Lettuce explain why Chick-fil-A just shredded America’s favorite green
From traveling produce miracle to culinary joke and back again
Iceberg lettuce has long suffered the barbs of food snobs and nutritionists who’ve ridiculed it as “the polyester of lettuce.” But things have really sunk to new vegetal lows when a restaurant chain best known for peddling fried chicken sandwiches says it will ax iceberg from menus.
Georgia-based chicken chain Chick-fil-A revealed Monday that it has issued a mandate against iceberg, saying the crisp, watery orbs don’t pack the same nutritional punch as darker, more leafy greens like kale.
The chain appears to be on a health kick. In January, it urged consumers to, start the “New Year by adding one healthy habit” to their routines. That habit? Eating smaller meals, “like an 8-count pack of grilled nuggets every three to four hours,” the chain advised. Which, obviously, is a lot of Chick-fil-A chicken.
Now, out of continued concern for your health, the chain will no longer serve iceberg lettuce on its sandwiches. “It’s at the bottom of the salad food chain,” said David Farmer, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of menu strategy and development, in an interview with Business Insider. “There is no nutritional value in iceberg lettuce.”
The move could leave some customers missing iceberg’s distinctive structure and crunch, features that have made the lettuce both a staple of American cuisine — a raft that sailed Thousand Island and ranch dressing into the country’s culinary pantheon — and a butt of gastronomic jokes.
There are reasons iceberg got where it is. In the 1940s, before refrigerated trucking, iceberg lettuce — before then known as crisphead lettuce — was one of the few varieties of lettuce that could withstand cross-country travel. The name, iceberg, came from the ice distributors packed around the heads. For decades, if diners ordered salad, they got iceberg.
But in 1970, farmer rights activist, Cesar Chavez, led strikes protesting the treatment of growers in California, where most of the country’s lettuce was (and is) grown. Some 7,000 lettuce pickers went on strike — the biggest farm labor strike in US history. The price of iceberg shot up as the light green heads rotted in the fields.
The so-called “Salad Bowl” strike happened around the same time that a new kind of health consciousness set in. California cuisine started spreading east, and more Americans started to realize that lettuce wasn’t just iceberg, but mesclun, frisee, oak leaf and romaine — lettuces that don’t tolerate slatherings of heavy dressings, which were also going out of style in favor of vinaigrettes.
Within a few decades, the country had become host to scores of Whole Foods stores selling box after box of mixed field greens, and it had a presidential candidate in Barack Obama who lamented the elevated cost of arugula.
Iceberg had become a joke — a conveyance for canned peaches and cottage cheese or un-trendy salad dressing.
But, then, its fate improved. A little.
In 2007 — the same year Obama decried the price of arugula — the country’s largest lettuce grower, Salinas, Cal.-based Tanimura and Antle, went on a marketing offensive. The company decided iceberg needed a “day” of its own.
“Mother’s Day has strawberries, Thanksgiving has celery, but historically no holiday has been associated with Iceberg lettuce,” said the company’s CEO Rick Antle, in a press release. “What better product to claim ownership of Father’s Day than the cornerstone salad of steakhouse menus?”
All of a sudden, wedges of iceberg were on hip dining tables across the country, being applauded for their nostalgia-inducing crunch. Iceberg, at least for a while, reclaimed its throne.
But the fact remains, iceberg isn’t nutritious. When kale — its textural and nutritional opposite — emerged as the trendy green of the moment a few years ago, it became clear that the American produce palate, at least among elite eaters, had changed in favor of nutrient-packed dark greens.
It’s just taken Chick-Fil-A a while to catch up.
