Romaine Calm

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. My name's Nicole John C. Burke, and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of the the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival.

Is it obvious?

I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden.

Each week here on the Grow youw.

Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk.

Go. Go on a drive.

Or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.

Okay, remain calm, everyone. We are talking about lettuce today. No, seriously, I don't have any really good vegetable jokes, so if you do have one, can you let us know? Ha. Just joking. Yes, it is true. I'm going to start pretty much every vegetable focused episode with lame garden puns. So just prepare yourself or just fast forward. Today we are in fact talking about romaine lettuce. It's one of the most popular kinds of lettuce. Raise your hand if you've ever bought romaine lettuce like this. The three little heads of romaine lettuce in a bag from the grocery. I know you have, right? Or maybe you buy it where it's like soaking wet because it keeps getting sprayed at the grocery like every 15 seconds. And so it's like dripping wet when you put it into your little grocery bag. Yep, I bet you've done that too. So romaine is. It's one of the most common lettuces. It's good for us, of course. And today we're going to dig into the surprising stories of this vegetable. You're going to learn things you've never heard before. And you're going to see romaine in a different way at the end of this episode. I promise. So let's go way, way, way, way, way back, like 6,000 years ago, back a long time ago. And romaine was being grown by this small the amazing Egyptians. In fact, the story has it that ancient Egyptians were growing lettuce over 6,000 years ago. How do we know? Well, they were showing off their lettuce in their hieroglyphs. So there's like artwork and famous stuff from those awesome Egyptians that show off the beauty of the romaine lettuce. Pretty cool, right? So romaine is actually also called cos, C, O s. I didn't know this in my limited vegetable knowledge until I was hanging out on Instagram and noticed all of my Australian gardener friends always referred to it as cos, C O s. And I was like, what's cos? So I googled it and yeah, it's the same thing. So romaine is also called cos because it was said to have originated off of the Greek island of the same island. It's literally called Kos, near Turkey in the Aegean Sea. Pretty cool, right? So they named it for its place of origin, but I just like to call it Romaine because I'm Kas. You know, you don't know if you're saying like, cosco or cos or what. So I'm just going to call it romaine instead of cos. And if you're Australian or you call it cos, you can do that too. Okay. So, yeah, so this lettuce was showing up in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and obviously they like to eat it. These guys were smart. And. And then what happened is the lettuce started spreading, so other people started growing it too. So not just in the Middle east, but this traveled over to Europe. So suddenly Europeans were starting to grow lettuces, you know, I don't know, thousands of years later, and it even spread into Italy. And do you guys know who's from Italy? Christopher Columbus. Right. So Christopher Columbus, the famous dude who came to the Americas, along with lots of other dudes that aren't as famous but should be. And he actually brought lettuce with him, this romaine lettuce, in fact. So the story has it that in 1494, when he showed up in the New World, he brought some lettuce with him. Cool, right? So romaine is. Well, there's. There's different kind of lettuces. So some lettuces we call head lettuces, meaning that they form like a tight, compact head. And then there are lettuces that we like to refer to as more loose leaf, where they kind of like, are just hanging out. They're just like chilling kind of lettuces. Those are called loose leaves. So you have like your uptight lettuce and your chillin lettuce. So Romaine's one of those uptight ones. So the way it grows is it starts in the center, and then it keeps growing more and more leaves around that tight center. It's pretty beautiful, actually, if you start to like when you chop it up. Have you ever done that when you're chopping up your romaine and you just kind of look down and take a look at the shape of the lettuce? I think it's pretty amazing. You know, that's the secret to happiness, is just finding, like, beautiful, beautiful things in your everyday life of chopping up lettuce. So there are actually, like, four most popular varieties of lettuce. Crisp head, butter head, and red leaf lettuce. Those are the ones that everybody seems to like. And number four, right alongside them is romaine. So you can actually, you could still, you know, harvest romaine from the outside if you wanted to have it more loosely and not cut off the whole thing. But in general, a farmer would go and say, take a knife or sheath or, I don't know, something sharp and grab the romaine from the top and then literally just kind of slice it off at the base of the garden. So it would leave the roots and the base of it right there and take everything above it all at once. So that's different. Like with a loose leaf lettuce, you just come off and you cut a few leaves around the outside. Well, not a farmer, but if you're gardening