the dish as a starter, not at the end of the meal as done earlier. Conquering Romans introduced lettuce to Britain. Leonardo da Vinci was the first artist to depict salad in his paintings. In Leda (1504), a child, standing next to the goddess of fertility, poses with a bouquet of lettuce. Today, the word goes beyond a bowl of health. ‘Salad Days’ means carefree days of youth, a phrase Shakespeare used in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Lack of imagination alone will limit the varieties you can toss up as a salad. Mix apples, celery, walnuts, lemon juice and mayonnaise, you have the Waldorf salad. Mix soaked and drained moong dal with green chillies, lemon juice and dhania leaves, you get your pro/vit as tasty “kosmili”. It’s olive oil and mustard paste in one part of the world, curd and cucumber in another.

Salad as total sustenance? Possible. See that some protein and carbs are included and give desserts a clear by-pass. And learn when to push the plate away.

GEETA PADMANABHAN

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