News Coverage
Roquefort on the salad? Or Ranch? Rocket Fuel?
Published April 28, 2003
This week's hot new dietary supplement: perchlorate.
Previously found in rocket fuel. Now, perhaps, embedded in a salad near you.
Tests on lettuce samples from a California supermarket found the presence of this toxic substance, which leached from a defunct rocket fuel plant in Nevada into the Colorado River, which irrigates the fields where most American lettuce is grown.
The contaminated samples included baby greens, radicchio and butter, romaine and iceberg lettuces.
Researchers say it's not yet clear how much perchlorate has found its way into the country's lettuce crop. It showed up in just four of 22 batches tested, and the sample was too small to be scientifically definitive.
But "when nearly one in five samples of a common produce item are contaminated with a chemical component of rocket fuel, that's significant," said a spokesman for the environmental group that financed the tests.
The Food and Drug Administration said it was already planning to look into the matter but hasn't yet figured out the proper scientific methods for doing so.
Apparently it is insufficiently scientific simply to test the lettuce and say it's a bad idea to eat it if it's laced with rocket fuel.
Presumably the contaminated lettuce is not flammable or explosive, and so won't be classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
Who knows, maybe a little perchlorate may give you that much-needed energy boost, or cure toenail fungus, or even retard hair loss. It could be the next Viagra.
Let's not give in to premature alarm.
At the very least, though, this news is another kick in the gut to those of us who are trying to lose weight.
Up till now, lettuce has been the more harmless of the two components that make practically everything that's not fattening palatable.
The other, of course, is salad dressing, which, assuming it's tasty salad dressing, is bad for you because it contains fat, sugar, milk products or something else the diet-conscious are supposed to avoid.
So, eliminating fattening dressing and, now, potentially toxic lettuce - and pending further tests disclosing more exotic and/or life-threatening chemicals in the California veggie supply - the smart salad of the future will consist of raw carrots and broccoli, celery, bean sprouts, red cabbage, green pepper and a dash of vinegar or lemon juice.
Tastefully arranged on a bed of one of the wild field greens that grow outside California. Such as arugula - traditionally known in these parts as ...
Rocket salad.