My Salad Bar History

When I was a kid there was a steak house on our town line called Brock’s that my parents would take us to as a very special treat.  One reason we loved it was that they brought that yummy crock of port wine cheese to the table when you sat down and the second was because they had a salad bar.

A salad bar was a new thing back in the 70’s.  In the dark of the restaurant all those little crocks of cut up vegetables nestled in the ice seemed so exciting.  I think it was the fact that we got to pick out things ourselves, that and the house made croutons, a treat we never would have at home.  For the most part the salad bar was a great way to get vegetables into kids.

For the years from age 14-21 a salad bar held no pull for me because both my boarding school and college had mediocre to terrible salad bars.  To this day just smelling those fake bacon bits makes me a little wheezy.

Then salad bars seem to disappear, except at Korean markets in NYC, but since I did not live there I did not cross their path often.

Enter Whole Foods, land of fresh greens in three choices, interesting vegetables like edamame and artichoke hearts as well as a whole 25 feet of prepared salads.  It is like salad bar nirvana.  House made dressings, six kinds of cheeses, quinoa, couscous, and barley salads, both grilled chicken and turkey and beans so many ways that practically every nationality’s favorite is represented.

Many different fruits are even there, all in their own little sections.  If you just want orange supremes, (that’s orange segments cut out of the peal and pith) you can have them or grapes pre-pulled from the stems just waiting to be scooped up.

The salad bar at Whole Foods has become a destination and rightfully so with it’s many tasty offerings all at $7.99 a pound.  The problem now is that there are too many delicious and fattening choices at the salad bar.  It seems the more fattening and yummy the heavier they are.  Take the mayonnaise laden egg salad.  I am sure that one small spoonful weighs in at $3.00 and 300 calories.  I can hardly imagine what the profit margin is on the oh-so-heavy hummus.

To help keep me away from the forbidden pre-made salad offerings I wish that Whole Foods would charge by the calorie count rather than the pound.  If the raw beet shreds were $4.00 a pound and the seafood salad was $8.00 I would be a lot more likely to eat only the raw vegetables and not be tempted by the others.  In my world Whole Foods would pay me to take the celery off their hands in the pay per calorie equation.  But alas, that will never happen.  All that mayonnaise and oil adds not just flavor, but weight, both to the container and to my hips.

So just like a visit to Brock’s, going to the Whole Foods Salad bar needs to be a once in a blue moon occasion because I am just not good at skipping the chicken salad or Mexican corn medley just begging to be sampled and I am never going to take celery, even if it is free.