Zen Salad

4 min readApr 17, 2015

I’m in rapturous awe over this piece of art before me that is my salad.
Seriously.
I don’t even know exactly what I did differently from all the other times I utilize the salad bar, but damn this is good!

I think there are two different mindsets when it comes to eating salad. And most people fall into one or the other.
(Bear with me here…)
There are those that like a mix in every bite, and those that enjoy each ingredient separately.

It’s not that one or the other is right or wrong, it’s just how we’re accustomed to eating.

I’ve always enjoyed my salad by having a little of everything in each bite. A good mix of everything so that I get all the possible flavors and combination of flavors every time I put my fork in my mouth. You could say I’m a unionist when it comes to eating salad.

But it dawned on me that I could just as easily enjoy this salad for it’s specific ingredients, enjoying each for what is was individually.
Experiencing the different parts individually and enjoying the “mix” with each new bite.
It’s almost a salad inception. Experiencing a subset reality of a larger whole.
Salads can be so meta.

Have you ever eaten a salad in the dark?
I’m accustomed to consciously guiding what ends up on my fork. Ensuring that each bite has equal parts of everything that makes up the whole salad.
It’s a very involved process for me.
But you can’t do any of that in the dark.
Whatever ends up on the fork goes in the mouth, and that’s my bite.

Of course, on a certain level you can’t exactly have 100% separation of salad ingredients.
But letting the fork fall where it may, so to speak, is a wonderful exercise in zen.

Sure, I had to let go of control over my my eating experience, but I also had to let go of my preconceptions about an unmixed salad bite.
Now, as I eat, I’m aware of my assumptions about how a salad “should” taste.
Before, I was all about making sure that that nut and that cranberry and this piece of cheese ended up with all this other stuff over here. But now I don’t have to worry about making each bite “right” and the new flavors and textures become a series of new, exploratory events in and of themselves. I’m now experiencing each ingredient as an end it itself.
The process of eating my dinner suddenly becomes a lot less stressful too. Not that eating salad is particularly stressful, but letting go of individual bite-constitution certainly frees me up to be with my food more and experience the flavors at a deeper level.

Yes, yes, I’m overdramatizing my discovery of new ways to eat a salad.
But the point is that I never realized there was this whole new way of experiencing something which had become so routine!
I was stuck in my unionist ways when it came to salad. I didn’t realize the separatist view was just as valid a culinary experience.

Both ways carry advantages and disadvantages, and we can have opinions on which we prefer, but confining ourselves to one mindset or another only leaves us missing out.
Certainly if I only ate a salad with a separatist mindset, I would lose out on the full explosion of flavors and textures that come from eating a salad as a unionist.
Experiencing both standpoints has not only given me a bigger palette to explore, but also given me a deeper appreciation of how a salad can be made.

This post is a little weird, I know.

But the point I’m getting at, if you haven’t already grasped it, is that we can discover some pretty cool shit if we only open ourselves up to new ways of thinking and doing.

All of our thoughts and preconceptions are potential cages — however insignificant.
Simply being aware of them is to be free of them.

I hope I’ve maybe shed some light on some thought patterns you don’t need to abide by anymore.

The next time you’re eating, shut the lights off.
You’ll learn some interesting things about yourself.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to finish my dinner.

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Zen Salad

Written by C-137