Iceberg Lettuce

This is the origin of the conqueror of western plates, heir of the Pharoahs, first among leafy greens: iceberg lettuce.

Long before the great flood and the confusion of tongues, Min—a god of the Black Land—demanded oil. His people obeyed. Between his white bull and barbed arrows they laid a bed of lettuce, pressing the seeds to make oil. The oil was for their god and the lettuce was for them. Men ate it to ensure their fertility. And indeed, the fertility of the Pharaoh himself was tied to the flood of the Nile: each year, his potency ensured there would be water for the crops.

Year upon year, the floods came and went. And over the millenia, lettuce changed. Thicker, fatter, wetter, sweeter, it became as prolific and varied as its cultivators, wrapping the world in its leafy embrace. For all its changes, lettuce is still jealous of the flood. It holds, by weight, more water than anything else we eat. Eat a head of lettuce, and you drink a cup of water. Its layers of cellulose, swollen and firm, hold that cup of water with absolute rigidity. For weeks after a lettuce head's harvest—weeks after its death—its cup remains full.

In service of its legacy as vessel and guardian of floodwater, the lettuce dynasty comprises seven cultivars. There are six lesser cousins: loose-leaf, the sandwich standby; summercrisp, its stiffer twin; romaine, lord of caesar; oilseed, descendent of Min's offerings; butterhead, the tender; and celtuce, long-stalked emissary to the far East. But first and greatest among them is iceberg lettuce. 

The heart of a lettuce is all crunch, and iceberg lettuce is all heart.

The heart is where the water resides. Here, where no sun can reach, the leaves are palest and thickest. Their walls swell, a reservoir of strength erecting the green fronds that spread and catch the light. The heart is white and mild, practically devoid of nutrition and flavor. It is the part that children eat. It is the part that displaces richer food, that assuages guilt, that makes an empty meal feel big, that seduces dieters who immediately betray themselves by smothering its labyrinthine folds with dollops of creamy dressing.

Iceberg lettuce is too often a prop for other flavors, a scaffold of texture to lift and shape ingredients that lack structure of their own. Few diners have the fortitude to confront the iceberg's naked wedge. For lettuce is an avatar of sobriety, empty and chaste. Brave the void and peel the leaf, the curl that cups the water. Crush it and know its secrets.

First the taste of tap water, leftover from rinsing. Then the scent, faint and earthy, felt only at the very back of the nose. Then comes the cleaving edge of a ravenous chomp, freeing the dewey payload from its cells. Suddenly there is the wash of wet grass, a morning walk past fresh-tilled earth, the sprawl of a summer afternoon. The taste is calm and implacable, consistent from start to finish. It is as still as a pond and as clear as a mountain stream. It is the remains of a vegetable's life.

Lettuce remembers being alive for longer than most, holds that memory as dearly as it holds water. The memory of a simple life, easy to remember, not too different from its afterlife. 

To laugh into a salad is to laugh at death. And the lettuce laughs with you, because sadness has no crunch. Tears are possibly the least crunchy thing there is. Crunch is the texture of satisfaction, of freshness, of youth. Crunch is the joy of having all your teeth and using them all at once.

And the greatest crunch yields the thinnest drink. That is the paradox of iceberg lettuce, the paradox at the heart of all its leafy cousins. It is the water that makes the crunch. The water of yesterday's rainfall and tomorrow's tears, the water that cradled and nurtured the first few living cells ever to exist, the water that has cleaned and washed and sated the thirst of all plants, all people, for all time.

This is the water that fills your mouth, the stark truth slipped into every sandwich. As long as there is rain to swallow, lettuce will be there to embrace it and to give it back to us. It is our mirror and our canteen. It is our witness, stiff and mute. All speech is obsolete next to its implacable crunch.

Seedless and sterile, lettuce cannot keep us alive. But in life and death alike, it upholds its sacred vow. No matter how full our mouths may be, the hungry shall remain hungry. But in each hollow bit, all of us shall drink.

The vessel of the flood will deliver us from thirst.