Yesterday I learned something disturbing.
Lettuce may be full of poop. In more ways than one.
This came courtesy of a Washington Post article making the case against lettuce, which is a fairly aggressive position for a newspaper to take on a Monday.
Not war.
Not inflation.
Not whatever Elon is doing.
Lettuce.
And apparently they’ve got receipts.
Lettuce is roughly 95 percent water. It doesn’t provide nearly the nutritional wallop that its position atop the Healthy Food Industrial Complex would have you believe. We throw away enormous amounts of it. Growing and transporting it consumes land, water, and energy. Essentially, it’s the Data Centers of vegetation.
And leafy greens have a particularly irritating habit of occasionally trying to poison us.
This was unsettling.
I’ve spent most of my life assuming lettuce was one of the good guys.
Nobody has ever walked into a doctor’s office and heard:
“Your blood work is concerning. How much romaine and chard have you been eating?”
Lettuce has always had tremendous PR.
It gets invited to every salad.
Hamburgers let it hang out.
Tacos apparently require it.
Restaurants put a single leaf underneath appetizers for absolutely no reason.
Nobody eats that leaf. It is decorative lettuce.
Somewhere, an entire agricultural operation is devoted to growing lettuce whose ultimate purpose is to sit underneath three mozzarella sticks.
And iceberg lettuce?
Iceberg is basically crunchy water somebody put through a paper shredder.
Nobody has ever eaten iceberg lettuce by itself and thought:
More of this, please.
It exists primarily as infrastructure for salad dressing.
Which brings me to the problem.
Because I found this article fascinating.
I read the arguments.
I considered the evidence.
I began questioning decades of assumptions about lettuce.
Unfortunately, approximately 48 hours earlier…
I bought a machine to manufacture it in my kitchen.
I would like to introduce you to my new farm.
It’s a countertop hydroponic garden.
It has grow lights. Individual planting pods. A water reservoir. A control panel. Temperature monitoring. Humidity monitoring.
There are buttons.
I don’t completely know what they all do. BUT BUTTONS!
Apparently we’ve reached the point in human civilization where making a salad requires a dashboard.
There was a time when farming involved owning land.
Maybe a tractor. Overalls. A dog named Kip. A guy named Kip, and one of those giant forks they put in paintings.
You got up at four in the morning, stared knowingly at the horizon, and said something about rain as you sipped your god-awful Folgers that your wife started making before the sun came up.
My farm sits on a counter.
I filled it from the sink.
It has Wi-Fi-adjacent energy.
I fully expect it to send me a firmware update before the Romaine roams.
And yes, among the little pods I’ve planted is lettuce.
So I’m now in the awkward position of preparing an argument that lettuce wastes resources while operating a private lettuce production facility approximately fifteen feet from my refrigerator.
This feels like getting caught giving a speech about fossil fuels while idling a Hummer behind the podium.
When the truth is boring, embellish.
Unfortunately, this part is true.
I’m apparently running a grow operation.
Except instead of marijuana, I’m producing garnish.
I imagine law enforcement kicking down the door.
“WHERE’S THE PRODUCT?”
Right there.
Next to the coffee maker.
We’ve got basil.
Some herbs.
And approximately six dollars’ worth of future romaine being produced by a machine that probably cost more than every salad I’ve eaten since 1997.
Economically, we’re off to a tremendous start.
I haven’t harvested anything yet.
Right now, I’m mostly growing optimism.
Tiny green shoots aren’t coming out of a few pods yet; I’m considering a time-lapse camera. Like a baby monitor… but different.
I’ve become a farmer.
A very small farmer.
A farmer who can reach his entire agricultural empire without moving his feet.
And now I’m learning the eventual harvest is mostly water, nutritionally overrated, environmentally questionable, and potentially capable of giving me E. coli.
Fantastic.
I bought a countertop biological weapon.
The Washington Post’s argument ultimately made me realize something, though.
Maybe lettuce isn’t food at all.
Maybe we’ve misunderstood its role.
Lettuce is infrastructure.
It’s the structural support system that allows Newman’s Own Italian dressing to enter your body while maintaining the fiction that you’ve made a healthy decision.
Nobody orders a salad because they’re excited about lettuce.
They want chicken. Cheese. Bacon. Croutons. Dressing. More dressing. Maybe some avocado. And regardless of the smell consequences, some anchovy.
Then lettuce gets thrown underneath everything so we can call the entire construction a salad instead of what it actually is:
Nachos without the structural integrity.
I’m still going to grow mine.
I’ve already committed.
The farm is operational.
The lights are on.
There are crops in the ground.
Well…
Dirt Sponges.
There are crops in the dirt sponges.
And if the lettuce eventually tries to kill me, at least I’ll know exactly where it came from.
Farm to table.
Approximately six feet, but far away from any Folgers.
Yesterday’s Sports Autopsy
Something deeply unsettling has happened.
We won again.
Two days ago:
2-0.
Yesterday:
2-0.
After wandering through the wilderness at 1-8, Bertie took away the clever bets, and we started asking an embarrassingly simple question:
Who wins?
Yesterday the answers were Tampa Bay and Atlanta.
And for the second consecutive day:
We were right.
