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HOW TO BEAR DOWN AND DIG IN.
I've been toting a lunch to work for the last few days, at the risk of my co-workers thinking I'm poverty-stricken. (I don't know why I make that association, or assume others do. I have a lot to answer for, I suspect.) But today I ran out of supplies so I had to hit the streets. I joined a co-worker at one of NYC's many "let us toss your salad" places where you hand a Hispanic man a bucket of lettuce and then point to things like a baby while he adds them to the bucket, and mixes in dressing. It's one of those weird acts of adult infantilism that New York provides in no short supply. I was very impressed with my co-worker, for whom ordering salad was a relatively crisis-free activity. She explained that she looks at the ingredients in front of her, rather than examining the pricing board hanging above the salad bar.* I, on the other hand, regarded the ordering process as a Sphinxian riddle issued by the proprietors of Café Europa. I was juggling the wealth of choices with a desire to avoid getting gouged by the establishment, because I believed the odds were skillfully stacked against me in getting out of there with change from a $10 bill. I suspect these salad places are part of a long legacy of rube-baiting, handed down from snake oil salesmen, carnival barkers, and casino magnates. But today I decided to step right up and put all of that unnecessary conflict behind me. I ordered what I wanted, without regret. If I paid a little extra and didn't "win" this game of lunch, at least I'd be sated in other, more important ways. It was a big switch for me, personally, eating without regret. Here's what I ordered with my bucket of baby spinach: - cherry tomatoes tossed in a primeval vinagrette consisting of water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen in the presence of electricity. The salad cost $386.41, and I threw half of it away to make room for Sour Patch Kids.
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