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The story behind Caesar salad

(www.nationalgeographic.com)
129 points Bluestein | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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fracus ◴[] No.44469615[source]
It casts the same spell as pizza. You'd have a hard time finding someone who doesn't really enjoy it. It even works on people who don't generally like salads.
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munch117 ◴[] No.44471142[source]
It is precisely a salad for people who don't generally eat salads.

The big uncut leaves are suited for slow nibbling of token amounts of salad.

Croutons are recognizable from a distance as a non vegetable ingredient, making it attractive to someone who'd rather not eat vegetables at all. To me they're just stale bread.

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MangoToupe ◴[] No.44472081[source]
I'd think that peoples' main objection to salad is the uncooked veggies, which isn't addressed at all with caesar salad. I don't generally trust raw vegetables to not make me sick. Especially in the US.

> The big uncut leaves are suited for slow nibbling of token amounts of salad.

What does this sentence even mean?

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malnourish ◴[] No.44472118[source]
Raw vegetables make you ill?
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MangoToupe ◴[] No.44472152[source]
I'm sorry, what's confusing about this take? All raw produce has the risk of infectious disease. Have you seriously never heard of food-born illness? Here's one example: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2025/07/03/blueber...

Basically anything you put into a salad is better off in a soup or stew, or heavily treated with such low-ph liquid (e.g. salsa, pickled veggies, etc) as to remove the risk. If it isn't suited for canning, I'm not going to eat it.

Perhaps in a country with better-regulated food production it would seem more reasonable.

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1. CrazyStat ◴[] No.44472793[source]
There were 19 deaths in the US blamed on food-borne illnesses from leafy green vegetables in the 40 years from 1973 to 2012 [1]. If you’re avoiding salad out of safety concerns I hope you never go anywhere near any motorized vehicle.

If it’s an excuse not to eat salads because you don’t like them then fine, but maybe just own your food preferences instead of grossly exaggerating the dangers.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4591532/

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2. Retric ◴[] No.44473002[source]
In general your point’s fine but…

There’s likely multiple orders of magnitude difference between the numbers that “were reported” as part of a known outbreak vs the number of associated deaths that actually took place. People often get admitted without identification of what specific food caused them issues.

Further there’s reasons to avoid things that don’t result in deaths. “Each year in the United States an estimated 9 million people get sick, 56,000 are hospitalized, and 1,300 die of a foodborne disease caused by known pathogens.”

So their salad avoidance isn’t as extreme a reaction as you’re suggesting.