For decades people have been told that if they want to eat healthy and lose weight they should eat more salads. But this expert says that salads are bad for you AND bad for our environment.
In The Washington Post food and science writer Tamar Haspel starts out saying,
There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.
It’s salad, and here are three main reasons why we need to rethink it.
Haspel goes on to note that lettuce has almost no nutritional value at all yet soaks up too much water and takes too much space to grow, too much energy to refrigerate, and too often become waste.
In fact, check out some of the “unfortunate” rankings for lettuce…
Salad has unfortunate repercussions in our food supply. Lettuce has a couple of No. 1 unenviable rankings in the food world. For starters, it’s the top source of food waste, vegetable division, becoming more than 1 billion pounds of uneaten salad every year. But it’s also the chief culprit for foodborne illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, green leafies accounted for 22 percent of all food-borne illnesses from 1998-2008.
Anyway, this is certainly a different set of ideas and darn it if they don’t sound quite logical. So, maybe you should forget about those salads. Do it for the earth, won’t you?