Vinay Menon: Lettuce is in short supply and so is Canada’s ability to be self-sufficient

Can you imagine life without lettuce?

Well, you better. Because leafy greens are MIA in the GTA. Godspeed if you’re craving a Caesar salad. You have a better chance tonight of securing white truffles or Geechee Red Pea.

A story this week, by the Star’s great Josh Rubin, outlined why cancel culture has come for restaurant salads, and grocery stores are charging an arm and leg for butterhead: “The culprit … is a hotter than normal growing season in California, which reduced crop yields and made it harder for lettuce plants to fight off pests.”

I didn’t wake up this morning to slander lettuce. But in the taxonomy of fruits and vegetables, lettuce is easily the most overrated.

Have you ever seen someone walking down the street eating an apple? Yes. Banana? Carrot sticks? Celery? Check, check and check. What you’ve never seen is someone holding a head of iceberg like a bowling ball and gnawing away.

A potato is as versatile as a Swiss Army knife. You can put artichokes on pizza or pulverize them into a party-pleasing dip. Kidney beans are the unsung heroes of the pantry. Mushrooms are magical. I would lament a world without leeks, shallots, cucumbers, jalapenos, corn, dill, radish, ginger and anything else that makes this sentence sound more like a Simon & Garfunkel song.

But life without lettuce? Lettuce rejoice.

A nutritionist once told me the only thing I should put on leafy greens is olive oil. Apparently, most of the bottled dressings we rely upon to disguise the fact we are trying to choke down revolting leaves are not good for us. She spoke of Thousand Island the way a DEA officer warns of fentanyl. She solemnly offered Cobb caution.

Now, if there were a filet mignon or vodka shortage, I’d be having a panic attack. But lettuce is like a bike tire: useless on its own. Lettuce is a shadowy gateway to croutons, blue cheese and future cholesterol meds. You can easily sidestep lettuce and hit your vitamin and fibre targets in grocery aisles that do not require a line of credit for a three-pack of Batavia.

Lettuce is not insulin. Nobody needs lettuce. We are not bunny rabbits. With more shortages to come given climate change and creeping food insecurity, we need to shrug off this temporary absence of Asteraceae.

The hell with lettuce. Save your angst for when we run out of salmon sashimi.

We now have drug dealers. In the future, there will be food dealers, violent thugs who hawk black market lentils and rare rutabaga in back alleys.

That is when we will experience true gustatory distress.

But a shortage of lettuce? This is both a feel-good story and a wake-up call.

Now I just need Elon Musk to take an active interest in cauliflower and destroy that putrid plant the way he’s running Twitter into the ground. You know why I love Greek salad? Lettuce is the least of it. There are babies named Cocoa, Clementine and Hazel. There is no baby named Lettuce.

And if this column is offensively ignorant, at least more than usual, answer this: Why don’t we do a better job of growing our own produce? I’m not suggesting Moose Jaw ditch pulse crops and attempt to become a global player in pineapples or papayas. Geography and climate shape agriculture. But if your neighbour can cultivate marijuana in his basement with grow lights from Amazon, you can’t possibly tell me Canada is incapable of deploying advanced greenhouse tech to ensure every citizen has access to reasonably priced lettuce year-round.

Or a foodstuff far more delightful and less problematic.

I direct your attention to a story in Scientific American: “Lettuce Produces More Greenhouse Gas Emissions Than Bacon Does.”

I’m not telling you to swap those Peruvian sprouts for a cheeseburger. I’m just saying Carnegie Mellon researchers concluded foods that are good for your body are often bad for the environment due to a spike in energy and water use.

And as with this lettuce imbroglio, the costs get amplified with export distance.

But forget lettuce, which is like 95 per cent water and 0 per cent delicious.

Is it not time to get serious about growing locally?

Our hardworking farmers can only do so much. Shouldn’t the rest of us try to produce a tiny sliver of what we consume, even if it’s just one windowsill jar of scallions at a time? People, if a moron like me can grow tomatoes, anyone can.

I don’t know who lived in my house before my wife and I bought it. But the previous owner either had a fruit fetish or was banned from Loblaws. We were in our 20s when we moved into this hellhole. We were too naive to ask about the trees and bushes. Then summer arrived and we were buried in apples, plums, cherries and raspberries. I remember walking into the backyard and expecting to trip over watermelons. I have carpal tunnel syndrome from picking pears.

But what if every Canadian household just grew one or two things?

We’d never run out of stuff we need and never miss the stuff we don’t.

This lettuce shortage shall pass. Then we’ll move on to a cabbage crisis. Or maybe string beans will skyrocket to $800 a kilo. The underlying problem extends beyond food and now includes everything from Children’s Tylenol to CPAP machines.

Canada is just not self-sufficient.

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