A CULINARY HISTORY OF SALAD DAYS

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life. ~ Cyril Connolly 

 Salad is my escape path from now; from the startling, dispiriting events that began on Nov. 8. It’s a fresh means of branching way beyond anything drearily political.

So here’s my hopefully appetizing blog about the cliogastronomy of the green salad. [For you etymologists, I’ve tossed Clio, the Greek muse of history, into the bowl with gastronomy, the study of culinary customs, to create cliogastronomy, an historic analysis of culinary customs, in this case of salads.] I picked the green salad because it is parsecs distant from vulgar, citrusy orange-ish hair. Lettuce proceed...

A brief history of salad.  According to the Oxford Companion to Food, salad is a term derived from the Latin sal (salt), which yielded the form salata, salted things such as the raw vegetables. Salt is associated with salad because vegetables were seasoned with brine or salty oil-and-vinegar dressings during Roman times.

The phrase "salad days", meaning a "time of youthful inexperience" (on notion of "green"), is first recorded by Shakespeare in 1606. Salads ware eaten in ancient Roman and Greek times with a dressing of vinegar, oil and salt. Apparently ancient Roman salads were quite similar to modern-day ones.

Salad also appeared in late 14th century when the English, perhaps including Richard II, were eating salad or sallet at their meals. International trade records in the 17th century include cargo logs from the island of Curaçao to the Dutch colony of New Netherland (that later became New York, New Jersey and Delaware) of "a can of salad oil at 1.10 florins" and "an anger of wine vinegar at 16 florins", primal precursors to Newman’s Own Italian dressing. Back in the Old World, Louis XIV, the Sun King, probably enjoyed several types of salads, including mixed greens, pickled vegetables and boiled salads (warm vegetables dressed in vinegar/spices). Yum!

Unsurprisingly, salads have evolved over the centuries. The Food Timeline enumerates 23 different varieties of salads, everything from Caesar salad to Watergate salad. Caesar salad wasn't concocted by Augustus, the first Roman emperor; it was created by Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who opened a series of restaurants in Tijuana, Mexico. On Fourth of July weekend in 1924 at Caesar's Place, Cardini created the salad as a main course, arranging the lettuce leaves - together with garlic, olive oil, croutons, Parmesan cheese, Worchestershire sauce and anchovies - on a plate with the intentiion that they would be eaten with his customers' fingers. The salad became particularly popular with Hollywood movie people who visited Tijuana. The rest is history. 
And now we have space salads, way beyond Tijuana. Space salad farming is now officially a thing according to NASA. After proving that lettuce grown entirely in space was safe to eat back in 2015, NASA has announced that the first crop of orbital veggies has now been cultivated exclusively for consumption by the crew.

This latest crop of “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce grown entirely on the International Space Station (ISS), operation name, Veg-03, is the newest step in NASA’s ongoing efforts to create a sustainable, renewable food source aboard their spacecraft. The first space lettuce eaten by American astronauts (Veg-01) was produced back in 2015, and was sampled both plain, and with balsamic vinegar by the ISS crew. Astronaut hero Scott Kelly said at the time that it tasted like arugula.

Lettuce.  Cliogastronomically speaking, what’s known about lettuce, the primary ingredient in green salads? Lettuce is a member of the daisy family. Its first recorded production was in Egypt 4700 years ago. It was initially grown for the oil from its seeds and considered a sacred plant of the reproduction god Min.

Lettuce leaves’ consumption came at bit later. Based on hieroglyphics, Egyptian lettuce may have been an ancient ancestor of what we now call romaine lettuce. There are 2 broad types of lettuce, head lettuce – like the iceberg lettuce you consumed as a child; and leaf lettuce – like romaine, bib and red-leaf. California’s Central Valley accounts for 71% of US head lettuce production, followed by Arizona producing nearly 29%. These 2 states also produce over 98% of leaf lettuce in the US. Lettuce is grown year-round in California, much of it in the Salinas Valley the nation’s salad bowl, and Arizona.