with it. But when you're doing a head lettuce, you're going to take the whole thing. Boom, all at once. Generally, they cut it that way so that they're not pulling up all the dirt with the lettuce. So that's sometimes where when you have a romaine head, it seems really nice and clean. Right. And not so messy. And part of it's because they don't take any of the root up. Okay. What starts to happen, though, with the romaine is it grows in the cooler seasons of the year. And when it gets hotter, what you'll find when you cut back the romaine is it will actually start to give off a little white, milky substance. And that's a sign that the weather's gotten too hot for your romaine. In fact, if you've ever bought romaine, say those bags of three heads of romaine, and it tastes a little bitter. The chances are that lettuce was grown when the temperatures were just a little too high for the romaine's liking. And that's why it's putting off that kind of bitter flavor that you've got to cover up with some salad dressing. Of all these, lettuce varieties that people love, like the butterhead lettuce and the red leaf lettuce. They do say that romaine lettuce has more nutrients than all the others, which is crazy. I wonder if the red leaf lettuce isn't as nutrient rich, because I would think the red would. But at least among the other greens, it's known to be the most nutrient rich. So let's talk about those nutrients, shall we? It's got vitamin C. One serving of romaine will give you about 5% of what you need for the day. And vitamin C is good for obviously your immunity, but it also grows your bones and keeps your teeth nice and healthy, which I need because I keep somehow ending up with cavities. The romaine lettuce also has calcium, believe it or not, so only 2%, but hey, that counts. Lots of vitamin K. So more than 100% of the vitamin K you need for the day is in one single serving of romaine. More than 100% of the vitamin A that you need is also in romaine. So this is a great antioxidant and helps with, like, reproductive growth. So like your cell regenerating and stuff. There's also folate in here, and folate produces the folic acid that you need, especially when you're pregnant. So super good for you. And 32% in one serving. So if you had the biggest romaine salad ever, you could pretty much cover your folate needs for the whole day. It's got 4% of your phosphorus needs, 3% of magnesium, and 5% of potassium. So it's good for you. Right. I mean, it's not like amazing with any one thing, but to know that with just one serving you could cover your vitamin A and vitamin K needs for the day, I think that's pretty great. So lettuces are one of the most popular vegetables in the US and the only vegetable that's more popular in the US Than lettuce is guess what? I'm going to wait a second and see if you can think what it might be. Think in your head. Okay. Now, if you think of, like all the fast food restaurants, you probably guessed what the vegetable is. It's the potato. Yeah. And I think it really, honestly is only due to the fact that all the rest. All the fast food places make french fries and all the kids like potato chips. Yeah. So pretty crazy. So we have the potatoes. They're the most popular. And then second only to potatoes is romaine lettuce. But lettuce in the US Is a Funny thing. So we're going to talk about this in a future episode, but would you believe that pretty much 99% of the U.S. 98, actually, sorry to be 1% off. 98% of the U.S. the lettuce produced in the U.S. is all produced in, like, two places. Just two for the whole U.S. so we're talking, like, people in Vermont and North Carolina and Wisconsin and Alabama and Utah. We're all eating lettuce from the same two places. One of those places is in California, and the other place is in Arizona. So about 71% of the US lettuce is all grown in California, and about 29% is in Arizona. I don't know why I had to get so specific there. Let's just say 70 and 30%. Does that sound good? Yucca said 70 and 29 actually adds up to 100%. So sorry about that. I'm gonna have to check my math. So this was according to a story way back in 2013, but I have to say, I was just reading about lettuce, and it's still true. So pretty much most of the lettuce in the US Is all grown there. And I think it's the Salinas Valley and Yuma Valley. And it's mostly because the temperatures are just right for the lettuce to grow. There's Arizona takes over during the colder parts, I think in California. And then California basically covers the base. Otherwise, most of the romaine we eat is all grown right there. And so they grow it, they package it, and then they ship it all over the U.S. yeah. Pretty crazy. So most of the lettuce you've ever put in your mouth, if you don't live in California or Arizona, has traveled however far your home is from California or Arizona. So when I lived in Philly, my lettuce was traveling really far. And, you know, you can just. If you want to, you should map it, see how far your lettuce travels before it reaches your plate. But this is crazy to know so much lettuce is grown there and then to know how much lettuce we're actually consuming. So they say that we consume over 12 pounds of romaine lettuce a year. That can't seem right. I'm gonna have to Google that. 12 pounds of lettuce a year. That should be more, I think. But that's the statistic. We got 12 pounds of romaine lettuce per person. I think that should be way higher. So we're gonna have to work on that statistic, guys. So that's the deal with lettuce in the US but the fun thing to know is, way back when the Egyptians were enjoying it, lettuce was actually first seen as a weed. So I think there's some saying, you know, that a weed is just a flower that no one's found the use for yet. And that was definitely the case for romaine. So it was just seen as like this random green weed and eventually became known as this great thing, and obviously now is super popular in America. