Lettuce Please Forget Certain Food Memories

I pulled a small head of lettuce from the fridge to plate a dish. A gorgeous head of lettuce. Unfortunately, I grabbed it from the bottom so as not to damage the foliage and immediately felt this small, nasty patch of rotten leaves from beneath. The shower scene from Psycho was not as horrifying (Okay, a bit of an exaggeration).

During my first summer home from college, I worked in our family’s wholesale produce operation just outside of town at the true Farmer’s Market. Got there at 4 am and worked til 1 pm. There was a soul food dive there where I ate lunch every day before heading home: fried catfish, collard greens, cornbread of course. But I digress.

My job most mornings at the produce warehouse was culling: separating the spoiled (or about to be spoiled) from the fresh. Potatoes and lettuce mostly. You’d dive your hands down into a bushel or so, and find the rotten shit and toss it. I’m not sure which was worse: coming up with a handful of rotten lettuce leaves or a handful of rotten potatoes. Not sure it even matters. Disgusting. I mean literally degustant. Took your sense of taste away.

So here I am, forty years later, with my hands around a few rotten lettuce leaves and feeling that whole set of associations flooding back into consciousness, as if it had always been there. Which I guess it was.

OK, time to think of something else. This shit wigs me out.