TAMPA BAY ML ~ -140 ✅
Rays 4, Tigers 1.
This was the kind of handicap I would like more of.
Drew Rasmussen was the pitching advantage.
Detroit was sliding.
Tampa Bay was simply the better side in the matchup.
Rasmussen gave us six innings, allowed one run and walked nobody.
Tampa scored twice in the first.
Added another.
The bullpen finished it.
No drama.
No wrapper.
No need to explain tomorrow morning why the team we picked won but our bet somehow didn’t.
Good handicap. Simple bet. Winner.
I could get used to this.
ATLANTA DREAM ML ~ -480 ✅
Dream 78, Sparks 71.
And this one needs to be framed and hung in the laboratory.
We had a choice.
Atlanta had beaten Los Angeles by 36 points four days earlier.
We could take:
Atlanta -9.5
and get a much prettier price.
Or we could swallow the hideous moneyline and ask Atlanta to do exactly one thing:
Win.
Atlanta won by seven.
Which means:
THE -9.5 LOST.
There it is.
The exact thing we’ve been talking about.
For once, we didn’t turn the team we believed would win into a more complicated bet because we wanted prettier odds.
We paid the ugly price.
Atlanta won.
Ticket cashed.
The wrapper saved us.
That’s not theory anymore.
We have a body.
Well…
Technically we don’t have a body.
Because we won.
This metaphor has gotten away from me. I need more coffee.
THE GIANT SCOREBOARD
Another 2-0 moves the official record to:
ALL SPORTS: 1,029-1,056-7
Four straight official winners.
And after the 1-8 disaster:
4-0 over the last two days.
The laboratory appears to have stopped leaking.
Meanwhile:
TENNIS: 0-1
Protected like an endangered species.
Who the hell bets on tennis?
TODAY’S GRINDER
So obviously, after winning four straight by simplifying everything, today we decided to introduce a point spread.
Growth.
We started with baseball.
Milwaukee immediately caught our attention.
They’re one of the best teams in baseball, Kyle Harrison has been excellent, and the Mets are considerably below them in the standings.
This isn’t a case of finding one cute statistic and building a small religion around it.
Better team. Good starter. Rested bullpen.
Milwaukee survived.
Tampa Bay survived too.
Not with yesterday’s handicap.
That’s important.
Yesterday was Drew Rasmussen.
Today it’s Ian Seymour against Jackson Jobe.
Detroit has now lost six straight, and Seymour’s recent numbers are considerably better than his season ERA suggests.
Jobe makes this less comfortable than yesterday. Let’s hope he does his (rim shot) Jobe.
But Tampa still survived the second grind.
The Dodgers didn’t.
Los Angeles is traveling across the country to Atlanta, and I’ve watched enough Dodgers baseball to know that sometimes they get off a plane on the East Coast and act like somebody forgot to change their internal clocks from Guam. I wish someone would introduce them to the medical wonder that is Melatonin.
Good team.
Don’t need them today. I’ll watch them. Scratch things, and be happy I didn’t include them in Tuesday’s party.
Then we got to the WNBA.
Dallas looked obvious.
They’re home.
They’re better.
They’re trying to clinch a playoff berth.
The moneyline was somewhere around -350.
Yesterday Benzo would’ve looked at that and said:
Perfect. Winners only.
Then we noticed something.
Dallas and Portland have played twice.
Portland won 84-83.
Dallas won 101-97.
One point.
Four points.
And today’s spread?
Portland +8.5.
Well…
Hello.
Dallas also has some significant boo-boos that need to heal up.
TODAY’S PICKS
⚾ MILWAUKEE ML
No run line.
No first five.
No interpretive dance involving pitcher strikeout props.
Milwaukee wins the baseball game.
That’s the assignment.
⚾ TAMPA BAY ML
We’re going back.
Different pitcher.
Same opponent.
Different handicap.
Detroit has been dreadful lately, Seymour’s recent trajectory is strong, and Tampa Bay still grades as the better side.
Could Detroit finally snap out of it?
Of course.
That’s why they make us actually play the games.
But the grinder kept Tampa.
Rays to win.
🏀 PORTLAND +8.5
And there it is.
Our first little act of rebellion against Winners Only.
Dallas should probably win this basketball game.
I’m perfectly willing to say that.
I just don’t think they necessarily win it by nine.
Portland has already beaten them once.
The other game was decided by four.
Now you’re giving me eight and a half points?
I’ll take them.
This isn’t us making a price prettier for its own sake.
There’s actual matchup evidence underneath it.
That’s the difference.
Three picks.
Three chairs.
For once, all three occupants have identification.
Milwaukee ML.
Tampa Bay ML.
Portland +8.5.
Two winners-first bets and one point spread that actually earned its way through the door.
And if Portland loses by four and covers, I promise not to complain that we picked the wrong winner.
Probably.
Meanwhile, my lettuce farm will be sitting on the counter under approximately 900 watts of artificial sunlight, quietly manufacturing enough salad to garnish a mozzarella stick. Safely away from any trace of Folgers…. and, hopefully, poop.
This isn’t called Pick What I Pick.
It’s called Don’t Pick What I Pick.
Please wager accordingly.
