Let’s do lettuce

If you’re at a stage of life where you’re shunning the common joys that make the days worth living — sugar, caffeine, alcohol, sunlight — you may want to remember what Mark Twain said of a dying woman with no bad habits: “She was like a sinking ship with no freight to throw overboard.”

When the worst thing happened, she couldn’t stay afloat.

This is what I contemplate at Beyond Organic in Freehold, NJ — a vertical aeroponic garden, one of the new-fangled indoor farms cultivating health fanatics. If you need Google to figure out what aeroponic means, you may not know a Bibb lettuce from a Boston. Hint: One of them is sweet and leafy and the other is, uh, sweet and leafy. That should solve everything.

But don’t worry. The owner of this cutting-edge oasis didn’t know about vertical vegetables either until she quit her corporate job a couple of years back. Then she got a yen for growing green severed heads on pillars like radio towers signaling space.

If there’s a McDonald’s up there, watch out: These crowns are bigger than half a dozen Big Macs — a bulbous revolution ready to rise up and defeat the golden arches.

I gaze up and stare at the leaves like giant hands reaching toward me, and I wonder . . . As I get older, should I continue to clean up my act? Thinking of Twain, I fear my usual diet of tofu and flax, kale and kohlrabi is setting me up to sink.

But since aeroponic farming

may be the wave of the future, I figure I should be armed with knowledge should green heads be the one thing between us and aliens.

So I ask a million questions. Why grow the food vertically? Because it saves space and doesn’t need dirt. Why do the heads get so big? Because they’re fed super nutritious water. Why are there so many of them? Because the system

creates faster growing cycle times. Why might they be more nutritious? Because of that super duper solution. Why is this hightech process good for the environment? Because it uses less water.

And why does every lovely leaf, every stalk, taste like a breath of spring air — so crisp, so firm, so sparkly? Because factors like sun and rain are controlled and they may be fresher when you eat them, like lettuce should be, could be.

Red leaf and butters and spinach and chard and

delicate fingers of arugula so brilliantly bitter you say wow like you would over chocolate mousse pie. And micro-greens so tiny, so tender, you feel like a plant mom caressing and suckling them, each bite like an ancient memory of Garden of Eden yum!

That is if you like lettuce. Which I do, even if it could eventually kill me.

Still, I leave the greenhouse with enough leafy heads to start a new race. Yet to keep from going down like a sinking ship, I consider adding cheese to my salad — there’s some fat for you. Or even a dose of sugary pecans, that ought to do it. And then I think harder. How about keeping those greens pure and naked, like nature intended, then run out to pick up the teensiest bag of shoestring McFries before the revolution takes over? Donna Debs is a longtime freelance writer, a former radio news reporter, and a certified Iyengar yoga teacher. She lives in Tredyffrin. Email her at debbs@comcast.net.