Every spring, as the temperatures start to climb and my body suddenly produces enough serotonin to graduate from frozen Trader Joe’s food to actual fruits and vegetables, I decide that I’m going to become a Salad Person. I imagine how good it must feel to get several servings of fresh produce in one meal, knowing that I can enjoy my evening bolognese without forcing myself to prepare some green beans on the side because I’ve already gotten my day’s worth of veggies into my diet.
I’ve always loved vegetables, even as a kid, so you may think that becoming a Salad Person would be easy for me, that I’d have chopped tomatoes and onions already prepped and waiting for me in the fridge, that I’d be the type who could actually manage to finish an entire bag of mixed greens before they turned brown and slimy in the crisper drawer. But, alas, this is very much not my reality. When the clock strikes noon and I decide it’s time to eat lunch, I dread the thought of tucking into a salad instead of opting for my normal soup or pasta or sandwich.
Or at least, that’s how I used to feel before I started to reframe the way I think about salads. These days, I may not have reached certified Salad Person status, but there are several days a week that I reach for a chilled, vegetable-heavy meal over making a midday fast food run, and that’s progress.
So, what changed? I stopped assuming that every salad has to feature greens as the focal point.
It’s not that I don’t care for greens. I truly believe that there’s nothing more delicious than a particularly well-made Caesar salad, and I’ve been known to eat an entire bag of raw arugula while under the influence (embarrassingly, this has happened more than once). But I believe we all need to release the idea that a good salad must contain greens.
This realization came to me while on vacation in Athens, Greece. It was the dead of summer, with scorching temperatures reducing my normally massive appetite until sunset. By the fifth day of the trip, I realized that I’d eaten horiatiki salata, what we in the United States would call a “Greek salad,” for every single lunch since I’d arrived. I never felt like I was fighting my way through a plate of greens, though. There was no filler; every morsel, every chunk of cucumber, tomato, feta was a flavorful, vibrantly colored treat, especially when doused in particularly good olive oil. It never once felt like diet food—I was just eating a plate full of cold vegetables, and I was happy.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had a greens-less salad, but it was the first time I’d realized that I was limiting myself on the salad front. Something that I’d tried so hard to force myself to enjoy could take on this whole other, more exciting form—and one that didn’t require chopping and washing and drying piles of flavorless romaine. I was transformed as a salad eater.
Now, I see “salad” as an incredibly large category of dishes. Salads can be warm or cold, made of fruit or vegetables or a mixture of both, contain loads of greens or none at all. Thanks to cookbook author Jess Damuck, I’ve even called a plate of burrata and mandarins a salad, which is a specific type of freedom I believe everyone should experience in their lives.
We live in a food landscape that can be confusing and frustrating, a food culture in which it feels like we’re forced to choose between packaged, processed foods that slowly make us sick and hyper-healthy albeit deeply unappetizing “good-for-you” foods that do little to satisfy us. I believe that the greens-less salad allows us to inhabit a space comfortably in between these two extremes, a space where we eat fresh, whole foods that make us feel good without forcing “healthy” eating habits that we don’t actually enjoy.
So, yes, the cannellini beans you covered in olive oil and lemon zest and parsley count as a salad, as does the chopped fruit you drizzled some honey on for a bedtime snack. And if you’re also the kind of person who’s never used up an entire bag of kale in your life like I am, you have my permission to leave it off your grocery list this week. In fact, you might just find that you’re even more inclined to eat a salad if you do.
Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.