Salad Days: A Story of Science, Sexism, and Jell-O

If leafy greens and a little vinaigrette is salad, and chicken with mayo is salad, and vegetables in Jello-O are ALSO salad… What exactly is salad?! That's the big question we're tackling this episode—and it takes us down some unexpected rabbit holes. Listen in now to hear how ‘scientific housekeeping’ and good-old-fashioned sexism made salad into women’s food, and how this led to boiled cucumbers, lettuce-cup prisons, and the emergence of the Jell-O salad. Plus: the rise and fall of the great American salad bar (RIP), and why that plastic bag of mixed salad greens is the most high-tech item in your refrigerator. Lettuce might be in the news for all the wrong reasons right now, but that doesn't mean it can't be salad days for your ears! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I will never turn down a Cobb salad. I mean, I would order a Cobb salad at a filling station.

• 0:08Nicola Twilley?

  Whether you're at a filling station or a fancy bistro, no judgments here. A Cobb salad is a hearty mix of chicken, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, blue cheese, and lettuce and tomato. It's a good salad.

• 0:20Cynthia Graber?

  One thing you probably won't find at the filling station is a simple tossed salad.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  It's a few little leaves and the most delicious little dressing. And there's a taste of an herb and the taste of a delicious little vinegar. Those, I think, are perfect salads.

• 0:36Nicola Twilley?

  OK, now I want that salad, too. They both sound perfect.

• 0:40Cynthia Graber?

  But those aren't the only kinds of salads in town.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  Yes, they're a jello vegetable salad, the sunniest dish of good-for-you goodness you'll find anywhere. Have you made a jello salad lately? Well, do this week.

• 0:53Cynthia Graber?

  I'm not sure about that, but as you all might have guessed, salad is being served this episode of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 1:02Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley. And already, I am concerned. If salad can be all these different things, what actually is salad? How are we going to pin this one down, Cynthia? Can we?

• 1:14Cynthia Graber?

  I don't know. I already find it so confusing. How can tuna salad, potato salad, Cobb salad, and a lightly dressed green salad all be in the same category?

• 1:23Nicola Twilley?

  So many questions. How did salad become something for women to eat? Why are women typically expected to order salad? And who is responsible for inventing those jello salad monstrosities of American community cookbook fame?

• 1:37Cynthia Graber?

  All that, plus how to make sure that the pre-chopped lettuce in your salad bag actually stays nice and crisp for weeks on end. But before we get started, some of you in the US may be avoiding salad these days because of the explosive diarrhea issue. We hear you. We're not, frankly, because we at Gastropod buy our lettuce from smaller local farms, and those are not part of this outbreak.

• 1:56Nicola Twilley?

  These huge outbreaks of foodborne illness, today it might be an issue for chopped lettuce, tomorrow it might be chopped fruit. It's an issue anytime there's an industrial food system that produces and distributes at scale, especially these days when the current administration has dismantled a lot of the guardrails that should help prevent against it.

• 2:15Cynthia Graber?

  But if you do want more virtual explosive diarrhea, we have an excellent episode all about foodborne illness and a super cool new way to fight it. It's called "Phage Against the Machine." Check it out.

• 2:25Nicola Twilley?

  This episode is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 2:39Speaker 04

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• 3:12Speaker 05

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• 3:52Nicola Twilley?

  The word salad is a surprisingly recent addition to our vocabulary. It showed up in the 1300s in France as the name for a dish of seasoned greens and herbs. But it comes from an earlier word, salata, meaning something that's salted.

• 4:06Speaker 06

  The idea was that people would gather leaves and flowers and salt it and put a little oil and a little acid if they had it.

• 4:14Cynthia Graber?

  Emily Nunn writes a popular newsletter called The Department of Salad, and she feels pretty strongly that salad has been around for far longer than the 1300s in France when the word salad appeared.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  You know, how is it possible that early man wasn't eating leaves? And if he had a little something to put on there, put some flowers or berries in there? I think man has been eating salad since the very beginning. That's my history. When I die, I want that on my tombstone.

• 4:38Nicola Twilley?

  After all, for almost as long as there have been fresh green things, there will surely have been hungry humans who fancied something fresh and green to eat. Or so culinary historian Laura Shapiro imagines. She's the author of the book, "Perfection Salad."

• 4:53Speaker 00

  There's some watercress growing across the road, and you have a few radishes. You put some of these fresh seasonal things together and you have it. This is my idea of the origin of salad.

• 5:06Cynthia Graber?

  In the ancient Western world, in ancient Greece and Rome, people mostly did not eat their vegetables raw. They were considered pretty suspect and had to be cooked.

• 5:14Nicola Twilley?

  The exception was leafy greens, like ancient lettuce, which had smaller and more bitter leaves than the lettuce we know today, and leafy green herbs like sorrel and cilantro and parsley. Those were eaten raw.