According to the USDA Census of Agriculture, 3.88 billion pounds of lettuce were produced in 2012 on 323,359 acres, up 3% since 2007. In 2014, annual consumption was 14.1 pounds and 10.8 pounds per person for head and leaf/romaine lettuce, respectively. Due to its very high water content (94.9%), lettuce cannot be successfully frozen, canned or dried and thus must be eaten fresh. The number of farms producing lettuce on 5 acres or less (such as vertical farms) increased 38% between 2007 and 2012. Sales of US lettuce in 2013 totaled nearly $1.5 billion, making lettuce a leading vegetable crop in terms of value. In 2014, salad restaurants in the US were earning more than $300 million. This seems like a fair amount of green (money), nevertheless it represents a minuscule 4 one-hundredths of a percent of total US restaurant industry revenues. Lots of room for growth.

Tomatoes.  As you know, a myriad of other veges can be tossed with lettuce to create a mixed greens salad, including artichoke hearts, avocados, carrots, celery, cucumbers, hearts of palm, mushrooms, olives, onions, peppers, radishes, red onions, shallots, and spring onions. For me, the most important vegetable to include in a mixed greens salad is the tomato, all others pale in comparison. The US popularized mixed greens salads in the late 19th century.

Tomatoes are a new-world fruit, probably originating in what’s now Peru. They made their way to Europe in the 16th century, courtesy of Spanish explorers. There are more than 3,000 varieties of heirloom or heritage tomatoes in active cultivation worldwide and more than 10,000 known varieties. The name tomato comes from the Aztec xitomatl (or tomatl, that means “plump thing with a naval.”) gave rise to the Spanish word "tomate," from which the English word originates.

Rudolf Grewe dug into the earliest of Europe’s culinary encounters with the tomato and discovered that although some Europeans knew tomatoes could be eaten; few actually did, because most thought tomatoes were poisonous. [Since it is a relative of the nightshade family, a tomato plant’s leaves are indeed poisonous.] One writer in 1585 suggested they be prepared “with pepper, salt, and oil.” But this writer didn’t recommend it, as tomatoes “give little and bad nourishment.”[Tomatoes are 94.5% water, so he had a nutritional point. But despite their low calories, they offer a fair amount of vitamins C and K and minerals.] Even though they were widely grown in European gardens as a decorative plant, it took more than a century for Europeans to record any formal culinary preparations for tomatoes.

Likewise, some early colonists in the US also believed that the brightly colored fruit was poisonous. By the time commercial production began in the mid-1800s, the tomato was well established as a popular produce item in the American diet.

From coast to coast, we love tomatoes. Tomatoes are the second most consumed vegetable in the US, behind potatoes. Ninety-three percent of American gardening households grow tomatoes. My parents planted them in their WWII “victory gardens” and every year afterwards. As a youth, I remember driving past miles of commercial tomato groves in Southern New Jersey (the “Garden State”) when we vacationed on the Jersey shore in the summer.

There are 2 general categories of tomatoes, fresh market and processed. Fresh tomatoes are grown in all 50 states. In 2014, annual per capita fresh market and processed tomato consumption was 20.6 pounds and 67.2 pounds, respectively. Florida produces the most fresh-market tomatoes. California grows 96% of all US processed tomatoes that you eat in salsa and other tomato products such as sauce, paste, ketchup and canned tomatoes. Americans have increased their tomato consumption 30% over the last 20 years, mostly in processed forms.

In 2014, approximately, 27.3 million pounds of fresh market tomatoes were harvested with a total value of $1.14 billion. A total of 14.6 million tons of processed tomatoes were grown in 2014, with a total value of about $1.32 billion. Tomato production has become much more efficient. Half a century ago, harvesting California’s 2.2 million tons of tomatoes for ketchup required as many as 45,000 workers or barely 49 tons per worker. In the 1960s, scientists and engineers at the University of California – Davis, developed an oblong tomato that lent itself to being machine-picked and an efficient mechanical harvester to do the job in one pass through a field. By 2000, only 5,000 harvest workers were employed in California to pick and sort what was by then a 12-million-ton crop of tomatoes. That’s roughly 2,400 tons per worker, a 49 times increase in productivity over 5 decades.

As mentioned before, there are innumerable varieties of tasty, colorful tomatoes such as beefsteak, plum, cherry and grape cultivars. Our favorites include dry-farmed Early Girls, where the tomato plants are no longer watered after they reach maturity. This lack of water stresses the plant, forcing its roots deep into the soil in search of water and focuses its efforts on producing fruit.

But no matter what the size, shape or color, when tossed in a mixed greens salad the tomato provides the perfect accompaniment for a wondrously fresh, flavorsome dish that many have enjoyed over the centuries. May every day be a salad day; it trumps anything. 

