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Hated salads and most vegetables growing up. I don't think I had every heard of Romaine lettuce until I was in my mid-20s. I can trace what I thought was my hatred of vegetables back to just eating bad or canned versions of almost all of em. I'm lookin at you green beans.
I wonder if this is why my kids really like vegetables. They grew up eating them "supermarket fresh" and now the younger one likes having his own veggie plot in the garden.

I absolutely despise canned vegetables. I'll give canned tomatoes & beans a pass, but everything else must go.

> I'll give canned tomatoes & beans a pass

I favour San Marzano tomatoes for cooking. If they're not in a tin, and whole, they're not allowed to be sold as "DOP".

You can get San Marzano seeds and grow your own; no doubt they're very good. You can buy fresh San Marzano at a greengrocer; they're probably fine too. But San Marzano DOP are picked and tinned only in the foothills of Vesuvius.

You also can't get tinned chopped San Marzano DOP; they have to be whole. To be fair, chopping up a tin of San Marzano results in a soupy pulp, which is fine if you're making a sauce or soup, which is what they're best for. Tinned chopped tomatoes tend to be chopped whole - you get the cores as well as the pulp. I take out the cores when I chop them. I've always been picky with tomatoes.

I've never heard of tinned lettuce.

I always believed the veggie hate has more to do with children's pallet being more sensitive to bitterness.
Canned Whole peeled tomatoes are the best way to get tomatoes (for cooking) out of season. Canned Chopped tomatoes and tomato sauce are low quality. Paste is usually medium quality.
Giving beans a pass == letting beans go?
I don't know, I hated veggies until college, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly attributable to the fact that I lacked the patience for so-called "acquired tastes" until I matured a bit. I'm comfortable saying that I just grew up, rather than explaining it as "I didn't change, vegetables just actually used to be bad when I was a kid, and now they're good."
Fresh and raw green beans are superb, but fairly unusual in stores. When I was a kid my family ate lots of them because one of my neighbors was a green bean farmer and gave away bags of fresh beans to everybody he knew. But the vast majority of beans he farmed went straight to a processing plant to be canned. Some got frozen, those are better than canned but far inferior to fresh.
'Fresh and raw' exists in stores, but by the time they get home fresh is relative and they are not very fresh. Frozen is often best because it goes from field to freezer quick and thus locks in freshness. Not always though, you need to try each vegetable to see what works.
mmm. Green beans fresh out of the garden, sauteed in butter & garlic would have been on the menu if the rabbits hadn't gotten to them first...
Please tell me canned lettuce isn't a thing...
I strongly doubt this, if it was they would definitely have served it for lunch in elementary school.

I can see myself getting in trouble for not eating it too. Dull gray, wet but with a fluid that can't really be called either water or grease, somehow soggy and yet wilted at the same time. Smelling of year old unwashed gym socks but with a flavor best described as mealworm extract concentrate.

Actually now that I think about it, I'm surprised it's not a thing.

It isn't, but canned spinach is, and it's as disgusting as you might imagine.
Pickled lettuce is, though I've not tried it myself.
my grandfather had a farm and one of the crops was green beans. I use to just walk to the field and pick beans for a snack when I was little. They are so good like that.
Pretty much the same story as the Red Delicious Apple, Imperator Carrot, and Pascal Celery - the variety that was easiest to grow and was most shelf stable won out, at the expense of taste or nutrition.
I haven't had a red delicious in decades. Also apparently they used to be delicious. Most carrots I see in grocery stores here are Nantes.
We still have a variety of tasty apples here in France (don't know about their nutritional worth, though). But what totally kills me is seeing apples being hauled in all the way from freaking Chile, while the same variety is in season locally.
> the variety that was easiest to grow and was most shelf stable won out

This is a bit of a lazy trope at this point - and somewhat self-fulfilling. There are lots of counter examples or fruits that only seem easy to grow and shelf stable in hindsight because we prioritized them. Fresh pineapples, bananas, avocados, grapefruit, etc. Same thing with nutrition - the nutrition only declined after they were grown en masse or switched to hydroponic.

