A PSA from the Bag Salad Lady

(or: I'm Back on Lettuce)  ·  #lettucespray

This is a public service announcement for my fruit and vegetable lovers. My careful eaters. My label-readers. My produce-aisle devotees. You know who you are — you're the ones standing in front of the romaine right now with your arms crossed.

I know how you're feeling. Betrayed.

Because produce was the one that never let us down. Cast your mind back to 2020. Toilet paper was being rationed like wartime nylons. Flour vanished. Yeast became contraband. Grown adults were trading sourdough starter like it was currency — and through all of it, the produce section stood there in full color, calmly misting its greens like nothing was happening. Whatever else the world took away, we always had our salads.

And now the headlines have you side-eyeing the lettuce.

As the Bag Salad Lady — and I have earned that title, a Costco-sized bagged salad almost every day for years, plus one recent month hosting Bert and Ernie that some of you followed with popcorn — I believe I have standing to speak. So here is your PSA, in three parts.

Part one: the honest math

Ten years. A big salad almost every day, loads of fresh fruit and vegetables alongside. That is thousands upon thousands of servings — and out of all of them, one, maybe two, were ever tainted.

You do the math.

Fear is a terrible accountant. It counts the one loss and loses the ledger. So let me read you the other side of mine: I released a ton of excess weight. My numbers shock most doctors. I am in the best health of my life — because of those fruits and vegetables. And even after my month with Bert and Ernie, the moment my body could handle raw again, I was back. Big salads, same as before. The drift lasted exactly as long as the healing did — not one day longer. That's the whole scandal. The Bag Salad Lady looked at the evidence and re-upped.

Part two: check your relief

Now a question, offered with love and exactly one raised eyebrow.

Is anyone out there feeling a little bit… relieved?

Maybe you grew up on meat and potatoes, and some quiet part of you has been waiting years for this excuse to finally be a valid one. See? Even the lettuce isn't safe. Might as well. Or maybe the fruits and vegetables were always a report card — eaten to earn the gold star, to be good, to pass — and a scary headline reads less like a warning and more like a hall pass. A system that's tired of being graded will take any honorable exit it's offered.

If any of that landed — it's okay. It's human. I'm not here to shame you; I'm here because an excuse you haven't named runs your choices from the shadows, and an excuse you have named is just information. And if the fear is genuine? Also human. That's a protective system overlearning from headlines, exactly the way protective systems are built to do. You were never broken. You were biological.

Part three: remember the good in those things

While you've been side-eyeing the produce aisle, the produce aisle has been quietly doing what it always does. Fiber — the kind you eat, not take — feeding the good tenants in your gut neighborhood. Water and crunch and color, and every one of those colors doing its own quiet work. Steadiness where the packaged stuff gives you static. These are the foods that don't shout at your nervous system — they just show up, day after day, and build you.

The produce section kept its promise through an actual global pandemic. It has earned better than a breakup over one bad actor.

The actual PSA: source it, and dive in

The answer to a scary headline is not stepping away from the very foods building your health. The answer is sourcing.

Know where it's grown. Know where you buy it. Wash it like you mean it. Store it well. That's not fear talking — that's wisdom. Fear says never again. Wisdom says let's pay attention. The adult response to risk isn't avoidance. It's care.

And while you're at it — make the prep joyful. Music on. Good knife. The colors on the cutting board. And that small lovely moment later: opening the fridge to find everything washed, everything ready, waiting for you like a kindness from your earlier self. Front-load the joy, and watch the “it takes too much time” story get very, very quiet.

Drift is information, not failure. And the produce aisle is still right there, misting its greens, keeping its promise.

Source your healthy foods — and dive in.

This has been a public service announcement from the Bag Salad Lady. We now return to your regularly scheduled headlines, which you are free to read with one raised eyebrow of your own.

You were never broken. You were biological.

Whatever plan, practitioner, or medication is serving you right now, keep it. My work walks beside anything — And… Not Instead.

A note of care: I write about my own relationship with food, and I know these waters run deep. If you're navigating an active eating disorder, please reach out to findEDhelp.com — offered with love, never a push.

With love and light,

Sonja