IS VERTICAL FARMING THE NEXT BIG GREEN THING?

If Matt Damon can grow potatoes on Mars, why can’t we grow lettuce and basil in Bushwick? 

Is vertical farming the next big green thing? You would think so if you follow the growing interest of the media. Or will it turn out to be like Webvan and other dot-com busted ideas?

It’s too early to tell if the billions that venture capitalists have plowed into food and agriculture (ag) tech startups like AeroFarms, Edenworks and Plantagon will provide fiscal fruit in addition to actual produce. But vertical farming is definitely being talked about way beyond Silicon Valley as well as the Central Valley’s and Florida’s non-vertical “flat-land” farms. Its promoters euphorically predict VF will change the way food is produced and ultimately even help mitigate hunger.

Vertical farming (VF), also called warehouse farming and urban farming, refers to indoor food production without sunlight or soil. Instead, VF uses hydroponics, aeroponics, frequency-specific LEDs and systems to grow vegetables in columns of vertically-stacked racks from 6 to 80 feet high inside warehouses or other open-space buildings, as shown in the picture below. Although the first vertical farm in the world was a hydroponics facility built in Armenia sometime before 1951, Japan has emerged as a leader in commercial VFs after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tidal wave destroyed a substantial amount of cropland.

Most vertical farms grow “microgreens” – salad vegetables such as lettuce, arugula, Swiss chard, sprouts and herbs – picked right after the first sets of leaves have developed. Lettuce is the most popular microgreen grown by VFs.

City-Hydro’s Vertical Farm. Source: New York Times

Here's a brief summary of what’s known about lettuce. Lettuce is a member of the daisy family. The first record of its production was in Egypt 4700 years ago. It was initially grown for the oil from its seeds and considered a sacred plant of the reproduction god Min. Lettuce believe in Min.

Lettuce leaves’ consumption came at bit later. Based on hieroglyphic information, Egyptian lettuce may have been an ancient ancestor of what we now call romaine lettuce. There are 2 general types of lettuce, head lettuce – like the iceberg lettuce you consumed as a child and still do in a Caesar salad; and leaf lettuce – like romaine, bib and red-leaf. California’s Central Valley accounts for 71% of US head lettuce production, followed by Arizona producing nearly 29%. These 2 states also produce over 98% of leaf lettuce in the US. Lettuce is grown year-round in CA and AZ.

According to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, 3.88 billion pounds of lettuce were produced on 323,359 acres, up 3% since 2007. In 2014, annual consumption was 14.1 pounds and 10.8 pounds per person for head and leaf/romaine lettuce, respectively. Due to its very high water content (94.9%), lettuce cannot be successfully frozen, canned or dried and thus must be eaten fresh. The number of farms producing lettuce on 5 acres or less (such as vertical farms) increased 38% between 2007 and 2012. Twelve percent of domestic lettuce is exported. Sales of US lettuce in 2013 totaled nearly $1.5 billion, making lettuce the leading vegetable crop in terms of value.

Because VFs are a new type of farm operation, they account for a very thin wedge of the leaf lettuce market. Although VF techniques use far less water and fertilizer and no pesticides, because the sun doesn’t shine indoors VFs use much larger amounts of electricity than conventional farms. Alas, VFs get no free sunshine.

Recently VF start-ups have enjoyed quite a bit of media attention. After all, who wouldn’t be interested in folks who grow micro-romaine in warehouses in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the east-coast center of nearly everything cool, now including micro-lettuce?

Part of this tech-oriented attention is concentrated on the amount of green (funding) ag start-ups have received. “Food and ag tech” start-ups have received notable venture-capital (VC) backing; $4.6 billion in 2015, a considerable sum that represents 3.5% of all VC funding.

The pluses of VF are enticing. Vertical farms can produce microgreens much faster than their horizontal, dirt-based brethren. Some VFs indicate their leaf greens can be produced in 12 to 16 days. That’s far less time than regular, horizontal leaf lettuce farms’ harvest cycle. Depending on the variety and time of year, outdoor lettuce is produced between 65–130 days from planting to harvesting. With the reduced growing cycle and the increased amount of food grown per unit of production area, VFs’ lettuce yield is probably at least 180% of the outdoor leaf lettuce yield, although some VFs claim far higher yields.