• 5:26Cynthia Graber?

  But they weren't eaten plain. They came with a salty condiment made of oil, vinegar, and fish sauce. But instead of using it as a dressing, like you do for a salad today, the dressing was on the side, and you just dipped the leaves before eating them.

• 5:38Nicola Twilley?

  From an ancient Roman cookbook, we know that they were also eating more complicated salads, though they also weren't called salads at the time. These were layered dishes with things like bread, cheese, cooked veggies, herbs, meat, and a dressing, and they were served cold. Food scholars called these early salads, too.

• 5:56Cynthia Graber?

  So almost from the start, salad was both things. It was simple greens, and it was more of this kitchen sink type of idea, like an ancient Roman Cobb salad.

• 6:04Nicola Twilley?

  Of course, not everyone back then was dining on these proto-salads. These kinds of dishes were typically part of banquets, served to people who already had plenty to eat.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  The more you eat beyond subsistence, the more you're going to get a nod towards salad.

• 6:21Cynthia Graber?

  These early salads that weren't originally called salads, the ones served at banquets, they were eaten over the centuries as something to stimulate the appetite, maybe to celebrate spring and offer fresh, refreshing foods. They were beautiful to look at.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  There are like 17th century poems about the glories of salad, things like that.

• 6:38Nicola Twilley?

  The term salad days, meaning the days of youthful vigor and immaturity, that expression dates back to Shakespeare. Cleopatra refers to the time she was in love with Caesar as a young woman as, quote, "my salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood."

• 6:54Cynthia Graber?

  Green and cold, like a salad. But all the while, this parallel track of salads being green and simple or complicated and meaty, this continued. Popular salads in the late 1700s were called salma gundi or grand salads, and they'd have meat and pickles and colored jellies, and they'd be more of a meal than a starter.

• 7:11Nicola Twilley?

  All this began to change once scientists started to figure out what was actually in food, and people then started to think about food in terms of its nutritional value. In the 1800s, they didn't really know about vitamins, but they had figured out the importance of protein and carbohydrates.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  And when they found out about calories, the early sense of calories was the more calories, the better. It kind of didn't matter what form they came in. Calories were going to build you up.

• 7:37Cynthia Graber?

  The word calorie had been used with regards to heat, the science of thermodynamics, and then our good friend Wilbur Atwater applied it to food in the late 1800s. You can listen to our episode, "The End of the Calorie," for more.

• 7:49Nicola Twilley?

  But the point was, scientists concluded that salad was not punching its weight in terms of protein or fat or calories compared to, say, steak and potatoes.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Salads would have been the outlier. It's not going to make you strong.

• 8:03Cynthia Graber?

  Salads and all those vegetables in a salad, they were kind of looked down on because they didn't have all those things people thought you needed. But it's not like veggies disappeared entirely from our diets at the time.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Everybody had a grandmother, and everybody knew about roughage. Vegetables were obviously good for you in some undefined way, and they grew them and they ate them. But they were a mysterious commodity. One cookbook writer thought they must have been important because of their colors, because they make the plate look so much prettier next to the meat.

• 8:33Nicola Twilley?

  But this general vagueness about the purpose of salad was not satisfactory. In the 1800s in America and Europe, people believed they were on the verge of figuring out everything.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  The great movement of the late 19th century was towards science. And you had scientific charity, you had scientific housekeeping. Scientific cooking was a big thing. The art of cooking, the preparation of palatable and attractive food.

• 9:01Cynthia Graber?

  Depends upon a knowledge of procedures based upon results of laboratory studies.

• 9:06Nicola Twilley?

  And the reason that scientific cooking was a big thing was not just because everything was being scened, but also because women were starting to be allowed into the hallowed halls of higher education. And they wanted to get in on this whole science thing, but they weren't allowed to. There were very few avenues for them to explore their intellectual abilities.

• 9:23Speaker 07

  But one thing we do know, we know where Destiny will send the young women, namely to the kitchen.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  The women's colleges are coming up. Women are being admitted to the state universities and the land-grant institutions. Women are going into normal schools to learn to be teachers. So the idea of educating women is out there. And if you're going to educate them for something, it better be for homemaking and for being a good wife and mother. And again, you're science-minded, so that means when you go into the kitchen as a good wife and mother, you know how to feed your family, how to raise the family.

• 9:58Nicola Twilley?

  What did this scientific housekeeping mean for salads? Well, just wanting to eat something green and refreshing was no longer enough.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  You didn't look at what's growing, what's nice and ripe in the market, what you felt like eating. All that is very unimportant.

• 10:17Nicola Twilley?

