Salad bar queue

It’s a known fact that the Americans are not that sympathetic towards vegetarians. If you need variety in food in America you better be a meat eater, except of course if you are in an Indian restaurant. I mostly have my lunch in the office café and well as usual there are slim pickings for the vegetarians over there. Most of the times I need to be content having the salad which is like a self serve buffet sort of arrangement.

Occasionally I will be lucky enough to find a vegetarian soup or a Taco bar which gives me a different option. But most of the times it’s the salad which I have to be content with. The salad bar is interesting at my workplace and is quite different in terms of its variety. But the menu is not something I am going to talk about here.

The most frustrating part of the salad bar is its queue. Well it would seem a simple exercise, take a bowl and fill it with whatever you like from the bar. But there is something which makes the above exercise little bit complicated though, the contents of the bowl have to look pretty, yes that’s right “Pretty”.

The most frustrating part is that you stand in the queue and most of the times it’s a long one and you see people arranging the Salad by picking one cucumber at a time. It’s not a rule or something it’s just the way people do it by default. They have to precisely place each and every vegetable at different spots in the bowl and make sure when they take them out to bill it looks wonderful. The person at the counter who bills doesn’t care how good your salad looks; it’s just the weight they worry about. For me it seems little bit funny though as it’s just a salad and you are going to eat all of it so what difference does it make where you place a broccoli. To be frank I never got the point.

For me it’s just a mix of some leaves and vegetables with some dressing on the top. You mix everything together and eat it that’s about it. I never found a reason to arrange anything in the bowl. Placing cut tomatoes one each on every corner of the bowl is something I would never understand. Anyways that’s me. I don’t come from a country where we eat salad that often so probably I am missing something.

Anyways it’s almost lunch time and I am off for another bowl of salad and again I have to stand in the queue looking at the masterpieces which are made in front of me.