Changing tastes account for a lot. People really thought these were superior products at the time. Also the rise of national media came with it recipe books - and consistent ingredients nationwide became desirable in its own way.

The most common apples at my local stores are Fuji, Gala, and Honeycrisp. No red delicious at all
At any given time we have 2-3 different types of lettuce in the fridge. But I lean a lot more towards iceberg these days than I used to. It keeps the longest and is the most versatile (maybe save for Romaine). And yes, that supreme crunch. There is no amount of spinach you can put on a sandwich to make itself noticeable.

A lot of what you buy in a grocery store is grown hydroponically, so it really doesn't matter for flavor what you buy - you just pick how bitter of a green you want. But if you can pick up a fresh iceberg from your local farmer's market, it might surprise you how much flavor is in that bad boy.

So the article makes the economic argument, that it's easy to grow and ship. Which has been the main/economic argument all along. They don't compare it to anything else except kale, which has been a fad the past decade that I've never really understood. (I like kale for several different uses, but the zeitgeist has been absurd.) The article makes no mention of the dozens of different varieties of lettuce or hundreds of varieties of other greens that have higher nutritional content and an incredibly broad variety of flavors. It doesn't even talk about the many other uses of iceberg lettuce beyond wedge salads. Pretty shallow article overall. Perfect for social media.
Honestly, the economic "it's cheap to sell!" is a pretty superficial trope in most of these articles, and in this case it's probably dead wrong. Kale or chard are usually much easier to grow and last longer than iceberg.

Iceberg won out because our grandparents and great-grandparents considered it a superior ingredient. They grew up in a world where bitter chewy greens were common and iceberg stood out based on their tastes at the time.

I don't know, I like iceberg more than mesclun mix. A wedge of iceberg plus some tasty things and served with steak/chicken/pork chops goes great. Shredded iceberg is irredeemably awful. But a whole big wedge of it? I've never complained when served it, at least.
The old timey steakhouse standard-- and they're delicious on a hot summer day.

I've always suspected the humble iceberg wedge salad is a restauranteur's ideal menu item: take a 50¢ head of lettuce, divide it into quarters, add toppings and sell it for a 60x or more markup.

I wouldn't be surprised if it had the highest margin of all the items on the menu :)

For what it's worth, I prefer romaine or other lettuces or greens in salad, but can appreciate wedge-type iceberg salads as well.

I don't mind shredded iceberg lettuce in certain uses if it's freshly cut and I trust where it's coming from. I like it on a sandwich or burger, for example. I still think I'd prefer other alternatives more but it has its own qualities to appreciate.

I know it's terribly low-class of me, but iceberg lettuce remains my favorite lettuce.

I agree that shredding it kind of ruins it, though.

Wedge salads are great. But, how do they get properly washed? Do you have to disassemble the layers, wash them, and put it back together? Or is it just the outer leaves you have to worry about?
Am I the only one who thinks lettuce is just...overrated?

Greek salad, Israeli Salad, Olivier Salad - all of the lettuce-less salads are far superior.

If I wanted to eat something that tastes like nothing and has no real nutritional value...I will eat nothing.

Funny memory from childhood: kale used to be used for decoration on buffets and on served plates—you weren't expected to eat it.

Kale had an incredible PR campaign that turned it from scraps to leading leaf.

> you weren't expected to eat it

Despite the incredible PR campaign, I still mostly feel that way about kale. I just don't really enjoy it. Not the flavor, not the texture. Might as well be eating weeds.

Listened to a news story at some point over the last couple years, as there were lettuce shortages in North America due to the drought in the US Southwest, and one quote stayed in my mind:

"Lettuce is perhaps the most expensive way to transport refrigerated water from farm to table."