  Something else that went by the wayside, the idea that you could smell and taste your way to cooking a delicious dinner.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  In other words, your senses are not what's important. What your mother told you is really not important because she was cooking in the pre-science era, so forget that. You want to cook according to rules and instructions that are written down, that you've learned from a cooking teacher, or from school, or you've seen it in a book.

• 10:42Nicola Twilley?

  And your goal was to tame and control the food using your scientific mastery. Taming, when it came to vegetables, a lot of the time that meant cooking it, so it was no longer raw and savage and unfit for civilized digestive systems.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So a raw vegetable is indigestible on the face of it. So how do you tame it? You boil it.

• 11:05Nicola Twilley?

  And it wasn't enough to just lightly blanch your vegetable in boiling water for a minute or two, leaving it still crisp and green.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  You know, cucumbers, you would boil for 20 minutes, string beans, three hours, beets, 12 hours, celery, 30 minutes. You are cleansing them of any impurity. You are making them so digestible that they're practically just a mass of, you know, liquid in front of you. And they have lost resistance. They are not putting up a fight. You have tamed them. You haven't just cooked them, you have tamed them. Remember, this is the most important thing you're doing. Even if you've gone to school, that doesn't matter. Nothing matters. What matters is what you are doing in the house. That's your whole sense of worth.

• 11:52Nicola Twilley?

  Fortunately, for an endeavor that was the source of women's whole sense of worth, boiling was not the only route to tamed vegetables. Purity and sanitation and control could also be achieved by blanketing veggies with a sauce the color of hygiene itself.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  White sauce is like a foundational sauce in sort of all, certainly French and European cooking. Flour, butter, then milk, or whatever else you put in it, or water. But you get this, when it's done badly, it's library paste. When it's done nicely, it's a bechamel. These American white sauces were closer to library paste, but they were smooth, white cover-ups for food. Because, you know, along with science, there was efficiency. So you have this white sauce, and it was wonderfully efficient because you could do anything with it.

• 12:43Nicola Twilley?

  Including covering up your boiled vegetables.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  So white sauce makes it look pure and taste like maybe something else it wasn't. It is exactly the opposite of the French version of a sauce, which enhances, it's used carefully to bring out this flavor in. Not this American white sauce blankets the food, covers it up, makes it helpless.

• 13:08Nicola Twilley?

  Powerful stuff. So a scientific housekeeper could and did thoroughly subdue these renegade veggies by boiling them and drowning them in white sauce. But what to do with lettuce, with salad greens? You can't boil lettuce.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  I bet they tried. I bet they tried, and they were even more than cucumbers. Once you boil a little lettuce, you really don't have much.

• 13:30Nicola Twilley?

  But even though lettuce couldn't be boiled into submission because it totally fell apart, it did still have a role in this new scientific kitchen where the goal was to tame your food.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Lettuce was the wrapper. Lettuce was the plate. Lettuce had an active role in subduing food. That is to say, you could enclose something in the lettuce cup. They loved the lettuce cup. And they would tuck something into that, or if you didn't have a cup, you would put it on a lettuce leaf. Nobody wanted to see a lot of messy lettuce scattered around a plate. Again, it was this idea of efficiency and control, and the woman of the house was in charge of everything. The last thing you want to do, or the last thing she wants to be identified with, is kind of, you know, messy, just a mess of uncontrolled greenery.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  So you don't see what we would call a tossed salad, or what the French would do, just toss a little salad. That would not happen.

• 14:30Nicola Twilley?

  There were options, of course. You didn't have to use a lettuce leaf cup to control every salad. There's also the saltine fruit salad combo.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Which is a little portion of fruit salad, and it's surrounded by saltines standing on edge on four sides. And then you tie those together with a little ribbon. So this little fruit salad is actually in prison with a little ribbon around it. That is what you have created. There was, once, I read about it, but it was impossible to even envision, a celery salad that was served in a block of ice. They didn't say, they didn't say like, you get a hammer. I don't know how they ate it. But the idea was, these fresh things could not be allowed to run amok on the table. You wanted to capture them.

• 15:20Nicola Twilley?

  And speaking of capturing ingredients, in the 1890s, a New York cough syrup manufacturer and his wife introduced the first Jell-O.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Ah, gelatin, so gelatin. Man, once they got granulated, flavored gelatin, they were on a roll. Nothing was past them. Nothing was too much.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Mmm, bright crisp vegetables in cool shimmering Jell-O. There's a salad for you. Bright radishes, for instance, and cucumber in shimmering lime Jell-O. Golden carrots and cabbage in refreshing lemon Jell-O.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Everything in the kitchen could go into a gelatin salad. They made antipasto gelatin salads. They would make Christmas tree gelatin salads.

• 16:06Nicola Twilley?

  One version of that was made of lime Jell-O, cream cheese, cottage cheese, pimento cheese, nuts, and pineapple, cut into the shape of a Christmas tree.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  You could do anything.

