As an informed American, I’m expected to know the terms melting pot and salad bowl—specifically, their political and sociological connotations.

It is often said that, ideally, places like America are supposed to be “melting pots” where entirely different elements are inseparably fused together and made stronger than any one element alone. But it is also often said that places like America are, in reality, “salad bowls” whose different elements, even if mixed, remain separate and unfused. 

I’m not a politician or a sociologist, and I’m not looking to start today. As places like America are concerned, I’ll just say that I see evidence and merit for both ways of looking at things.  

But as a foodie? 🤔

I can tell you that flavor is definitely more complicated than that—and to be honest, I feel a need to speak in salad’s defense. (Clearly, because I’ve done a lot of that lately.)

First of all, The Melting Pot is a fun and delicious dining experience, but it ain’t cheap, and you and your clothes will smell like bouillon for about a week. It’s a strangely enjoyable problem (you’ll be tempted to eat your laundry the next day), but… yeah. Melting pots aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be.  

Secondly, should the “separateness” of salad really count against it when the point of salad is to eat fresh veggies? And have we forgotten the part of the analogy where all of the salad ingredients get, umm, chewed up together?

In all seriousness…

Sure, there’s a separateness to salad—to all of those veggies piled together cold—but as some Americans might say, that’s why God invented salad dressing. Like a lot of celestial solutions, it works in mysterious ways; it doesn’t change the nature of what we’re eating, but it complicates it in enough ways that we can start to find it interesting. 

So—for today’s final foray into the food science of salad—we’ll be talking about the two key ingredients in salad dressing and examining what makes them so useful and powerful in the kitchen. This is good food-science info with or without salad in the picture (but I promise, this will be the last time I mention salad for a while!). 

 

To wrap up this little series, I want to explore one more avenue of salad-dressing discussion: the science of fat and acid as they relate to salad (and flavor in general). If you want to “crack the code” on tasty, nutritious salad, it’s probably somewhere in here! 

Now, I’ve mentioned Samin Nosrat’s seminal cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat a few times, and it’s because those four things are basically the primordial elements of flavor. Chefs and cooks make food tasty by combining those four things in different ways. 

With this in mind, salad presents an interesting culinary challenge where heat, the most complex contributor of flavor, is basically out of the equation (and salt plays a smaller role). That just leaves fat and acid… which, you’ll notice, are the two core ingredients in pretty much any salad dressing (classically represented by oil and vinegar, respectively).  

So: what roles do fat and acid play in salad dressing and, by extension, the salad as a whole? 

Analogy version first: if salad (dressing) is supposed to be a party, acid is the music that loosens people up and fat is the party-starting friend who gets people talking and dancing. 

 

Now let’s get into a little more detail about acid… 

Imagine, if you will, a mouthful of chickpeas or plain Greek yogurt (either one). Pretty bland, right? It’s inoffensive, but the food and its flavor stick to the inside of your mouth like paste.

Now imagine that, after swallowing the chickpeas or yogurt, you take a drink. If it’s a sip of plain water, that pasty flavor still sticks in your mouth… but if you take a drink of coffee or lemonade or soda pop, it vanishes. Why? Because all of those beverages are acidic. 

To be clear, acid doesn’t nullify flavors. It’d be more accurate to say that acid “loosens” flavors so they can mix and mingle (or rinse out) without sticking. And this is why the second ingredient in almost any hummus or tzatziki recipe is lemon juice: you need acid to cut the chickpeas or Greek yogurt (respectively) so that you can actually taste all the other flavors you’re adding to an otherwise-bland paste. 

The cutting and “loosening” properties of acid also explain how acid can help to “balance” flavors… and this is where we get acid’s ability to counteract bitterness, which is especially useful information at the salad bar.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that, anytime you consider bitterness unpleasant, it’s largely because the bitter taste lingers—almost like someone is banging a high, sharp piano note on your tongue over and over again. Even if the source of the bitterness isn’t pasty like chickpeas or yogurt, the flavor “sticks” in your mouth just the same. Right? 

Again, acid is the main solution to this problem, but not just when you want to wipe the palate clean afterward. Acid is also present whenever those same high, sharp, bitter notes are part of something that tastes beautiful to you. 

I could understand how a mouthful of arugula, by itself, might be considered an unpleasantly bitter experience—but with, say, a fresh strawberry vinaigrette, arugula takes on a whole new character. There’s a bit of bitterness, but it doesn’t linger anymore. It dances with the light, natural sweetness of the strawberries and the zing of vinegar, and you’re better able to appreciate arugula’s other unique properties: the slight pepperiness, the odd but enjoyable texture, the curl and crunch of the leaves. And that’s before we even think about the rest of your salad ingredients and what they can contribute! 

So, to wrap up this idea and return to the analogy, acid is to salad (dressing) as music is to a party because they’re both meant to loosen things up and set the mood. There’s a Goldilocks balance here: too little and things get clumpy and awkward, too much and it’s sensory overload, but just the right amount and everyone is at ease together. 

 

Now let’s talk about fat and, with acid covered, this should be a bit more straightforward…

I said above that fat is like the party-starting friend we all need, and I say so because fat plays three main roles in salad (dressing): 

1️⃣ It provides energy that just isn’t present otherwise. In some ways, this is just another way of saying what everyone knows: that dressing is “the fun part” of salad because it’s where most of the fat and calories come from. Still, as I’ve said before, this can be a winning compromise; even light dressing is enough to get the attention of our energy-hoarding animal brains and “trick” us into eating all of those nutrient-dense veggies without bogging us down in excess calories. 