Iceberg lettuce is the worst, as it has almost no nutritional value.

Iceberg is the primary reason I didn’t like salads for most of my life. Then I discovered that you can eat fresh spinach, not boiled, and I started eating salads.

Also, I’ve never heard of or seen a “wedge salad”. Is that what it sounds like?

> I’ve never heard of or seen a “wedge salad”. Is that what it sounds like?

Yes. It's a wedge of a head of iceberg with dressing on it.

As a french, I'm deeply horrified. I mean, Iceberg is basically the cheapest blandest salad you can buy.

That's the thing you want to eat out of the fridge as a filler, cold with some sort of fat sauce (also directly out of the fridge, like a ranch or something) because otherwise it has no taste nor recognizable texture. Yes it's crunchy, but there are so many crunchy salads which are way tastier and better (like the "Sucrine", can't find an English name, that's not even the better, but that's readily available (fresh, not in a bag you need to refrigerate))

“I think when it comes to just sheer deliciousness, people always loved iceberg lettuce,” says Angie Rito, chef and co-owner at Don Angie." Wat. I guess that was a century ago, before the industrialization and selection of bland lettuces that are bland but can survive without darkening for a week in a plastic bag.

I'm always dumbfounded hearing about the American way to think about food, all you can readily buy is so industrialized, you miss so much.

> I'm always dumbfounded hearing about the American way to think about food, all you can readily buy is so industrialized, you miss so much.

I think you're dumbfounded because you don't understand how Americans think about food, except what you hear on the Internet. Which, I shouldn't have to point out, is mostly a load of horseshit.

America is the land of farms as far as the eye can see, growing all kinds of different foods. We have wonderful foods. I can go into a bog standard Kroger right now and there's an entire wing of the store with fresh fruits and vegetables, another area with hundreds of different cheeses from around the world. I can even buy common European brands of butter (though I prefer our local stuff). And this is a bland everyday American supermarket, not one of the many local farmer's markets.

Sometimes I wonder where Europeans get their crazy ideas about what it's like to live in America.

As a french, you may be misunderstanding the article.

Iceberg is not a salad, it's a lettuce first of all. And this is not about being torn up to use for the "cheapest blandest salads" you're referring to, it's a wedge "salad" which is an entire large piece of solid iceberg lettuce dressed in creamy blue cheese and bacon. You say it has "no recognizable texture" but it's all texture, the entire point of a wedge salad is the amazing, crunchy, ribbed, fresh texture. Contrasting with the rich fat of the cheese and the crispiness of the bacon. It's a pairing made in heaven, just like strawberries and cream, or melon and prosciutto.

I'm always dumbfounded when people assume their own country/cuisine/whatever is so superior to another, especially when they don't even seem to understand the item in question in the first place.

iceberg lettuce is, as you say, a sandwich lettuce, not a salad lettuce. It has a very clear crispy texture (as you say). Radicchio is only crispy in the center part.

It was a revelation when I moved to california and had my first real salad. it was intensely bitter with nutty and other flavors. Later I found out that arugala, endive, radicchio, are all great when properly dressed with a good salad oil, but they definitely have wayyyyy more flavor.

I'd be surprised if anybody could even really say what iceberg lettuce "tastes" like- to me it just tasts like crunchy water.

Iceberg definitely has a flavor. Very mild, to be sure, but it has one.
And even worse, hardly any nutrients compared to other leaf veggies.
Yeh - as a Brit, I concur. Romaine, for me.
Jingoism about lettuce? Jfc
The "lettuce wars"? Really?
> I think when it comes to just sheer deliciousness, people always loved iceberg lettuce

That's an idiosyncratic take. It tastes like ... water.

Yeah. I love to use iceberg lettuce, but it's 100% for texture and freshness. It has virtually no flavor at all. But that's what makes it such a great vehicle for other delicious flavors to put on top of it. I have to assume that's what the author meant to say, because I had the same double-take at that sentence.