• 16:15Nicola Twilley?

  The past is a foreign country, I know, but when you look at these recipes, it's a little disconcerting to imagine real human beings making and eating them. We're talking onion juice, grated carrot, hard-boiled eggs, celery, and gelatin, and that's a salad. Or how do you fancy a peanut butter salad? With obviously peanut butter, but also chopped green peppers, and celery, and pimento, and mayonnaise, and cream cheese, all embedded in lemon Jell-O. I have to say, I'm kind of about to puke.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Mrs. Nesbit, who was the famously terrible cook during the FDR administration, used to serve the White House guests something called Asheville Salad, where you, you mixed canned tomato soup with gelatin and put it in kind of a ring mold. And, and that was a salad. She was well-known for serving the worst food in the history of the presidency.

• 17:12Nicola Twilley?

  Ah, America, land of the free and home of the horrifying gelatin salad. But Laura says although it's easy to laugh at these scientific salads, there is something more serious going on to do with the role of women. The story of how salads became feminized after this break.

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• 19:31Speaker 00

  You know, when they didn't know about vitamins and they didn't know even why you were eating these things, the salad was something that did not pack a big nutritional punch. So what was it doing there? Why was it on the table? It was a little decoration. It was a frill. It was non-nutritive. Well, what was a lady in those days? Also decorative, also a frill, also non-nutritive.

• 19:53Cynthia Graber?

  The emergence of scientific cooking at the time, this is when salads started to become female food. They became associated with women and with women's roles. A salad was meant to be an ornament on the table, just like a woman on her husband's arm.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  The favorite word for food like that is dainty.

• 20:08Nicola Twilley?

  Now, as you can probably guess, these dainty women were not poor, working-class women. Daintiness and dainty foods were associated with the lady of the house. She might have help to clean and wash and make other less dainty dishes, but salad was her domain.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  The lady is the only one who has the kind of dainty, skillful fingers that could do this. A lot of the kitchen help might be the hired girl next door, or it might be a recent Irish immigrant. And the whole nature of class prejudice and ethnic prejudice and so forth was such that they were clumsy and sort of oafish in the kitchen. So there's a, there's a real class gap. American food has always been laden with class distinctions, and this is really one of the clearest.

• 20:57Nicola Twilley?

  Laura's book about this time period is called "Perfection Salad." That was the name of one of these dainty gelatin salads.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Perfection salad is, it's kind of the ultimate of these salads. It's a plain aspic, and it's filled with chopped up, like red peppers and cabbage and things. It is a really uninteresting salad, but it looks very pretty when it's unmolded. You have this little glassy thing with cute little cuts of vegetables in it. And then you eat it, and there's kind of no point to it, which is, in some ways, a horrible vision of women's lives at that time.

• 21:36Nicola Twilley?

  Oof, super depressing.

• 21:38Cynthia Graber?

  Of course, at the same time, just like in the past, there were also salads that were rich and full of a variety of heartier foods, including meat. Those became men's salads.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  When men are at the table, you might have a course called the salad course, and there might be a simple lettuce salad there. But not just that, because as we all know, a few leaves of lettuce are very feminine. So you would make sure that it was anchored, as they say, by like a baked ham. Now, that, nobody would confuse for a lady's salad. Or you would take the French dressing and put a huge scoop of, of chutney or something in it. Just you strengthen it, you, you make it strong.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  I think that's why those name salads were created, to get men to eat them. The chef salad, the Cobb salad, the crab louie, you know, with the thick, delicious sauce.

• 22:31Nicola Twilley?

  Speaking of thick, delicious sauce, typically mayonnaise-based, the next big breakthrough in salad culture started with mayo.

• 22:39Cynthia Graber?

  Salads had always been enhanced with some sort of dressing. The Romans used a dipping sauce, sure, but otherwise, we've been pouring on oil and vinegar, maybe a little mustard. We talked about the gross sounding white sauce, but also people made creamier dressings with handmade mayonnaise, which is oil and salt and egg yolk.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  I mean, mayonnaise had always been part of, say, a very traditional chicken salad or a lobster salad would have a little sheet of mayonnaise on it. And people made them from scratch because that's what you did.

• 23:05Cynthia Graber?

  And it can take like 10 minutes of steady whisking to get that mayonnaise to emulsify, which wasn't so fun, especially in the days before electric whisks were invented.

• 23:13Nicola Twilley?

  And then, in 1912, a Mr. Richard Hellman, who owned a deli in New York City, he started selling his mayo commercially, and then he opened a big industrial mayo factory, and the bottled dressing boom began.

• 23:27Cynthia Graber?

  Bottled mayo expanded the accessibility of the world of mayonnaise-based salads, like chicken salad and tuna salad and potato salad, many with a little crunch from some fresh or pickled veg and dressed with that great, easy-to-use bottled mayonnaise.

