Recently, I was shopping for a few groceries in Walmart, when I noticed a bag of mesclun mix salad, priced at 3.89.  The mix looked very much like the lettuces I have been picking out of my garden for some weeks now; the same size, varieties of greens, etc.  To grow my small lettuce  patch, I purchased 2 bags of potting soil (the dirt in my yard is very poor) for $4.00, and a package of lettuce seed for .99.  I wasn’t at all sure my gardening efforts were remotely cost effective, till I saw that bag of salad greens.  At those prices, my salad patch has already reached the break-even point, and is over into profit.  Since gardening is part of my exercise plan, I don’t count the hours I spend or my labor as part of the cost.

In spite of the pictures I have posted on Triond, I am not really much of a gardener.  I have learned over the years which vegetables I can grow successfully under reasonable conditions.  Leaf lettuce is usually fairly easy to grow.  I used to buy several varieties and mix them before planting; with the advent of preselected mesclun seed mixes, I no longer have to invest in several packages to have a tasty salad mix.  Lettuce likes cool weather, so is a good crop to start early in the spring when the weather invites out-of-door activity but is still too chancy for most vegetables.  It requires quite a bit of water, and is fairly happy in filtered or partial sun, so it is undaunted by my shady yard.  Given plenty of water and reasonably fertile soil, lettuce is easy to grow.  I tend to be over-enthusiastic about planting the seeds, so my lettuce plants are always too close together; but thinnings never go to waste.  They are a tiny and a bit delicate at first, but a real treat compared to store lettuce.

After I got over the mind-boggling concept of paying nearly $4.00 for a bag of greens, I gave some thought to why it might cost that much.  I knew that the price had to cover things like labor to field hands, cost of machinery, factory costs, packaging and shipping.  A few minutes research further revealed costs I should have taken into consideration as well:  lettuce does not keep well.  (That is one of the reasons I grow it; if I buy one of those high-priced packages of lettuce, I usually wind up throwing about half of it out.)  It has to be maintained at a constant temperature while being stored and shipped, and it cannot be allowed to freeze or get too warm.  Either extreme will ruin the product.  It cannot be shipped or stored with fruit, as this causes it to develop brown spots.  Most factory lettuces are washed in a chlorine solution, and treated using a calculated mix of oxygen and carbon dioxide (Yes, I know this is kind of normal for plants) to prevent spotting.  While these treatments are not especially health threatening, they can give a rather odd flavor to ones salad.

As if planting, cultivation, processing and shipping weren’t enough to add to the cost of a simple salad, there is also the hidden cost of research into better methods of getting a perfect leaf of lettuce to market, and well as research into disease resistant, travel-hardy varieties.  So next time you dig into a plateful of leafy greens, think of the farmer, laborer, factory worker, truck driver, stock boy and scientist who helped bring it to your table.  Bon appetit!  

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