Also VF producers enjoy reduced transportation costs because their markets are often geographically close. However, the transport costs associated with shipping outdoor lettuce ordinarily are a minor expense. Overall, transportation costs account for about 4% of the energy used in the US food system.

The minuses of producing VF microgreens center on its micro scale and indoor-ness. Although some VFs are growing bigger, many remain miniature – using a garage, spare bedroom or small building interior areas to produce greens. Vertical farms save on unit water, fertilizer and pesticide costs but are saddled with much higher electricity costs for lighting, pumping and cooling. VFs are very electricity intensive. Even as price of LEDs diminishes, monthly lighting expenses are sizeable for VFs. One VF owner says his operation, a one-acre VF in Michigan that produces 33 tons of microgreens per year, is profitable but he is paying $7,000/mo for cheaper off-peak electricity, electricity, which represents 8.4% of annual revenues.This owner expects electricity costs can be reduced to $5,000/mo by year-end with the use of frequency-specific LEDs. With these LEDs, he also expects crop yield will increase.

It is not clear that as VFs’ production grows vertical farmers’ marginal electricity costs can be reduced that much because each plant requires a specified amount of lighting. Vertical farms’ profitability will depend on that. One reason that VF may remain a small, tentative niche is that like all horizontal farmers, VFs need to produce green profits, not just greens to be sustainable. And VF profitability has been an issue.

“There are situations in dense urban areas where space is highly limited that growing food with artificial lights, stacked vertically, makes sense, especially highly perishable products like sprouts or salad greens where there is an immediate market for them,” said Stephen J. Ventura, a professor of environmental studies and soil science at the University of Wisconsin. Critics consider it unlikely that vertical farming can produce enough food of different varieties to feed a significant number of people in a commercially viable way.

Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University, remains concerned about VFs’ longer-term feasibility when he states, “It’s such an appealing idea — ‘Press Floor 10 for lettuce’ — that people picked up on it right away. The fundamental problem [with VFs] is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require a lot of electricity probably from burning of a lot of fossil fuels. Vertical farming is fine if you’ll let me have a vertical nuclear reactor next to it.” Prof. Bugbee’s tongue is in his cheek regarding the vertical nuclear reactor. But in 2015, 67% of US electricity was generated from awfully un-green fossil-fuels.

Because it’s a newfangled way of producing produce, there are no data available about the total amount of food produced by VFs. Still it’s a miniscule slice of overall food production. The largest VF now in operation is 2.3 acres, which represents 0.5% of the average-sized farm in the US. For a bit more perspective about how tiny VFs are relative to outdoor vegetable farms, the largest vegetable producer (including lettuce) in the Central Valley tills 53,095 acres.

Most members of the VF community do not expect they will ever harvest anything but a small serving of US overall vegetable production. Nonetheless, small servings of high-value local microgreens are fine because few VFs are interested in selling to mass food distributors like Safeway and Kroger. Some more aggressive VFs might want to sell to upmarket retailers like Whole Foods, but VFs’ current production volumes usually do not meet Whole Foods’ requisite needs. Instead, successful FVs are likely to keep selling directly to local higher-end restaurants, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) coops and/or other direct-to-consumer channels where higher prices hold sway. The USDA asserts many consumers are willing to pay a premium for local food, as anyone considering farmers-market produce can attest.

VF-grown microgreens are as local as veges can get. Yet the most-often used definition of “local” food is quite expansive and encompasses far more than VF producers. According to the definition adopted by Congress in the 2008 Farm Act, the total distance that a product can be transported and still be considered a “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product” is less than 400 miles from its origin, or within the State in which it is produced. With this Farm Act local food definition, lettuce grown in Youngstown, Ohio or Montreal, Canada would be considered locally produced in Brooklyn!

The USDA estimates that local food sales totaled $6.1 billion in 2012, which represents 0.45% of total US food sales. Local food sales are quickly growing and are projected to increase 24% per year during the next 3 years.

Hans Hassle, chief executive of Plantagon International a Swedish VF firm that’s expanding in the US and around the globe, says “Vertical farming as an industry is very much at the beginning. We have focused on making it industrial and scalable, and that’s a little bit crazy. It’s like trying to do the impossible. It looks almost like science fiction.”

But not nearly as fictional as Martian potatoes. Here’s to indoor microgreens in Bushwick and beyond…