• 23:39Nicola Twilley?

  By the 1920s and 30s, Kraft and other companies began introducing all kinds of creamy concoctions, starting with French dressing.

• 23:47Speaker 06

  Who knows what French is? Like, it's red. Why is it red? And why is it that texture?

• 23:53Cynthia Graber?

  Emily's being rhetorical, not literal. As an American, she is familiar with French dressing, just not with this creamy dressing has to do with France.

• 24:00Nicola Twilley?

  I have never tried bottled French dressing, so I literally had to look up what French is. For all of you who, like me, are innocent in these matters, it is a sweet and tangy tomato, oil and vinegar-based creamy emulsion.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  A mingling of rare spices, herbs, and tomatoes with golden oil and vintage vinegar. Velvet, smooth, and mild. Perfectly blended for true French flavor your family will love.

• 24:24Cynthia Graber?

  Emily's point is that French should just be a vinaigrette, like people usually use on salad in France, a vinegar and oil-based dressing. And originally, that's what French dressings were in the US, too.

• 24:33Nicola Twilley?

  But somehow, in the 1920s, Americans started adding paprika for color, and then tomato, and then also some sugar, because Americans love sugar. And hey, presto, French dressing meant something else entirely.

• 24:46Cynthia Graber?

  Other bottled dressings quickly joined French. There's Thousand Island, which also included mayonnaise and ranch dressing. You can listen to our Ask Astra Pot episode from last December for All Things Ranch.

• 24:55Nicola Twilley?

  Today, the bottled dressing section of an American supermarket is substantial, which is a funny thing to see if you come from anywhere else in the world, because this is another uniquely American contribution to the universe of salad.

• 25:09Speaker 06

  Actually, I think all the dressings are American. Thousand Island, right, is American. Creamy Italian has to be American. I mean, there's nothing Italian about it, so yeah, that's American. A salad imagines that somewhere, there's a taste that's purely exotic.

• 25:27Speaker 06

  Kraft Free knows where it is.

• 25:31Speaker 06

  Where Mediterranean herbs and spices frolic in a creamy Italian dressing.

• 25:46Cynthia Graber?

  And we didn't just contribute dressing. This is also the time period when a lot of classic American salads got invented, like the Waldorf, which originally only had apples, celery, and mayonnaise, the grapes and the walnuts, and yes, also the marshmallows came later.

• 26:00Nicola Twilley?

  The Waldorf was named after the hotel where it was invented, New York City's Waldorf Astoria. The Caesar, romaine, croutons, parmesan, and then a creamy dressing with anchovies, that's another name brand salad from the era. It was supposedly improvised by a Tijuana chef called Caesar Cardini when he ran out of other ingredients.

• 26:19Cynthia Graber?

  These named salads became kind of set in stone. A Waldorf salad always had apples. A Caesar always had romaine. And if you wanted to eat that salad, you expected to be able to access those ingredients, no matter what time of year it was. The idea of seasonality in salads, of just using whatever was around and fresh, it was all starting to disappear.

• 26:37Nicola Twilley?

  The idea of local and seasonal eating in general was in steep decline, thanks to the rise of my favorite technology, refrigeration. By the early 1900s, Americans expected to be able to eat what they wanted, when they wanted it. But what that really meant was that they got the same handful of sturdy, shippable vegetables all year round.

• 26:57Cynthia Graber?

  And when it came to salad, or rather lettuce, that lettuce had to come from someplace that could grow it all year round. Turns out, an optimal place was near the Bay Area. It's called the Salinas Valley. Well, God bless the Salinas Valley with a very unique climate. The minimums are not low and the maximums are not high. And when it does get too warm, we get a nice fog layer over the valley that keeps the heat from causing the lettuce head to open up and make a seed stalk. So this is an ideal location for lettuce.

• 27:31Nicola Twilley?

  This is Jim Lugg. He's one of the stars of my refrigeration book, and he's retired from one of the Salinas Valley salad giants, Fresh Express. He told us that back in the 20s and 30s, iceberg was the only lettuce in town.

• 27:45Cynthia Graber?

  The name iceberg came from the fact that in the early days, the refrigerated rail cars had ice bunkers in each end of the car. And 300-pound blocks of ice were deposited in.

• 28:02Cynthia Graber?

  In those end containers and there were fans that blew the cold air through the insulated rail car. They used to say on the New York market, the icebergs are coming in. And that meant the rail cars with the iceberg refrigeration system. Iceberg lettuce was perfect for this type of cross-country travel because it was hardy and could hold up for a long time over those ice bunkers and later in rail cars refrigeration systems. But it didn't taste great. It was kind of just crunchy and watery.

• 28:31Nicola Twilley?

