I don’t like salads. I know, I know, it sounds blasphemous. In confessing this truth, I fully expect to be inundated with articles about the health benefits of salads. There will be interventions; I walk into my house, I’m already suspicious because it’s nighttime and someone has actually turned on the outside lights, that and the lack of a blue light bouncing off the ceiling indicating the television isn’t on. My family and friends will greet me. I’ll be asked to have a seat, probably on the not so inconspicuous chair brought in from the dining room and placed in the middle of the group. People will begin with telling me they love me and that they have each written a letter about how me not liking Asian Chopped Salads is ruining their lives…

Salads, what’s there to like, anyway? I’m cold all the time, not emotionally (although some may argue that point) I mean physically cold three-hundred-and sixty-five-days of the year. Why would I order a concoction of biting Bibb lettuce, chilly carrots, and polar peppers—all of which when combined taste no different from one another with or without salad dressing?

No amount of additional items changes anything about salad, either; Chicken becomes as flavorful as foam. Apples taste like green peppers and green peppers taste like green peppers—what’s the deal with that? As for candied walnuts, well they taste like candied walnuts and I gobble them up so fast, they have little time to improve the salad as a whole.

Also, nobody ever finishes a salad. People get bored and give up—that’s why they lose weight—they put the fork down! That’s how I lost my weight through boredom and fork detruding.

It’s not that I dislike vegetables. I love them! I love squash, green beans, spinach—you name it, I probably like it. However, when mixed together with lettuce, I don’t like them anymore. Maybe I’m a broccoli bigot? Perhaps it’s a severe case of me not liking the food on my plate to touch? But then explain to me why I have no problem with casseroles? Or S’mores? Or green smoothies?

Mormons are especially clever when it comes to salads (which is something they may not be known for around the world but should be). Usually, these salads have no nutritional value what so ever.

My sister-in-law introduced, at a Sunday family dinner, a Cookie Monster Salad. Picture this: A mountain of mandarin oranges and crushed pineapple, stirred in a vat of vanilla pudding (made with buttermilk, not regular milk as is suggested on the box) and then topped with crumbled Keebler Fudge Stripes cookies! And we did not have this dish as a dessert we ate it as a side, as in a salad. It was the ultimate Diabetes Trifle and it was delicious.

Mormons are really good at the ability to take a dessert and put it in the wrong dinner course order. I’m not saying I dislike it. I’m saying it’s amazing that it’s a widely accepted way of doing things in the community. Nowhere else can someone go to a restaurant and order the dessert to come with the entrée and have the bread basket brought at the end of the meal—although I like the idea! I think the justification for calling such frothy treats a salad is the added fruit. Hey, let’s add fruit and call it a salad!

What’s worse than salad? Slaw. I hate any kind of slaw, really, coleslaw, fruit slaw, slaw-slaw. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this food, it’s basically finely chopped cabbage and veggies with either a vinegar or mayonnaise dressing. It’s cold, acrid, and drippy—yikes! I also dislike it for the name because slaw sounds very close to slop—as in what pigs eat.

I don’t know where this disdain of salads comes from—Weight Watchers? My childhood? Society? I suppose it doesn’t matter. So, now that I’ve professed that I cannot, do not, and will not eat salads, I guess I’ll see you at the intervention. I’ll be the one in the middle of the room!