Quite aside from her calorie-laden examples of “salads” at chain restaurants that are a few lettuce leaves laden with high-calorie toppings and dressings, responsible eaters at home like to eat a generous helping of greens and watery raw veggies like tomatoes and cukes in order to feel full, dressed with just a smidge of oil and vinegar. This still requires a couple of trips to the grocery per week, plus all the fuel required for groceries to receive the produce from megafarms in distant locations.
A large part of her crank complaint is valid, that it is a sinful waste of fossil fuels to truck low-nutrient salad greens far and wide. The solution is not to denounce salad greens, however. The solution is more community-based gardening.
Modern suburbia is dotted with “planned” developments that are only dense rows of townhouses, duplexes and apartment buildings for a mile or two in every direction. No general store and no farm plots in walking distance; and home gardening is effectively forbidden by the HOAs. Many of these housing developments have been hacked out of formerly unworkable topography by bulldozers, yet remain too hilly for anyone but fitness freaks to carry groceries on a bike. So everything that gets done requires gasoline.
There are often large, sunny slopes that could be converted to rentable garden plots, but don’t hold your breath on that. Instead, the community dues have to pay for lawn maintenance of “open spaces.” The community boards are often all-powerful, but lazy and unpaid. So nothing ever gets done except against their personal enemies or ideological targets who fly unauthorized POW-MIA flags or paint their door the wrong color. Forget about gardening or healthful outdoor laundry drying in summer. The “planned” community didn’t “plan” on the Great Obama Recession and the war with the middle east when they did the planning in the 90s.
Good points.