It's Not Easy Being Green

A coworker was griping about the usage of the word artisan. In his opinion ‘artisan’ had replaced the word from the days of the Silver Palate Cookbook – gourmet. As near as I could tell from his rather spirited tangent, this was wrong because artisan, used as a culinary buzzword, did not mean the product borne of a skilled trade, practiced craft or made by hand using classic techniques: No, here in the late ought-oughts of the new millennium, artisan implied fancy, expensive and elitist.

I can’t share my colleague’s umbrage to artisan because what other word can you use to convey the sense of small-scale, traditionally made food? For small-businesses that produces or grows food - marketing/packaging isn’t a strength, it is generally a low-priority afterthought. Whether small producers should seek the help of professionals, business school types or undergraduate interns – that isn’t the issue, in practice if they attach artisan to their product, it actually conveys a message about they are selling .

Later, I was asked if there was any culinary word usage that did upset me. The term Foodie is too stupid to get upset about so, I picked up a meme from the late restaurateur, Jon Beckel and began ranting about green salads. Years ago, after discovering I was from the Midwest, Jon asked me to explain (in a J’accuse type of way) why a green salad in the Land of Polite comes with carrots, shredded purple cabbage and cheese. Despite being sympathetic to the point Jon was making, he raked me over the coals about the customs of my people. The last one is easy, cheese gets added to everything in north-central-amercia.

As for the rest of it, the presence of carrots, cabbage, cucumbers, red onions or tomato(ish) wedges transform green salad into a garden salad. Green salad is lettuce and dressing. And no the lettuce doesn’t have to be green – radicchio, endives and other colors are allowed. I suppose that you could even douse the greens with ranch but vinaigrette made of mustard, garlic, pepper, oil and vinegar/lemon juice compliments rather than overwhelms the greens.

This isn’t a gourmet thing, or in the new parlance, a foodie thing, where a salad is ever only green, only served after the main course and only topped with a dressing made of 5 or fewer ingredients. Potato Salad, Tuna Salad, Egg Salad, Pasta Salad, Fruit Salad, Bread Salad are all legitimate salads. And I am not the only one thinking about what is a salad – perhaps, especially if you have watched any playoff basketball, you have seen the Taco Bell Ad; where two attractive men sit poolside discussing the very essence of salad – don’t worry though they are totally heterosexual because:

• They aren’t waxed-chested, nor clad in swimsuits, oddly they are fully clothed poolside.
• The salad they are eating has more meat than lettuce.
• A woman enters to clarify finer points about salad.
• They are, after-all eating Taco Bell & how ungay is that?

Even that deep-fried, cheese-laden concoction can be a salad – it isn’t artisan and it looks like a mega-taco but if it really wants to be a salad it can be a salad, just don’t call it green.