Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Salad Greens
It's easy to poke fun at iceberg lettuce. About the best thing you can say for it is that it's
crisp and it doesn't taste bad. Of course, it doesn't taste particularly good either. In almost
every way you look at it, iceberg lettuce is nothing more than crunchy water.
But when viewed from a certain angle - that of industrial engineering - iceberg lettuce
becomes a lot more interesting. An iceberg lettuce field is about as close to a widget factory
as farming can get. Iceberg lettuce is grown on a massive scale at an amazingly constant
rate (seasons mean little or nothing to the iceberg industry). It is firm enough that it can be
picked and packed with a minimum of trouble, and it is hardy enough that it can be stored as
long as three weeks without noticeable ill effect. In short, it is just about the perfect product
for industrial agriculture. But like so many other industries, the growing of iceberg lettuce
is changing rapidly.
Lettuces were almost certainly among the first plants humans ate. After all, in their most
ancient form, they were nothing but wild leaves. They also were among the first crops do-
mesticated. Egyptian art from about 2500 B.c. depicts fairly accurately a variety of lettuce
that is quite similar to one that is still being grown in Egypt today. This is not a lettuce most
of us would recognize. It resembles romaine, but its leaves grow out of thick stems that
look like celery stalks.
For the second half of the twentieth century, however, if you said "lettuce," it was pretty
much assumed you meant one thing: iceberg. Introduced in the 1940s, iceberg lettuce is
a refinement of an old lettuce family generically called "crisphead." In Europe these and
similar varieties are called Batavias. In the 1920s, in response to a lettuce blight that was
threatening the industry, a USDA plant breeder named I. C. Jagger began a series of refine-
ments that resulted in the first true iceberg lettuce, called Great Lakes, which was released
in 1941. (A named variety called Iceberg predates this lettuce, but that is coincidental; it
is softer and smaller than true icebergs.) Descendants of the Great Lakes family, called the
Salinas family, still dominate the iceberg industry. There are dozens of strains, each spe-
cifically developed for a certain climate, growing area or production window.
Iceberg is a very good lettuce, if crunch is all you care about. For more than forty years,
its ease of growing and resistance to disease and rough handling made it by far the dom-
