WTF is up with Iceberg Lettuce

Why do so many people use this ingredient? It is practically tasteless and has almost zero nutritional value. WTF is up?

I’ve also heard and I would like to know if someone can verify this, that Iceberg lettuce actually leaches minerals out of the other ingredients.

It adds “texture” to my salad…

It’s a neutral foil for a tasty salad dressing and it is very low in calories. Those are its good qualities, not to say it’s the best food ever.

It has a pleasant texture, being consistently crispy, but not going as far as cabbage does. It is best used where there is plenty of other flavors, such as on hamburgers.

My personal preference in salad is a variety of lettuces including iceberg. I also add raw spinach and shredded red cabbage.

It ships well, so back in the day, it was probably the easiest (or only) lettuce to find with any regularity unless the local farmers grew lettuce and it happened to be in season. As such, it became the default “lettuce” for Americans.

Recent article from Saveur.

I can’t believe this. I can’t understand how it would be be physically possible.

It goes great with bleu cheese!

I’m also not sure, if it is true, that it’s something to worry about. I mean, if the lettuce pulls stuff out of other ingredients, then that stuff’s…now in the lettuce. Which you’re going to eat anyway. Right?

I was wondering about that as well. How can it both have no nutritional value, and leech the nutrients out of other ingredients? If the nutrients don’t end up in the iceberg, where the heck do they go?

For the sake of science, somebody needs to mix iceberg lettuce and a bunch of celery and let 'em fight it out to see what happens. Since celery Has Negative Calories ™ and iceberg lettuce apparently leeches nutrition from other foods, who could possibly predict the inevitable horrendous outcome?

I don’t know how, but I pictured the poor nutrients going down with the Titanic.

I predict a black hole that destroys all of Earth. I have known to be wrong about these kind of things, however.

Zero nutritional value? I know it’s not as good as raw spinach or cabbage, but:

“This food is low in Sodium, and very low in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Thiamin, Vitamin B6, Iron and Potassium, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Folate and Manganese”

. . . from nutritiondata.com

Also, I find it to taste sweet, so it’s a good foil to stronger, bitterer greens.

Given a choice between iceberg lettuce and the lawn clippings and swamp pickings a lot of restaurants are using for salads these days, I’ll take iceberg every time.

Swamp pickings? Haaa! Yeah, I have seen a few of those in my salads.

It’s not really their fault. Supermarkets deliberately stock only the blandest-tasting fruits and vegetables in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Most folks have never been exposed to anything with an actual flavour, so they think flavours are “weird.” Just check out the nigh-on-hysterical reactions in this thread to the smell (or, as they refer to it, the “stench”) of curry.

I recall the anticipation I felt when the first Taco Bell arrived here in Ottawa. I was excited because I had heard from so many people how addictive and delicious the food was. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it looked just like food, it smelled just like food, but it tasted like… well, nothing. The tortillas had the flavour of wet cardboard. The “beef” was brown and smelled like meat, but it tasted like packing foam. The alleged cheese was a bright fluorescent orange, the colour of construction cones, and had the flavour and texture of rubber carpet underpadding. I tried to add some flavour by squeezing on some of their so-called “hot sauce” and got something that tasted like watery ketchup. And yet, all around me were people eating with gusto and, as near as I could tell, greatly enjoying their tasteless meals.

I like to put it under the good lettuce as a base, sometimes it’s hard to stick a fork through the limp but tasty greens. And ditto to texture.

Cite?

It makes great BLTs, especially with home grown tomatoes, a bit of salt and pepper, and of course Duke’s mayonnaise.