| WHAT I'M EATING RIGHT NOW |
| In praise of the desk salad |
| Last week, we went back to the office for the first time in nearly two years. Two years! I, for one, am thrilled about this development. No more moving from the bed to the kitchen table to the couch and calling it a "productive day." No more trying to muffle my dog's barking during Zoom calls. No more leggings. And, perhaps most importantly, no more depressing everything-but-the-kitchen-sink lunches. No more, I say! Do you remember the desk salad? I do. I spent my formative years as a journalist working in Midtown Manhattan, where lunch breaks didn't really exist. The 20 or so minutes you could steal away from the office offered little beyond an excuse to escape the frigid air conditioning for a second while you grabbed something quick to bring back and eat in front of your computer. The make-your-own tossed (or chopped) salad was king and spots hawking the stuff were everywhere. They were the precursor to the fast-casual food boom we're experiencing now — the original assembly-line heroes of the "healthy" lunch evolution. I work mostly out of our downtown St. Petersburg office, where tossed salad spots were just starting to catch on when the pandemic hit. But without the influx of office workers and foot traffic, a few of them didn't survive the past two years (R.I.P. Greenstock). Last week, elated to be working in person together again, a colleague and I walked over to Toss Salads & Wraps, a salad spot in the 600 block of 1st Avenue N. This week, I checked out Naked Farmer, which is technically more of a bowl place, but a plate full of veggies and greens is somebody's version of a salad, I'm sure of it. Even though the salads at both places cost more than my homemade lunches would for an entire week, there was something deeply nostalgic about their return. The leaves still got soggy after too many hours in the office refrigerator. Avocados were still inexplicably expensive to add on. And I still told myself that I'd eat half now and save the rest for later and of course, that didn't happen. A lot has changed in our world. But the desk salad has stayed the same, and there's some comfort to be had in that. |
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