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Have you considered going leafless?Western Archives

Sure, salad greens taste (mostly) good and are, as this incredibly informative Q&A on Grub Street reminded us this week, "one of the few foods you can pretty much eat without limit." For your health and your happiness, you should not abandon leaves entirely.

But I do love a leafless salad.

A leafless salad, as you might expect, is a salad without the leaves. To be clear, this is notnecessarily the same thing as a "grain bowl." While a bowl generally has a grain base, like rice or quinoa, a leafless salad has no base at all. Instead, it is comprised of all the good parts of salad -- the chickpeas, the crunchy vegetables, the protein, perhaps a grain in a supporting role -- without the hindrance of All Those Leaves.

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There are thousands, maybe even millions of benefits to going leafless, but I will outline just a few here.

First, let's discuss bite management, which improves drastically when greens are removed from the equation. There are no unwieldy, enormous leaves of romaine to fold over with your fork, no spinach stems hanging from your mouth as you make uncomfortable eye contact with your coworkers. You know when you think you've folded and forked a leaf successfully, but then it springs free and you have to pretend you didn't notice? Say goodbye to all that.

Instead, you will eat only bites that are truly bite-sized: crunchy half-circles of cucumber, manageable florets of spicy broccoli, extremely spear-able pieces of chicken. If you are going to eat a desk salad (nothing wrong with that!), it should at least be neat.

Then there's the matter of ingredient distribution -- it can be hard to mix the ingredients fully. One of the most disturbing salad mistakes is unwittingly eating all the good parts first, sticking yourself with a semi-dressed pile of kale.

Of course, this problem can be solved by mixing the salad in a larger bowl first, but sometimes that's not possible. If you pre-order your salads at a chain like Sweetgreen, the salad will not come mixed, and the bowl is too small for you to do it yourself. You canask an employee to do it for you, but that 1) sort of negates the purpose of pre-ordering and 2) is annoying, because the employee is already very busy.

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The solution? Get rid of the leaves. Suddenly, everything folds together like a dream. And if you've brought your salad from home? Simply add your dressing, then shake the Tupperware, allowing you to enjoy both a perfectly mixed lunch and a pleasant wave of nostalgia for McDonald's Salad Shakers.

Finally, and most importantly, there's the issue of salad enjoyability. In general, the customizable parts of salad are the interesting parts of salad, the parts that make you look forward to eating the salad. Many of them -- peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, radishes -- are great for you. And the less healthy ones -- the cheese, the bacon -- are delicious. So why not cut out the boring stuff and have a big bowl of the good? Less room for leaves means more room for everything else.

Just don't abandon vegetables entirely. A walnut, Craisin, and goat cheese concoction wouldn't really work for lunch.

Although, technically... that isstill a salad. I'll leave it up to you.