I remember the first time my future wife and I dined out. She looked up from her menu and informed me, "I hear the House Salad's really good here." I chuckled, then snorted ice water out my nose and started banging my fist on the table as I nearly lost consciousness with laughter. When I recovered my faculties, I discovered she wasn't joking. While I consumed a burger with two kinds of cheese, bacon, barbecue sauce, and guacamole, she actually foraged through a large bowl full of lettuce, carrots, red cabbage, egg fragments, and hard bread cubes. Really. All through the movie (a chick flick, of course), I waited for her to pass out, hyperventilate, or suddenly cry out for red meat.

As our relationship progressed, I discovered a whole new alternate lifestyle. There were all different kinds of "salad": Caesar salads, like the totalitarian Roman emperors liked (I haven't researched this, but it sounds right); taco salads IN BOWLS YOU COULD EAT (take that, Bill Gates); and grilled chicken salads, where white meat and vegetables cavorted in a gleefully bacchanalian rite of franchise restaurant decadence.
Eventually, I experienced an important dietary epiphany. Instead of scarfing down endless racks of fatty ribs and greasy chops and chargrilled burgers, I could dine more nutritiously on fresh garden vegetables AND racks of fatty ribs and greasy chops and chargrilled burgers.

I have since enjoyed many nutritional benefits as a result, chiefly the ability to confidentally inform a snoopy coworker, "Of course, I've had some green vegetables this week -- right between the fried cheesesticks and the lasagna." And by simply garnishing my lettuce with a few scoopfuls each of bacon bits, sunflower seeds, fried croutons, cheese, and maybe beef jerky, I have created a sustaining as well as nourishing treat (the French call this du cardiac a la harpoone, or heart attack on a stick).