It’s time for a GREEK SALAD RANT!

Nobody should be this angry about salad to start their day, but this morning I woke up, logged on, and saw this monstrosity.

It’s everything I detest about even food distilled into a single bowl. It focused all my rage into a container of greens. If Achilles saw this pathetic Greek salad he’d stab himself in the heel just to save himself the pain of staring at it anymore.

Sorry, I need to organize my thoughts. Okay, firstly, this is a ripoff — which is to be expected when you attend an event like this. There’s just a natural expectation you’re going to overpay and get underdelivered every single time. Still, this is much worse than the $12 platter of dry chicken fingers and cold fries we might be accustomed to at a game.

Unless there’s magic lurking beneath these greens (and I know there isn’t) we’re seeing a sad bowl of iceberg lettuce, four pieces of thick-cut cucumber, one hunk of green pepper, alarmingly large white onion pieces, three tomatoes, one canned black olive, and to top it all off: A random smear of feta, which seems to have attached itself only to the saddest and most pathetic piece of lettuce it could find.

Everything about this is wrong … EVERYTHING. It’s also a chance for me to unload on the modern Greek salad, which I promise has been on my writing bucket list for a while now, so please indulge me. *ahem*

THERE SHOULD NOT BE LETTUCE IN A GREEK SALAD LET ALONE BE THE MOST DOMINANT COMPONENT IN A GREEK SALAD!

Just so everyone in the back can hear me …

THERE SHOULD NOT BE LETTUCE IN A GREEK SALAD!

I know the Greek salad is generally divisive, because I understand it contains a lot of elements people don’t care for. Yes, there are olives which a lot of people don’t like — and feta, which can be hit or miss for some. Still, that’s not an excuse to change the entire make up of the salad to fit the masses.

This entire “putting lettuce in a Greek salad” thing was not created out of care or culinary ingenuity, but capitalism. It was a way to restaurants to save money on the higher-priced ingredients by bulking it out with non-nutritive garbage. Lettuce is fine and has its place, but not in a Greek salad. This is a dish that should contain 10 ingredients total.

Tomato
Cucumber
Red onion
Green pepper (optional)
Kalamata olives
Feta cheese
Extra virgin olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Oregano
Salt

Those last four as are whisked together for your salad dressing. Boom… that’s it. It needs absolutely nothing else. Every ingredient is designed to offer a powerful flavor, texture, and color. It’s a nutrient packed, flavor wallop delivered right into your taste receptacles which perfectly complements everything from a gyro, to souvlaki, all the way down to a humble grilled piece of chicken.

Lettuce brings nothing to the party. No, wait, lettuce is the cops who are called to your party. It’s there only to ruin the fun and make the whole thing worse. The only advantage it has is that it’s dirt cheap, which has allowed modern salad restaurants to use the actual Greek salad as a garnish — rather than the main star, and just throw butt tons of lettuce in to make you feel like you’re getting a full meal, when you’re actually getting robbed.

I hate this salad. I can’t believe it’s $10 — and considering Qatar isn’t that far from Greece geographically I cannot fathom that this was the effort. What a shameful garbage salad.