Who cuts your veggies?

A couple of years ago, while taking a 4-hour road trip, my kids and I stopped for dinner. Thinking the better choice would be to go in to a restaurant (vs. stop for fast food), we pulled in to an Applebee's.

I'm all about making healthy choices, but this is one area that is tricky. I know you can bring your own food on a road trip, and sometimes we do just that. But I'm also ok with the rules being different when the circumstances are different. Like my kids understand that the rules are different when we are at Grandma's house, or when there is a babysitter. Road trips fall into that category and I am ok with that - we've agreed that chicken nuggets are for road trips, and that is the only time they get them. So on we went.

I ordered some kind of salad with chicken, and I was struck by what a sad salad it was. There was an enormous chunk of cabbage, and you could tell by how dried out the cut areas were that it was 1) definitely cut by a machine in a factory, and 2) really pretty old.

I ate my dried up salad. I'm sure you know the type - you've eaten hundreds just like it. No human being would cut and prepare a salad like that. But someone pulled it out of a bag - iceberg lettuce, weird cabbage clumps along with "shredded" carrots so dry and old they had a whitish crust on them. (Do they bleach this stuff?)

So it got me thinking - how hard is it to cut up some goddamn lettuce?

Why do we accept such crappy salads? Mealy tomatoes? I want to eat in a restaurant where there is a person who at least CUTS the food there, in the kitchen. I don't think that's too much to ask. I don't want to eat food that was prepared in a factory. I mean these are supposed to be fresh vegetables - washing and cutting them has to be OUTSOURCED? WTF?

We finished our dinner and the server offered the kids some kind of tiny brownie sundae dessert (great) for $1 (great). Tiny brownie, with a drizzle of chocolate sauce, and sprinkled with nuts. Then this happened:
Me: Ok, we'll have one, but could you hold the nuts please?
Server: Oh, it comes with the nuts.
Me: No, like can you just not put the nuts on top? It's ok if there are some inside the brownie.
Server: Well, actually, it comes with the nuts already on top.
Me: On top of the sauce? Really? Who puts them there?
Server: I don't know, we get them from the truck like that. It all comes frozen. We just take a piece out and let it thaw. It already has everything on it.

What the WHAT?!

This isn't any better/healthier than going to a fast food place. They are selling the same crappy food, but for more money.

I know Applebee's is not exactly fine dining, and if I'd thought about it I'm sure I understood that most of their food comes frozen or pre-made and shipped on a corporate truck of some kind.

But on this day it just hit me. An actual cook would not serve a salad like that. A home cook would not serve a salad like that. But the people working in restaurants like this are not hired to be cooks, they are hired to assemble pre-engineered components. I'm sure that much like in the fast food industry, the management wants to be able to hire people without culinary skills and then automate things so they don't have to spend time and money training them. And that is why there was a giant hunk of old cabbage on my plate. The people aren't paid to think about the food they "prepare", much less care about it.

I was inspired to come home and start a blog detailing which restaurants in town actually cook their own food, and which ones are reconstituting sauce and defrosting things off a delivery truck.

But then I realized that there would be very few restaurants to profile. I still think it is a good idea. As consumers we should demand to know more about the food we order in restaurants. Locally sourced food is a grand ideal, but I'd love to just start with knowing my lettuce was washed and cut in-house. It's just not that hard to do.