Salad as concept

     Think of a table. Now imagine it without a top. Or legs.
     No, seriously, imagine it. Right now. I'll wait.
     Doo-dah doo-doo. Doo ta doo...
     Done? Good. What have you got in mind? Nothing? The disembodied idea of a table? Congratulations, you're a philosopher, grappling with a problem that has vexed great minds since Plato, who talked about pure forms, which he considered divine. A chair in the messy physical world can have splinters and be missing a leg — and at some point, played with enough, becomes a stool, or a bed.  But the idea of a chair ... pristine. Perfect.
     Now look at the above photo of S & S's "Wild Maine Salad." I had walked into the deli with a hankering for my standard deli fare, a corned beef sandwich on rye. Maybe hot pastrami — my wife likes that better, and as the star at the center of my world, has drawn me toward her tastes, in the corned-beef-vs.-pastrami question, as in all things.
     But I scanned the menu, and noticed this salad. I'm a sucker for salads — eat one for lunch at least four days a week, sometimes more. And I'm a sucker for fresh mozzarella, blueberries. I can get good corned beef at Max & Benny's or Kaufman's or Manny's when I'm in the vicinity. When in Rome, and all that.
    I'm not complaining about this salad, which was indeed very good. Lunch had been a corn muffin and coffee, so I was hungry and ate every bite. But I did take a photo of it first — feeling a little ridiculous, because taking pictures of your meal has become a rube move, like lauding your host's indoor plumbing. "Why am I doing this?" I wondered. "I'm never sharing this or writing about it."
    Wrong. Look at the photo. Anything ... not quite missing, but in far less abundance than one might expect? Almost completely obscured by the chicken and fresh mozzerela, the blueberries and the candied pecans? That right: lettuce. The thing had hardly any lettuce at all. An inversion of what I had expected — I found of nuts with a garnish of lettuce, instead of the other way around.
     Is it still a salad then? What if the kitchen had left out lettuce out entirely? Would it still be a salad — a salad of chicken and nuts and blueberries? Why not? A scoop of chicken salad has no lettuce yet we call it salad. What is meant by the word "salad" anyway? The Oxford definition is: "a cold dish of various mixtures of raw or cooked vegetables, usually seasoned with oil, vinegar, or other dressing and sometimes accompanied by meat, fish, or other ingredients."
     So the vegetables are key, definitional — without them it's something else, and while the lettuce was there, its minimal nature begins to make us question whether the term even applies. Although ... why "green salad" then if salads are always green? Maybe the mistake is mine, a strong bias toward lettuce, which I do use in abundance. I've ordered salads with extra lettuce.

    Okay.  There can be a thin line between rumination and rambling, so I should wrap this up. But it's interesting to reflect on at what point does one thing transform into another? When does a salad change into an antipasto tray? A table into a chair. Day into night. A democracy turn into a dictatorship. The change can be so gradual you hardly notice, though I imagine it will come the way Hemingway famously wrote about bankruptcy: gradually then suddenly.