No signs of a ceasefire in the family war against Salat

Summer is here and it’s the right time to eat Caprese.

“Fuck off,” said the 19-year-old who has 54 different words for “nope.” I tried to hide it in the daily food – a piece of frisée under the fiery chicken thighs (“No way!”), a sprig of lamb’s lettuce in the pork buns (“Nice try!”), a few strips of mesclun threaded into the pizza topping (“What do you think that is, you fucking Pizza Express?”). In each case, he pounced on me like one of the Death Eaters he’s only recently stopped having nightmares about, choking on the imagined poison while calling Childline.

“These are perfectly good leaves,” I argued, “and if you want to end up looking like a jaundiced Nosferatu, just keep avoiding the lettuce.”

“Just ignore him,” he told his pals. “He’s having a moment where he’s taking care of his kids. It’s all just words about green stuff that everyone hates.”

I had imagined it might be different at this point in my life. I mean, I lived through the years of salad cream and iceberg lettuce, and I expected that by the time I was fifty, I would be sitting down to a delicious pax balsamica where everyone at the table would easily agree that a bit of garlic never hurt anyone. No chance. Since Deliveroo and UberEats, young people expect to get three Michelin stars if they can fry an egg, so if anything, the salad wars have gotten worse over time. I expect to die in the middle of a discussion about why eating a radish isn’t as bad in itself as slaying a baby seal, and with my dying breath, I feel like I’ll be forced to concede my point.

It’s a daily humiliation, salad. I went to a car boot sale in Finchley and came back with a pair of silver-plated salad servers (£2), which caused the awful 19s to behave like Daleks.

“If any of you make a joke about ‘wankers,’ I’m banning you from the house,” I said, striding into the kitchen like General Custer.

Caesar. Cobb. Waldorf. Niçoise: I’m not putting up with any of that. On the other hand, I have to admit that my understanding of what makes a modern salad has changed somewhat. Two halves of boiled eggs, a couple of leftover plums, a prawn, a handful of sunflower seeds, a shriveled pepper, a piece of cheddar and a spring onion? “That’s not salad,” says Paul Hardcastle, inspo number one, “that’s fridge vomit.” After that, I decided to leave home and work on an organic farm. OK, I made that up. But I took the job as the Scottish Government’s salad ambassador, which is like choosing to be Mother Teresa.

There have been challenges along the way. My late mother always said salad made her cough. I’m not kidding. She was once married to a man who smoked in the shower, and she apprenticed in a diesel-powered carpet factory, but in the end it was always that forkful of salad that got her. Challenge number two for me was the experience of ordering salads in America. Too big. Too artificial. Too many croutons. As I write this, I’m in New York, recovering from the week’s salad disappointments. Yesterday, in an uptown restaurant that should know better, I was served what can only responsibly be described as the Donald Trump of salads. It was outrageous, overdone, depraved: a shameless mess of bacon bits, ranch dressing, and blue cheese, topped with a toupee of orange sauce and the flakes of misery. Having it brought to the table was like a summons, so I hopped in a taxi and drove like a fireman.

Please don’t tell the 19ers. For them, like Jimmy Cagney at the end of Angels with dirty facespretend to scream when I get put in the electric chair and eat the bad salad just to show the kids that pizza is not heroism. I haven’t yet told them my other American horror story involving salad, the one about the time I was at a restaurant somewhere on First Avenue with my friend Horatia Lawson. She ordered the large salad and before she even got her fork stuck in it, a cockroach crawled out and ran across the table. I tell you: For someone who initially had an aversion to leafy greens in a bowl, that was a trying day. But as I now take up my role as ambassador, praising endive and walnuts to ground beef addicts, I can only once again take comfort in my friend Oscar Wilde, who understood that making salad is an activity not unlike comedy or diplomacy, where the art is “knowing exactly how much oil to add to your vinegar.”

Andrew O’Hagan is an editor in chief at Esquire whose latest novel, Caledonian Road, is out now. This article originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Esquire; subscribe here.

Sign up for Junk Mail, our weekly newsletter featuring the best in entertainment.