VI: Lettuce
A quick look at the drugs inside of lettuce.
Good morning. Today is sextidi, the 16th of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la laitue, a bundle of crunchy leaves.
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Lettuce usually makes the list of "negative calorie" foods along with celery and cucumbers. This is supposedly because the amount of calories expended to chew and digest these vegetables is greater than the number of calories they provide. The amount of calories involved here is small – less than 10 in a serving – so measuring these things involves quite a bit of guesstimation instead of hard math, but most nutritionists will agree that these foods are more likely to be calorie-neutral (effectively zero calories) than any sort of effective weight loss tool in and of themselves.
Lettuce isn't named for its leaves. It's named for a milky, latex substance that grows in its stalk if you never pick the bunch of leaves we're all familiar with from the grocery store, and the plant is allowed to build up to its full, seedy potential. When the Romans harvested lettuce, they didn't always do it when the head was a little cluster of crispy goodness. They did it the way maple tree farmers harvest sap, tapping into lettuce stalks for sweet, sweet drugs.
