It boggles my mind that people would buy salads in bags. Instead of just a head of lettuce like the rest of the world.

It boggles my mind that people think that salad contains only lettuce. My world is much more flavorful than that.

I like my salad with a mixture of leafy greens, maybe with some radicchio or red cabbage for contrast, and perhaps some snow peas, radishes, and shredded carrots. I can keep all of that stuff around at the house and keep it fresh and prep it all, and that sounds very nice in theory -- except, most of it will probably rot before it gets consumed.

Or I can just buy a bag of salad and eat some of it at my whim.

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I'm further astounded that people bother with complaining about someone else's choice of food. It's not like I broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your fridge with.

Bagged salad isn't your issue; it isn't an issue at all.

What motivates you to make fun of me in this way, fellow HN user?

> like the rest of the world.

Are the motivations political? It's just a salad.

It’s much more polluting (why wrap salad in a plastic bag?), promotes bacteria growth (and disease like in the present case), and further removes us from food in its original form. Of course you’re to spend your money however you see fit, that’s not the issue.

The salad is wrapped in a plastic bag because it is useful. People exist, and some of us are gross. For instance: We don't wash our hands often enough, or properly-enough. We sneeze all over everything wherever we go.

We could get rid of the modern marvel of plastic bags, or get rid of the people instead. (I'm not a big fan of eugenics.)

Maybe I'd grow it myself and avoid all packaging and distribution problems, but the climate where I live doesn't support that very well at all and I like having salad during more than one brief period per year. Sustenance farming isn't really one of my goals in life.

And no, I do not think that my want for a salad at a time of my choosing constitutes some kind of unholy elevation of decadence. It's just a salad, and people are allowed to have things.

And the bag, itself, doesn't promote cyclospora outbreaks. It persists on things like greens, but it does not grow on them. That stuff comes from literal shit, like -- you know -- the stuff that everyone makes.

Or people could just buy unwrapped lettuce. No one is asking anyone to quit lettuce altogether.

At the end of the day: Circular arguments are circular, and you are no longer welcome inside of my kitchen.

Because in some places you will limit yourself to a few leafy greens. Never seen rucola sold without plastic, for example.

> It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.

This reads like C strings having not only a null terminator but carrying around a lifetime value specified in microseconds, and memory safety errors leading to weeks of explosive diarrhea.

How important is iceberg to your diet that you needed to create this YOLO lettuce header (heh)?

How important to your diet is that lettuce? Do you want to get fat eating bread all the time or can you stick your burger on that lettuce leaf? Done.

The header is the standard, which allows us to even have this conversation about tracking sources.

Not really. Lettuce has virtually zero nutritional value.

Which is a benefit in itself, it adds texture and is inoffensively flavoured (hell on the right day or if I haven't drank enough water yet it can taste great). All without adding many calories to the meal. It's also a much cheaper alternative than ozempic for those of us who don't have the consistent willpower to not treat ourselves to more food when we're hungry even if we know we have all the calories we need.

You will never lose weight by eating more calories. If you're going to consume extra calories, there are much more nutritious things than lettuce.

People are allowed to eat foods that make them happy. It's OK.

And in this context: On a worldly scale of foods that may be useful to demonize, eating some leafy greens like lettuce constitutes approximately nothing.

Why do you choose to behave in the way that you demonstrate? What accomplishments do you wish to achieve, here? What sorts of changes might to seek to impart?

You are much more likely to gain weight if you eat biscuits until you feel full versus eating lettuce to feel full. I.e. if you eat the same volume of BLT vs bacon sandwhich without the lettuce and tommato you will have consumed less calories with the one that is less calorie dense.

Serious question: Have you ever really looked at the packaging of the food products that you buy at the store?

Including some manner of descriptive coding isn't necessarily universal, but it has nonetheless been a normal way of doing things for a very long time.

It's similar to email headers or ip:port pairs in that it's hidden in plain sight. It's also similar in that most folks just don't notice them, and wouldn't care if they did notice them.

For instance: Plain old soda cans, which my dad made countless billions of during his career. There was a time when a person could show him a random 12oz soda can and there was a very strong chance that he'd be able to identify its origin by looking at it.

And I don't mean just the company that produced it, or the specific manufacturing plant within that company.

He could deduce the date of production, the line on which it was produced, the bodymaker within that line that did the metal stamping, whether it was made during the day or night shift, and (with a calendar) which crew was working during that particular shift.

And that's just the can itself.

The origin of the contents of the can are also generally available for anyone with the right knowledge to observe, usually with videojet printing on the can's dome. He wasn't in the can-filling business so he wasn't much help with those codes, but they were present.

But again, on any normal day: No normal person ever even notices the presence of this information.

Taylor Farms isn't an outlier here with their labelling at all.