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Pudding compromises salad bars

By Guest Commentary 3 min read

By Al Owens When I have a little more time, I’m going to conduct an investigation. One that could send shivers through the Republic. One that could force federal officials to abandon all previous investigations and focus their attention exclusively on what I’ll gleefully uncover.

I’ve been wondering for some time now, who was the well-intentioned person who sat down one day and said, “What this salad bar needs is pudding”?

I’d like to find them and take every new idea they’ll ever come up with and throw it into Redstone Creek. Pudding goes with salad like Necco Wafers go with filet mignon.

I’m not necessarily anti-pudding, but I do have my limits. In fact, I just may boycott salad bars for the rest of my life, if they don’t stop trying to surround lettuce with enough stuff to fill the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Salad used to be a lot of bland green, orange and red stuff that grew out of the ground and then you’d pour vegetable oil and vinegar on it before you ate it – just to please your parents.

I’ve never been able to find a pudding plant, or a crouton bush. But go to some steakhouse (none in particular) and tell the hostess you’d like to add their salad bar to your meal and you may wind up choosing between four dozen items you hadn’t considered heretofore “saladable.”

Congress should make anything that comes out of a box illegal on a salad.

If you’re caught lopping pudding, pretzels, phony bacon bits, little green peas with the consistency of crushed egg shells anywhere near your garden fresh vegetables – you should do time. Hard time. Attica time. Where you’d be forced to eat carrots and tomatoes with no dressing on them except on Christmas Day!

I don’t really mind raisins on my salad. I draw the line at Raisinettes.

And that brings me to salad dressing. I don’t need wine, pickle bits, or anything they can think of that’s wet clouding my decision to take the bitter taste of spinach out of my mouth.

I know what you’re saying – “If you don’t like the stuff, leave it alone.” Well the truth is, I can’t.

I see all of that bread, all those chicken wings, slices of beef, canned peach slices, chunks of pineapple, hard boiled eggs and I usually need a weightlifter to help me carry my plate back to my table.

And by the time I finish my salad plate, I can hardly remember what I ordered in the first place. That’s what galls me. I just ordered a 30-ounce steak and I’m full on two bites of it.

Salads were never meant to be full course meals. They were supposed to whet the appetite. Get you ready for that big ole slab of beef that follows. They weren’t meant for you to pass out when you finished them.

Oh, when I find that pudding-in-the-salad-person they’re in trouble. I’m hoping they’re not the same person who dreamed up that New Coke thing, or the Edsel.

I just have to tell them that pudding doesn’t grow on trees.

Edward A. Owens of Uniontown is webmaster of Red Raider Nation, “Where Champions Live.”

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