A Jar Full of Lettuce, or Second Breakfast #8
Hello! This is Meghan McCarron, and you're reading my newsletter, Second Breakfast. You can find me on Instagram, too. If you no longer want to receive this newsletter, you can unsubscribe here.
I'm working on a book proposal that involves researching of internet-driven food trends, and I've been surprised, though I shouldn’t be, by how many I now find cringey. 2010s wellness cuisine now has as much appeal as epic bacon humor. Aren't you a tiny bit embarrassed by avocado toast? Even if you still eat it? No one I follow posts a photo of it any more.
One of the cringiest has to be salad in a jar. A rainbow of vegetables tucked into a wholesome mason jar... do they taste good together or are they just aesthetic... people hated it even at the time.
A long time ago, I used to make salad jars for lunch. Now, our childcare situation requires J. to go into work regularly, and when I offered to make her lunch, she requested a salad jar. I almost said no, and the only reason would have been because salad in a jar is over. This is not a good reason to deny your beloved's lunch request.Salad in jar
In the morning, I started making Jenn’s salad in a jar from components socked away in the fridge, some of which also went into the baby’s lunch. (The baby considers lettuce leaves poisonous, so we are a long way from baby salad in a jar, but he does like beets.) Then I would send the family off, and plan to step away from my desk at a reasonable time and make my own lunch at my leisure.
Inevitably, around 2pm every day, I would lurch from my computer, desperate and starving, and enact the ritual Freelancer Game, "Are you lunch?" My answer was always something unsavory and stupid, a few pieces of chocolate, maybe some cheese — old pizza was a real find.
I confessed this to J., and she asked why I didn't make myself a salad in a jar, too. I bristled. Why pack two salads and put one back in the fridge? I could just make a salad from scratch.
J. pointed out that there was nothing wrong with putting the jar back in the fridge, and she was happy to clean it. So, the next day I made two salads in a jar, which was basically the same amount of work as one, and at noon, when I first started to feel hungry, instead of procrastinating for two hours and then eating like a rodent chewing my way through my own home, I got up, opened the fridge, and found an amazing treasure inside: lunch. A beautiful, tasty salad just for me.
So I’m here, in the year 2024, to confess that I love salad in a jar. My current version is simple: beets, feta, a hardboiled egg, and greens. The beets we steam every Sunday when I get back from the farmer's market, because they're something the baby will always eat, so I do have a nice stock of steamed beets to pull from. The dressing is rice vinegar and olive oil, poured in separate, lazy, eyeballed glugs. The lettuce, lately, is prissy overpriced little gems from one of two favorite farmer's market stalls. There's usually too much feta; I sop it up with a piece of toast.
Now, instead of sending the family off with lunch and pretending I will make a different, ok decision about my own lunch later, J. and I text about how much we are enjoying our salads every day. When I go out to lunch for research, I'm a little sad. I miss the jar.
WRITING CORNER
It's been a quiet couple months for bylines, but I've been busy on new projects. One thing: I received a Ferriss - UC Berkeley Psychedelic Reporting Fellowship, which will enable me to chase down some leads that emerged out of my mushroom chocolates piece.
READING CORNER
A gluttonous classic French buffet in a city rec center, by Lauren Collins? This was written just for me.
The latest on the challenges of unionizing the service industry
I love queer mess cinema
Everyone I know who WWOOFed had bizarre experiences but did come back with great stories
Glad to know I’m not alone sharing my office with a crib, but damn this is grim for Los Angeles
Hmmm, also grim for Los Angeles
At least our city is so ecologically chaotic it’s become an accidental parrot habitat
Will never not link to new Roman frescos
“By the end of the night, it felt as if I’d gone to an eccentric billionaire’s party for which he’d painstakingly recreated his last birthday from the summer before his parents’ divorce.” Tejal is back baby!!!!
WATCHING CORNER
Adding a tiny human to our family hasn’t changed what we watch, but it has made us embrace long viewing projects, so once he’s asleep we don’t have to make any more decisions. Currently, we are watching spy movies, based largely on this Vulture list, but put into chronological order.
It’s been incredible! In college, I majored in film, but my mix of classes covered either classic Hollywood or contemporary art cinema, so I’m low on the 70’s / 80’s in the U.S., and that time period has been our favorite in the spy movie quest so far. Consider a mini-festival of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1973), The Conversation (1974), and Hopscotch (1980), for an ideal mix of stylish, beautiful, and even fun paranoia, not to mention perhaps the longest run of American cinema openly skeptical of the CIA : )
Also, if you love Slow Horses on Apple, check out the British films The Ipcress File (1965) and The Fourth Protocol (1987), which seem to have influenced the look and feel of the show. Also, Michael Caine stars in both.
For a lot of these, we had to get DVD’s from the library. Bless the library.
It is bird cam season! Please enjoy this Great Horned Owl cam at the Lady Bird Johnson wildflower center in Texas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUT3nZJWn64
That's it for this edition! Thank you so much for reading. I really love writing this newsletter. If you've read this far, maybe you'll enjoy this cat meme, via my friend Hannah.
—Meghan