  At the same time, California's Salinas Valley and its iceberg lettuce were taking over the leaf side of things. Florida and the tasteless tomato were taking over too. And you could combine those with a bottle dressing 365 days of the year and call it salad.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  So that's what you had. You had iceberg lettuce. You had these styrofoam tomatoes. You had a dressing from a jar. And that was your salad. It was, it was a downer.

• 29:01Cynthia Graber?

  As you can imagine, Nikki and I agree, that was a low point in American salad history. Sure, you could get it whenever you wanted it, but it tasted like nothing. Why eat a salad? It was sad. But Americans were about to have access to a lot more than just iceberg lettuce, thanks to the one and only Jim Lugg. We have that story after the break.

• 29:22Nicola Twilley?

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces. So I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 29:51Speaker 07

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• 30:01Speaker 04

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• 30:08Speaker 07

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• 30:23Nicola Twilley?

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 30:50Cynthia Graber?

  To understand the revolution that was about to take place at the American supermarket when it came to lettuce, first you need to understand the revolution in storage that had transformed America's apples.

• 31:00Nicola Twilley?

  For those of you who have read Frostbite, and if you haven't, you really should, you will know that by the early 1900s, people had figured out that you could store apples and keep them crunchy and delicious for months and months by lowering the amount of oxygen in the warehouse where you were storing them.

• 31:16Cynthia Graber?

  And by the 1950s and 60s, the company Whirlpool, which had already established itself with washers and dryers and refrigerators, they started commercializing large-scale, warehouse-sized environmental control systems for apples. It was called controlled atmosphere storage. And in 1964, I was just curious to know more about what they were doing. So I went there, introduced myself.

• 31:38Nicola Twilley?

  At the time, the only way to get those Salinas Valley lettuce leaves around the country in one piece was to harvest and ship a whole head of iceberg lettuce. Individual leaves would never have survived the journey. This was frustrating for both Jim and his boss Ted Taylor.

• 31:53Cynthia Graber?

  Ted and I used to talk about, wouldn't it be nice if we could sell a, a package of pre-cut washed lettuce at retail? They weren't sure whether this was something that would take off. They just had a hunch. But we talked to some retailers. So we asked them, what do you think? Do you think your customers would buy a washed, prepackaged product? And they said, well, sure, if it has enough shelf life. Because everybody thought, you know, when you cut up lettuce, it won't last. And that was our challenge, how to make it last. Jim thought this new Whirlpool technology could be the key to making it last. So they formed a new company that was a partnership between Ted Taylor's company, Fresh Express, and Whirlpool. They called it TransFresh.

• 32:36Cynthia Graber?

  The mission was for TransFresh was to figure out how to transform fixed storage using their controlled atmosphere system to a mobile storage system. And that's where we started in, in June 1, 1966.

• 32:53Nicola Twilley?

  It was kind of a simple concept. Take a technology that worked in a building, shrink it so it worked at the scale of a package of lettuce. But it was not easy to accomplish.

• 33:03Cynthia Graber?

  We've talked about the science of vegetable decomposition on the show before, but when you harvest a vegetable or a fruit, it's still breathing and you want to slow that down to keep it from expiring, basically, and turning into mush.

• 33:13Nicola Twilley?

  Cold slows down how fast a vegetable is breathing, but reducing the oxygen, not too, too much, but as much as possible, that slows its breathing down even more.

• 33:24Cynthia Graber?

  What happens to the lower the oxygen level that the plant sees, the slower the respiration rate.

• 33:30Nicola Twilley?

  This is how that Whirlpool apple storage mechanism worked. It lowered the oxygen levels just enough so that the apples breathed super slowly and basically hibernated. But again, not too much.

• 33:41Cynthia Graber?

  And when the oxygen level gets too low, the plant stops breathing and it deteriorates very quickly. Jim and his colleagues at TransFresh did a bunch of research to figure out how to translate that process for apples to cut lettuce, how to help lettuce go into hibernation. What we learned early on was that a lower oxygen level and a little higher CO2 level really preserved the cut lettuce very nicely. But you have to keep adding oxygen and removing carbon dioxide to keep the balance because the plants are still breathing slowly, but still you can't just set it and forget it.

• 34:15Nicola Twilley?

  This is all well and good in a room where you can have a machine that is filtering oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out. But in a package that you're planning to sell at the supermarket, you can't have a machine that's blowing atmospheric gases around. The package has to do the work itself by having pores that regulate how much of each gas it lets in and out.

• 34:36Cynthia Graber?

  The early strategy was to really have a five-layer package. The two outer layers were for sealing. And layer two was for oxygen transmission. And layer three was for pretty printing because we had to have a package that was beautiful. And then layer four was for CO2 control. So the polymer chemists were able to dial in the proper chemistry for the oxygen and CO2 transmission rates. And we were good to go. The work of the chemists involved a lot of tweaking. One package maybe didn't work because it let in oxygen too quickly or was too slow to get rid of carbon dioxide.

