Ed Cumming Leave it out

Supermarkets have a conjurer’s trunk full of tricks to keep you spending. You think you are popping in to pick up supper, but you’re running the gauntlet of strategies that have been refined over decades. It is psychological warfare. The smell of baking and the aisle full of treats near the till are the least of your worrries. They split up the bread, milk and eggs so you have to walk around the place for the basics, increasing the risk that a bottle of wine or a brownie will end up in your trolley. Expensive stuff lurks at eye level; you have to bend for the bargains. Often, fruit and veg goes by the entrance. Get greens in the basket and you feel less guilty about loading up on Pringles and yumnuts later on. And the less said about the pernicious loyalty schemes, the better.

None of these is as evil as the bagged salad. Since the 1980s, the British customer has been slowly induced to believe that no meal can be complete without a little bag of salad, tipped into a bowl and plopped on the table. Pasta, pie, steak: whatever else you are cooking, you need the little bag. Even if you are having a vegetarian dish, which is a kind of salad itself, you must have another salad on the side. The leaf mixes have evolved, from sliced iceberg to combinations of all kinds of shoots and leaves. These days some even taste of something. My favourite is M&S’S Rosa Verde, a mix of lamb’s lettuce and butterhead.

The principle behind them is unchanged. You place a little votive salad bowl on the table for guests to pick at, to atone for whatever other sins they commit during the meal. At the end of the event, when they’ve wobbled out of the door, the host will dispose of the remaining leaves. There is always leftover salad, forlorn like flowers left by a grave. ‘Well, that was a success,’ the host will say, or at least think, while scraping the sad leaves into the bin.

The leftovers – 40 per cent of all bagged salad bought in Britain, according to some reports – are a reminder that what we eat has little to do with reality and everything to do with appearances. Most lettuce has limited nutritional value – iceberg has practically none – though it looks green. In that sense, you would be much better off giving your guests a single carrot each. But the benevolent presence of a pile of verdant leaves implies that you are a household that thinks about health. Never mind the plastic waste, you are signalling that you are not the kind of person to get by on potatoes and cheese alone.

Asda recently introduced leaves from ‘vertical farms’, adding a techno-futurist element. The token salad also provides the opportunity to show off your bourgeois bowls; perhaps something you picked up in Portugal or Kwazulu-natal. It’s not the salad that people like so much as the idea of being a salad person. And the kind of person who insists on a salad is one who has travelled abroad and returned with crockery.

All of which explains why sales have risen to such heights, despite the obvious problems. Britain now spends over £1 billion a year on chilled prepared leafy salads and vegetables, more than double the figure in 2008. Bagged salads are bland, wasteful, bad for the environment and often of little nutritional worth: no wonder we cannot get enough of them.

When will the bagged salad days be over?