SALAD DAYS

Salads: just the word is enough to send shivers down the spine of any self respecting meat-eater . Who wants to eat boring old veggies, bland and practically tasteless, when there is meat? Now I can see frowns of disapproval from the die-hard veggies. But then, if you want to be kind to animals, why are you eating their food?

But living in the US, that too with an American family has caused me to dramatically change my opinion. There has been so much meat in my diet that I have now come to love salads with a passion.

Salads have saved my skin a number of times, especially in restaurants. I hate having to choose what to eat. Yeah I am variety-phobic. I generally beg someone else to choose what I should eat. But this does not always work, especially in restaurants where the menu has exotic dishes and no one has any idea what goes into any of them. Along comes a salad in shining armor to my rescue.

And the sheer variety in salads, now this is one area that I love variety. It would be sheer sacrilege to call the salads here boring. They come in all shapes and sizes with the most obscure ingredients, like beans, pieces of meat, fish, garbanzo beans (the lowly channa) and exotic stuff like artichoke hearts.

Salads are also a godsend for people on a diet. Though I fail to understand how you can diet with salads when all the dressings are so calorie-intensive!!

And the best part about salads? The snob value. The sheer superiority complex that differentiates the salad eaters from lesser human beings. Have you ever noticed people in a restaurant who are smug and walk with their noses in the air and what seems suspiciously like a halo around their heads? These are the self-righteous ones who have just chosen salad for their meal.