• 35:19Cynthia Graber?

  They said, oh yeah, we can fix that. We'll just get a little lower respiration rate or rate of transmission for oxygen and CO2. They were great about solving those kinds of problems quickly.

• 35:32Nicola Twilley?

  Quickly is a relative term here.

• 35:36Cynthia Graber?

  It's very expensive for sure. And how long did it take? Well, I think 78, we had some product for the food service industry, five and 10-pound bags. 1978? That means it took 12 years before they had those five and 10-pound cut lettuce bags for restaurants and catering. The packaging film got complicated as we got smaller packages, like the one-pound family one that we introduced in 86. So you can tell where I'm going here, that probably took us 15 years to really hit the home run.

• 36:10Nicola Twilley?

  Or really more like 20, I'll told. But the end result was the very first pre-cut, pre-washed salad mix for sale on American supermarket shelves in a high-tech bag that made it last for at least a couple of weeks.

• 36:23Cynthia Graber?

  We probably doubled the life. I kind of forget the exact numbers, but more or less doubled the life.

• 36:30Nicola Twilley?

  That sounds and is impressive. But in practice, what that means is that lettuce that travels across the country to a supermarket, to your fridge, now lasts as long in your fridge as lettuce that you buy that was grown locally and hasn't had all that time spent traveling. Of course, most people are buying the well-traveled lettuce rather than the local farmer's market kind. So the extra life does come in handy.

• 36:54Cynthia Graber?

  And that's a long time for supermarket lettuce to stay crisp in your fridge, as long as you didn't open the bag to deflate it to save space before you stuffed it in the vegetable drawer. If you left it open, it would not be good.

• 37:06Nicola Twilley?

  Jim says if you clip the top or roll it over, you're still good. You're still getting the benefit of all that carefully engineered polymer chemistry. But yeah, leave that beautiful bag open to the elements, even inside your fridge, and you are wasting all of his hard work. And probably your salad leaves too, when they go bad before you eat them.

• 37:25Cynthia Graber?

  But all Jim's hard work, along with everyone else at TransFresh, of course, it completely transformed the salad industry. Consumers absolutely loved buying pre-chopped lettuce. It was instantly popular. Very popular. Our consumer folks that take the call, the 800 calls, just said people were calling all the time saying, we want more.

• 37:47Nicola Twilley?

  Imagine, before salad bags, you had to buy a whole head of iceberg, trim it, wash it, slice it, and eat a salad that tasted of nothing. Now you could open a bag and eat a blend of leaves. At first, it was just iceberg and romaine, but still, it was a salad revolution.

• 38:04Cynthia Graber?

  Different types of green leaves respire or breathe at different rates. So Jim and his colleagues did have to be careful about what they mixed in the bags. But romaine and iceberg are pretty close in respiration rate. So that wasn't a problem for us. With spinach, it's really a baby and its breathing rate is very high. Not that it couldn't be done, and it is being done for, for whole spinach bags, all spinach. But when you mix them together, that's when it gets complicated.

• 38:33Nicola Twilley?

  Complicated, but not impossible. You might think the salad guys are designing the perfect ratio of each different leaf in the bag to delight your taste buds, but that's not the whole truth. They have to consider how fast each leaf variety breathes, too.

• 38:48Cynthia Graber?

  We fiddled around with different mixtures of iceberg and romaine. And, and some tender leaves too got into that mix. End of story, they made it work. As a result of all of Jim's successes and the American eating public's access to a greater variety of chopped lettuces, the acreage of iceberg lettuce in Salinas has dropped dramatically. People aren't just eating iceberg anymore, and they're also not eating so many whole heads of lettuce. If, if we look at the total shipments, the total shipments of iceberg and Romaine are, the commodity shipments are way down. The packaged segment is way up. So my conclusion is that people don't buy heads of lettuce anymore.

• 39:30Cynthia Graber?

  They'd rather buy packages, whether it's Romaine or iceberg or tender leaves.

• 39:35Nicola Twilley?

  It is really something, a transformation in American salads. But also, Americans are not just eating more varied leaves, they're eating more of them. USDA data shows that our intake of leafy greens has significantly increased from where it was in the 1970s. And those researchers credit Jim's invention for a lot of that growth.

• 39:55Cynthia Graber?