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about what happens with this packaging. So it's kind of crazy to know that all of our lettuce has grown in just two places in the U.S. but let's talk about how that's possible. So the way it's possible is packaging. I'm sure you've seen all the packages that our food is carried in. And while to us, I will say, even to myself, it may seem just like, duh, they just wrap this thing in plastic. There's actually a lot of science that goes into it. So basically, they're trying to figure out how to preserve the food to their best ability inside the package. So for something like potato chips, America's favorite food, obviously, they tried to extend the life of the potato chips inside that bag by kind of making sure that air levels stay correct. I think it says 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% of other gases like carbon dioxide. But for salads, it's not the same because they're not like potato chips. So bagged salads, they don't add any gases to the bags. But what they have had to do is kind of create a bag that keeps the air balanced well, because what happens to the greens of lettuce is as soon as they're cut, because they're living things. As soon as they're cut and staying raw, those cells in the lettuce start erupt or rupture and start to release CO2. Pretty crazy, right? So they're just releasing this gas throughout their whole process. So when they're cut, when they're, like, chopped up, when they're packaged all the way until you consume them, they're kind of letting off this CO2 gas. So the trick is they've got the manufacturers have to harvest all this lettuce in the valley, and then they have to get it into the package very quickly. And then they have to make sure that the air quality is right so that as the lettuce is letting off all this CO2, that it actually Stays like, nice and doesn't end up gross by the time you see it at the grocery store. So as you've known with that bag of three heads of romaine, they wrap your romaine lettuce up in a transparent bag that's specifically designed to try to keep the balance right between all this CO2 that the lettuce is putting out and what would be a normal level of air quality for. For the lettuce? As the CO2 builds up, they usually set up these bags to have little holes in them. Have you seen that? Like, there's these little air holes down at the bottom of the bag, and those supposedly are supposed to allow that CO2 to get out of the bag and into the outside air. Crazy, right? So the packaging is just crazy to think about. All they have to do to make sure that the lettuce stays okay until it gets to us. So obviously we talk about, in that very first episode, the benefits of eating local food or shopping local. And one of the great benefits from shopping local with your lettuce is one, you don't have to worry about all that waste, right. And things staying the right balance in the air, but you also get to cut down on all of that plastic. So I don't know about you, but talking about my food being all wrapped up in plastic and jumping on a truck for thousands of miles from California and Arizona just doesn't have me super excited. What do you think? Yeah. Okay, so that's the, the next fact I wanted to tell you about the wrapping for your romaine. And now let me tell you something else surprising. On June 16th of 2015, there is an article written for NPR by Allison Aubrey, and the title was Landfill of Lettuce. Why were these greens tossed before their time? In the story, they're in Salinas Valley, one of those places. It's the one in California where something like 70 plus percent of our romaine lettuce is grown. And they're pointing to all these bags and all this lettuce, that's all being tossed out. It's super, super gross. So what they report in this story is that all of us throw away over $1,600 worth of food each year. Like what all of us throw away on our own. But what is often unreported, not beyond this $1,600 worth of food that we throw out ourselves, is all the food that's lost on the farms during the processing and the trucking. This article shows that the farmers often have to throw out their lettuces and all this packaging before it even gets shipped to you. They say this is often because they overproduce what called for or necessary, and they can't ship it if it's not going to get used up in time. So the article says that the farmers rarely actually give the full details on how much they actually throw out, but that they throw out a whole lot. So you got to check out the article and see the pile of waste that the reporters captured in this article. It's kind of crazy, and it tells the sad story of basically the result of what happens when we have a food system like we do here, where there's so much production going on in a small area of the country, and they're kind of out of touch and out of step with what's happening in all these other places that