by Rachel Simpson

Created on: November 02, 2008

This is a question that is usually asked by some skinny twit that works out excessively, and is obsessed with being no larger than a size 2. The answer is an emphatic no. To be constantly worried about what is and isn't good to eat is to take the fun out of food. There is nothing more depressing than the words: low-calorie, low-fat, and low-carb. Even worse is when the word "no" is affixed before any of the former. Salad dressing is a condiment that makes it just a little easier to choke down the necessary amount of roughage. There is always the case in which someone will abuse the right to use dressing and drown the poor salad in it. It is this abuse in the use of dressing on a salad that makes it fattening. I don't know what a salad ever did to you that it deserved to be drowned out by a dressing. Just because your wife, the doctor, or whoever is making you eat it doesn't mean you have to take it out on the innocent lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers that sit before you during a meal.

To get back to the question at hand, I also believe that it is an injustice to eat a salad without a dressing. First of all, a salad can be a lovely thing to eat, and when it is put together with the proper dressing, the flavors of the lettuce greens can really come out. There are a lot of different greens that can be used in a salad, and they all taste different. Many would beg to differ with me because they claim not to be the salad eating type. I'm not either, believe it or not; however, being in cooking school has given me an appreciation for a good salad. Even salads that don't necessarily have greens in them, like Salade Nioise and Greek salad, still have some form of dressing, even if it's simply olive oil. This helps all of the salad ingredients come together, and can even lend a bit of flavor.

Julia Child said "Don't be afraid of your food!", and I'm sure she isn't the only chef to have said this. To live in perpetual fear of butter, oil, cream and fat is a miserable way to live! However, I will say for those that are that paranoid by waistline expansion are able to use the vinaigrette. It tastes delicious, is simple to make, and just happens to be low-calorie, low-fat, and low-carb. This is the one of the few exceptions in which those three, terrible utterances can be used to describe something that is delicious. In general though, dressing on a salad is nothing to be afraid of. It should be celebrated and enjoyed when used properly.

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