Food

This Food Mag Wants To Make “Hand Salad” A Thing And NOPE, The Internet Is Not On Board

"If you are a garbage person that wants to just drink ranch dressing, have the courage to own it."

by Meg Watson  28 March 2017

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Working in the food world must be a tough gig. People want meals that can be ingested through their noses and “ejaculating cakes”. We want to watch reality shows where people try to construct edible alien eggs with blowtorches until they cry, but the second you hold a leaf of lettuce and call it a “hand salad” you’ve gone too far.

This is the fate that has befallen Bon Appétit this morning. The highly-respected food magazine has just published a recipe called “Hand Salad With Yogurt-Lemon Dressing”. It consists of individual lettuce leaves tenderly dunked in a small bowl of basic dressing and it has single-handedly (appropriately) derailed everyone on the internet.

Despite the mag’s plea for us to “not focus” on the name, the reaction against the term “hand salad” has been immediate. The only acceptable applications for such a term, as decided by popular logic, are 1) a description of a bowl of edible hands 2) a description of a meal prepared by 2004 Weird Internet icon Salad Fingers 3) a description of a handjob from someone who has never given or received a handjob and is too scared to ask what it is.

Also, what? Why does a lettuce leaf spattered with yoghurt need a recipe, this is not Huey’s Kitchen.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first time Bon Appétit tried to pull this thing off (pun not intended, but I refuse to delete it). Last year they published a similar recipe, “Hand Salad With Buttermilk, Grapefruit, And Mixed Seeds”. It’s the same kind of thing, but with bird seeds scattered on top of the wet lettuce. Yum yum.

Bon Appétit are also not the first ones to coin the term. Though it definitely hasn’t taken off, the earliest trace of it I could find is an Urban Dictionary term posted in 2011.

A “hand salad”, as defined by expert chef/Urban Dictionary poster “leaf lover”, is “a late night salad created by taking a large leaf of lettuce, placing several different items inside such as bacon bits, cheese, tomatoes and salad dressing. Fold the lettuce over like a burrito, hold it in your hand with no plate or utensils and eat it.” Example: “Man, I was really wasted last night but that hand salad I made tasted delicious.”

I mean… that is objectively a better recipe right there, but that’s not the point.

Here’s the macaroni and cheese thing in case you’re not mad enough: