I’m a creative person, but when it comes to making my own meals, “experimentation” and “waste” are synonyms. My prohibitive mind says that getting wild in the kitchen is not for me; this is for people with Old El Paso sponsorships, a dishwasher, and a much larger food budget. This is a shame. I love to cook. My watch says my heart rate dips when I’m sautéing and chopping.

I can’t ruin a salad though, it’s just not possible. The ingredients aren’t expensive, and the time it takes to assemble one is minimal. Salad recipes on Instagram have given me the freedom to experiment again: far from the wilting greens seen on the end of laughing women’s forks in stock photos, they represent a seismic shift in the way I treat myself and my body. Since Covid and the stresses of the post-Pandemic world broke me down to the nuts and bolts of a living being, I’ve been merely surviving. To me, this looks like eating packet sandwiches and white bread or eating nothing at all. No cooking. No care. Just sustenance or control.

Eating salads, for me, has been a radical act: buying fresh food, taking the time to prepare and pre-prepare meals, encouraging myself to eat and to feel good about eating. Learning how to make bowls of healthy, nourishing vegetables and herbs so delicious that I don’t think twice about devouring them. I’ve been steadily unlearning my aversion to salad dressings, and my unhealthy belief that unless they are low-calorie, salads are worthless.

One internet sensation of a salad became my best friend for almost a year—the Jennifer Aniston. A quinoa-substituted approximation of tabbouleh, this feta-strewn, lemon-juiced mountain of fragrant fresh herbs, cucumber, chickpeas, and rosebuds of pistachios not only kept me going, but it made me happy.

In the structured way this salad is put together—first boil the quinoa, then shell the pistachios one by one, then chop the veg, then add the dressings, then crumble the feta—I found peace and calm. I get excited about the prospect of eating it later. Like raking a gravel garden, or how Amélie plunges her hand into a sack of grain when the market gets too overwhelming, I’ve found a way to divert my living body away from the mess of my mind. A blissful autopilot, where the only outcome is a delicious meal.

I believe the Green Goddess salad came to me from the stars, not the algorithm. I tweaked the recipe I found on Instagram to be vegan to make it cheaper and cream cheese-free, and discovered a way to eat an entire cabbage by myself. Hello B vitamins.

If you haven’t given it a go yet, I desperately implore you to try. That green, green dressing makes plain, cheap brassicas taste like Hollywood. You could mandolin charred Brussels sprouts for it in the winter—or swap out the cabbage for iceberg lettuce if your local Lidl has none available (it happened to me.) Use any herbs you like. I love to use less basil, more parsley for a Greek vibe. Some people use chives. I put spring onions in it because I like them, and use an avocado in the dressing if I’m feeling decadent. Freedom!

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The word “salad” comes from the word “salt”. In the 14th century, vegetables, herbs and flowers like borage, fennel, garlic, primroses, mint, and violets were preserved or seasoned with brine, and contrary to popular opinion, enjoyed by people of all classes. It wasn’t all hog legs and goose pies.

That was my first mistake when it came to making salads with enthusiasm—I didn’t add enough salt. Why did the Caprese at the Italian restaurant taste so much better than mine? Why was my feta dressing so lacklustre? A deep-rooted fear, that only growing up in the 90s could command kept me from adding enough seasoning. Salt? That which raises the blood pressure and with it, the devil? Why don’t I just drink the olive oil too?

Growing up in an era of emaciation-as-fashion, salads were everywhere, but they weren’t delicious celebrations of fresh produce. They were sad forkfuls of Batavia and cherry tomatoes sour as bile. A resentment of a meal replacement. Salad dressings were served on the side and resolutely ignored, their calorie count stirring fear, low down in the growling pits of our stomachs.

““I believe the Green Goddess salad came to me from the stars, not the algorithm.””

I was 12 when the 90s ended, and yet I clearly remember reading about the weight loss routines of my favourite pop stars in a magazine aimed at girls my age. With no access to the foods listed, I embraced the feeling of hunger instead.

The Romans never cared for the idea of salads as a health food. They served their chervil and parsley drizzled in olive oil, vinegars, nuts, and seeds, and presented them as proud members of their feasting table cornucopia. The Greeks, too, have been dab hands at making salads for millennia, which is why I turn to them whenever I need inspiration. Dill, olives, masses of leaves. Sunshine.

An extra-cool thing about salads is that sometimes, you don’t even need to pay for them. Finding edible leaves to bring home and eat is a rare thrill—it feels strange to simply pick what I need and then eat it, so far removed from the natural world as I am. Often, the herbs I gather have double meanings and guided by my Treadwells Book of Plant Magic and Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, I can make salads that move me in directions of my choosing—wellness for the mind as well as the body.

Now, foraging is a meme, with its wild garlic gluts and elderflower cordials (not to mention juicy Wimberries on the West Pennine Moors), but for so many, it’s still a way of life—as Isabelle O’Carroll writes in her piece The Foragers of Burgess Park, a story I think about most days. This freedom of food combines some of the things I love most all in one: eating, hidden secrets, and herbal remedies. Salads can be cultural. They can be delicious. They can be subversive.