I have returned from a journey, sick and hardly able to think about writing my posts. I am going to be brief.  There are two bits of nutritional advice that have meant a lot to me and they both apply to lettuce. So here goes…

Eat foods that will spoil, and eat them before they do.  We have so many varieties of good tasting but fragile greens available to us in our stores. It is sometimes difficult to eat them before they get limp and dried out, or wet and decomposing.  Do your best to plan but when your plans don’t work out – toss what can’t be cleaned up and used. Buy more fresh stuff.  Inevitably there will be some waste.

Always go for as much color as you can get. Color means a lot. There are nutrients that come with that color and more are being discovered all the time. We now hear about lutein, zeaxanthin, and other carotenoids in regard to eye health and macular degeneration. We hear about resveratrol in plants with deep purple color. There are lots more.  I had to laugh when reading on one website about how these nutrients aren’t essential to life like some of the major vitamins, but that they may be  important for good health.  So the question becomes do you just want to be alive or would you kind of like to be alive and healthy?

Dark green lettuces also contain vitamin A, beta carotenes, vitamin K, vitamin C, folates and a lot of needed minerals. Just eat a salad every day if you can, and consider that you can actually make a salad be the meal.