You don’t want too many life-of-party types around at once; they’re often best in small doses as it is. But you do want at least one around when it’s party time, because they help to bring out an energy that even the warmest and most likable ingredients—I mean, ahem, people—don’t always know how to share. 

2️⃣ It enhances flavors and spreads them around as it moves. There is obviously a sense in which fat itself “tastes good” to our brains, but—for whatever combination of chemical reasons—fat really does make other things taste better, too!

There are also some physical properties which make fat a good flavor enhancer. For example, fat is good at “grabbing” seasonings and keeping them evenly suspended, but it can also be spread really thin. In combination, this means fat helps seasonings and other flavorings—including those “loosened” by acid—to spread uniformly throughout a dish. 

Think here of the party-starter’s talent for introducing new friends and getting people to circulate. Again, a little goes a long way in that department. 

3️⃣ It’s sticky to some ingredients and slippery to others (which helps salads to mix evenly). Notice, for example, that salad dressing prevents certain greens and veggies from clumping together while also making it possible for other ingredients like cheese to stick. 

It’s cool that fat can somehow be “sticky” and “slippery” at the same time, and that this plays a role in making tasty salads what they are… but this doesn’t mean that salad dressing will magically do the work for you. 

 

And on that note, I’ll leave you with two big pieces of salad-dressing advice, one each for fat and acid: 

FAT: Use less dressing than you think you need, but toss the salad more thoroughly than you’re used to (and use a bigger bowl than you think you need). Fat helps flavors to mix, but only if you actually mix them! 

A lot of salads would be more enjoyable if everyone followed this advice—not to mention healthier because, again, fat can spread itself pretty thin IF you put in the effort to spread it (and use equipment suited to that purpose). 

ACID: Use today’s knowledge to experiment, adjust, and “think at the margin.” Now that you know more about the role of acid in food and the Goldilocks balance you’re seeking, you can learn what happens when you tweak it here or there. 

Don’t like how bitter those greens taste? Try squeezing a bit of lemon on there and seeing if that brightens up your opinion. Want to find out what it tastes like to overcompensate? Get to the end of a salad you like and squeeze a little over the last bite. This kind of knowledge won’t make you a chef, but it is the kind of knowledge chefs have and use.  

(I mention lemon because it’s a common dressing ingredient and, more importantly, because lemon wedges are easy to use and widely available in restaurants.)

 

It might not be an interview or “news” per se, but I appreciated this blue zone-focused article from Strong Towns (a nonprofit advocacy organization) enough to share it here.

Plenty of writers, including Emma here, have done a good job with the high-level summary of what “blue zones” are and what health lessons they can teach us. But—as I know all too well—a high-level summary doesn’t convince or change anybody, no matter how amazing the information you’re summarizing. 

The first thing I appreciate about the article is the fact that it focuses on the teaching I often consider central to the wisdom of the blue zones: your environment has a bigger impact on your health than your choices. It naturally follows that it’s hugely important to exercise whatever control we do have over our environments to make them (make us) healthier… and Emma and Strong Towns seem to understand this idea from square one.  

The second thing I appreciate about the article is the way it extends that essential blue-zone teaching to its logical and practical conclusions and (so to speak) brings the rubber all the way down to the road. 

Most people can understand, abstractly, why walkable cities like the blue zones would have healthier people. But they don’t realize that their cities could become walkable if they willed it, and that (despite their current reservations) they might actually like the idea if they took a scientific look at their own assumptions. 

To wit, the real gold (for me) is in the last few paragraphs, when Emma points out that you have to design for the outcomes you want and that, when it comes to managing car traffic, this principle applies at both micro and macro levels. 

Science says that, if you want drivers to slow down, you have to design roads so that drivers want to slow down—not just set speed limits at the speeds you want them to go. 

More importantly, and I cannot stress this one enough: science says that, if you build more lanes on [name your highway], the traffic will NOT, in fact, get better like you want it to and think it would. Simply put, demand is not a constant like most people imagine (it increases when supply increases). Bottom line: there is no way to “solve” traffic in populated metro areas when everyone is so reliant upon roads and cars all the time. 

We have to think outside of that old box to escape traffic for good… and escaping traffic will be the least of our benefits! 

 

Tropical Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

4 cups cored and shredded green cabbage (about half a large head)
4 plum tomatoes, such as Roma tomatoes, diced (about 1 cup)
2 medium carrots, peeled and shredded through the large holes of a box grater
1 large red bell pepper, stemmed, cored, and diced (about 1 cup)
1⁄3 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro leaves
1⁄2 cup fresh lime juice
1⁄2 teaspoon salt

The Method

1. Mix the cabbage, tomatoes, carrot, bell pepper, and cilantro in a large serving bowl.
2. The salad can be made to this point; cover and refrigerate for up to 4 hours.
3. Add the lime juice and salt.
4. Toss well to serve.

My friend, New York Times bestselling author Kimberly Snyder, has a new book out called The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts. 

It is about awakening the power of your “heart brain” through the teachings and science of heart coherence, which is a proven and exciting new way to increase your physical health, mental clarity, and emotional intelligence. 

I highly recommend it!

Get your copy of The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts: Empower Your Thoughts, Balance Your Emotions, and Unlock Vibrant Health and Abundance on Amazon here!