Iceberg lettuce is the salad green everyone professes to hate, including a passionate clique (who knew?) on Twitter. “I love salads but I hate iceberg lettuce SO MUCH can we just agree as a people to move on from it’s terribleness? It's the least appetising,” one user tweeted recently.
I feel the same way about the terribleness of incorrect punctuation, but I suppose I should just keep to the subject at hand. As it turns out, even chain restaurants such as the USA's Chick-fil-A have joined the Lettuce Police. The chefs at Chick-fil-A’s Atlanta-based test kitchens have the freedom to experiment with all sorts of ingredients except for — yep, you guessed it.
"We have a mandate: Never use iceberg lettuce," David Farmer, Chick-fil-A vice president of menu strategy and development, said in an April 11 interview with Business Insider. In Farmer’s opinion, iceberg lettuce is tasteless and nutritionless. “It's at the bottom of the salad food chain,” he is quoted as saying. “There is no nutritional value in iceberg lettuce.”
This position is nothing new. For years, iceberg lettuce was the redheaded stepchild of the salad-green family, scorned by the cognoscenti for being watery, lacking in flavor, and being embarrassingly common. But pub patrons and sandwich sellers don’t care, and neither do any number of high-end chefs, who charge top dollar for a wedge of iceberg draped in a luxurious cloak of (artisanal) blue cheese dressing and crumbled (artisanal) bacon. According to an April 20 MarketWatch report, Americans still eat more iceberg than they do kale and spinach combined.
Because so many people are hung up on nutrition and nothing else, let’s deal with that first. It’s true that darker greens contain more nutrients, but iceberg lettuce has small amounts of protein, carbohydrates (half of which are dietary fiber), vitamins, and minerals. Here’s a helpful side-by-side comparison of iceberg and romaine. If I were introducing a picky eater to stronger-tasting, more nutrient-dense salad greens, combining them with crunchy, mild iceberg might go a long way in their conversion. Just sayin’.
Iceberg is also refreshing. Like a cucumber, it’s crisp and juicy, and in hot weather, just looking at it makes me feel cool. To my mind, its clean, neutral flavor has it all over the murkiness you’ll get from an indiscriminate mesclun blend any day.
That is why iceberg will be among the lettuces I’ll be planting in the backyard this year. Also, iceberg types are famously durable; those tight heads were the only members of my salad patch that survived a hot spell last summer.
According to The Smithsonian, the iceberg lettuce was developed in America in the 1940s, to answer the need for a transportable product, and the name iceberg comes from the piles of ice initially used to transport them, before refrigerated rail transport.
I’d wager the first proponents of iceberg would be appalled at how commercial producers strip the cultivar of the vibrant green outer leaves that form a come-hither ruffle around the compact white, almost translucent heart. The growers who sell at farmers markets know how captivating this lettuce can look, though, and now a striking red iceberg has joined the party. The color comes from the antioxidant-rich pigments called anthocyanins.
Generally speaking, salad greens love cool weather, and the seedlings will even tolerate a light frost. Because the seeds germinate quickly and days to maturity are typically short, lettuces make a great crop for novice kitchen gardeners. What’s more, you can cultivate varieties that you’ll never see at a supermarket or even many farmers markets.