  Which makes him pretty proud when he sees someone pick up a salad bag in the supermarket. Oh, I smile. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad to see that. And you know, when you go in the store today, they have generally not more than 20, 24 heads of iceberg, but they have 20 feet of refrigerated cases full of packaged salads. And it's, you know, Taylor Farm, Fresh Express, Organic Girl, but they all have their own personalities and people buy different ones. But fundamentally, the technology is the same in all of them. Jim revolutionized salads at home, but the thing that revolutionized salad in the restaurant, the salad bar.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  People my age think that the first salad bar was Pizza Hut. Like Pizza Hut, that was the dream salad bar when I was a kid. I mean, it was, it was amazing.

• 40:48Nicola Twilley?

  But although the Pizza Hut salad bar was a big deal, it wasn't actually the first. The first salad bar that was specifically advertised as a salad bar was at a restaurant called Chris's Corral in Oakdale, California in 1956. The inspiration seems to have come from an all you can eat buffet trend that in turn was inspired by a very popular smorgasbord at the Swedish Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair.

• 41:15Cynthia Graber?

  The salad bar got another bump when the sneeze guard was invented in 1959. There are a bunch of restaurants from the 60s that all claimed to have installed the earliest salad bars, but the chain Steak and Ale, the same guy went on to found Chili's and Bennigan's, Steak and Ale unveiled their salad bars in the late 60s and those became really popular.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  At Steak and Ale, what will 895 get you? Our hand-cut, six and three-quarter ounce sirloin. Our fresh salad bar. A steaming baked potato. Crisp vegetables. Hot wheat bread. Served by our friendly staff in a most relaxing setting. Given all this, perhaps we should be called Steak and a whole lot more.

• 41:57Nicola Twilley?

  The big insight was that a salad bar could entertain people and fill them up on lower cost food before their entrees came. So for a restaurant manager, they were gold. Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Ruby Tuesday, they all jumped on the salad bar train.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Introducing the all-new Pizza Hut Salad Station. Over 25 delicious new ingredients to discover. For a salad you can really make a meal of.

• 42:24Cynthia Graber?

  Pizza Hut had so, so many ingredients on their salad bar, things like lettuce, of course, and a bunch of regular, expected vegetables, but also sweet corn and bacon bits and croutons and shredded cheese and coleslaw.

• 42:35Speaker 06

  Slices of tomato, slices of white onion, olives. I would pile green chopped olives. That was so fancy for me. Broccoli, gross. Nobody wants raw broccoli in a salad.

• 42:46Nicola Twilley?

  One ridiculous fact is that before kale got trendy in the 2010s, Pizza Hut was the largest buyer of it in America, but not to eat. It was because they used it to decorate their salad bars as like a frilly green border.

• 43:01Cynthia Graber?

  But even though it seems kind of outdated now, the Pizza Hut salad bar truly lives on in legend.

• 43:07Speaker 06

  I think it was the plenty, you know? I think it was that I could go up there and have a big bowl of iceberg and Romaine and pile it up with Thousand Island and croutons and green olives. That to me, like, hello, hello gorgeous. So I think the reason we all remember the Pizza Hut salad bar, R.I.P. by the way, I mean, it has faded in glory and I think they're closing now, was that it was all in one place and we got to select and that really wasn't a thing back then.

• 43:41Cynthia Graber?

  The Pizza Hut salad bar may be difficult to find in the wild today, but it kind of doesn't matter so much because our salad options have expanded far beyond just packaged cut lettuce greens and expansive salad bars. There are many different kinds of lettuce at the farmer's market and all sorts of restaurants offer not just beautiful, but also truly delicious salads.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  And I do think that we're in a, we're in the golden era of salads.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  We have changed our sense of what good food really is. And salads definitely take the lead there. You expect a nice, fresh, genuinely fresh, nice little salad with a good dressing.

• 44:21Nicola Twilley?

  That freshness, in a way, it's like salad has come full circle. Back to its origins is something green and good, but also, just like in the past, salad truly is everything.

• 44:32Speaker 06

  Salad is, you know, it's like a kaleidoscope. And you can have dinner salad, you can put heavy things in there, and you can have side salads, and you can have, you know, a lunch salad that goes with something that doesn't need anything on the side at all. But the main thing that I think is always overlooked about salad is that you cannot define it. It's like jazz or modern dance. There's no instance where someone could say to me, but that's not a salad, you know? I mean, yeah, it is. Literally, anything you put in a bowl that sort of gets along together nicely is a salad.

• 45:15Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Emily Nunn, Jim Lugg and Laura Shapiro. Laura's newest book is coming out next year. It's called Big Appetites: Five Couples Who Dreamed Up a Revolution in Food. We have links to everyone's newsletters and books and companies on our website, gastropod.com.

• 45:29Nicola Twilley?

  And thanks as always to our producer, Claudia Geib. We have so much more salady goodness for special supporters, so look for that in your inbox and we'll be back with a fresh episode in a couple of weeks.

• 45:43Nicola Twilley?

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're

• 46:05Speaker 05

  starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 46:14Speaker 05

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.