they're delivering to. So kind of crazy and grim, right? Maybe we should talk about something a little bit more fun. Let's talk about E. Coli. So I'm sure you've seen all of the reports of E. Coli. I remember last year during Thanksgiving, I arrived to my parents and my mom had that great plastic bag of three heads of romaine, and I was sad to report to her that all the romaine in the whole country had been recalled because of E. Coli. So E. Coli is a strain of bacteria that can cause us to get really sick, and it happens pretty often. I feel like I hear about an E. Coli outbreak at least once a year with romaine lettuce. So I think I heard of it just recently, and I know it happened last year. This E. Coli, just like the food waste and the plastic, happens for the same reason and happens for the same reason as those other things, it's because of the way our salad is grown. So because so much of our salad is grown in these two places of the country, when there is an outbreak, when we start to see something happen with contamination, they have to literally tell the entire United States to throw away their lettuce, like, everywhere they are, because that one area of the country is responsible for lettuce all over the country. So that means that little bit of disease that happened in one spot could potentially be spread all over the country because of our system. So crazy, right? So an article I read in the Washington Post after the E. Coli outbreak last year said that E. Coli can just happen so easily, mostly because when we eat lettuce, we're not cooking it right. So because we don't cook it, then the lettuce can just hold on to that contamination and we end up putting it in our body. With large farms, it's really hard for the farmers, even though they try super hard to keep everything clean. It's just hard to not have contamination like that happen. So I read how sometimes the contamination can happen from birds flying over the fields, or there might be, say, a cattle farm nearby, and somehow the manure, like, comes downstream to the lettuce fields, something kind of nasty like that. And then because this lettuce is all processed in bulk in factories and kind of all chopped up together, whenever there is a little bit of an outbreak or a little bit of a contamination, then the fact is, because of that system, the contamination just kind of spreads through the whole thing quickly. Or even if it doesn't, we have such a system that there's no way to look back and kind of isolate the contamination. So. So in this article in the Washington Post, the guy said that, you know, really, this is just going to be something we're always going to face because the produce is not grown in sterile environments. And especially with the system that we have developed, he just says, this is just going to keep happening. Now, the bummer for me in these articles is the thing no one's really talking about is that if we could make our lettuce sources more localized to the customer, then a lot of this could be changed. So, for instance, instance, if we had lettuce growers in the Carolinas and in the south and in Texas and all around the US Then we could better isolate issues like this. And maybe only people in, say, three or four states would have to throw out their lettuce instead of all 48 contingent. What's that word, where all the states are touching, whatever that is, all those people wouldn't have to throw out their lettuce. An amazing thing to me, when I started working with my clients in Houston and in my own garden, there was seeing how much lettuce I could grow for literally six months out of the year. It was amazing to me to have all that delicious lettuce in my garden and then head to the grocery store and see the bags of romaine that came from California. I was like, wait, I'm pretty sure that the farmers around here could all grow this lettuce, and it would taste so much better because it would be coming to our grocery stores and our place so much faster. At least that's my opinion. Okay, I'm going to stop now with the bad news, but hopefully this opened your eyes to the source of that romaine that you love putting in your Caesar salad. And maybe it'll get you a little excited about growing your own lettuce, or at least shopping locally and finding all the lettuces that your farmers and local growers have. All right, now it is time for the very best part. I'm going to tell you a couple tips on how to grow your own. So romaine lettuces do grow really well, like I said, in the cooler season. So from 45 to 65 degrees is actually ideal. Like I said, romaine grows into, like, a head lettuce, but it does really well started from seed, and you can literally start the seed right there in the garden. Although you could start romaine seed indoors under lettuce before frost is finished. I personally like starting it directly in the garden because it's a little bit fragile to transplant into the garden later on, but you could totally give it a try. When you order romaine or cost seed, you're going to get tons. The seeds are super tiny, and you'll get a lot. It's a great time to experiment, growing, you know, in a variety of ways. So perhaps you could start a bunch of the seeds indoors, and then you could also try to plant some directly after frost is over. You do want to wait till the thread of frost has gone, because frost will harm the romaine, so you definitely want to make sure that that does not happen. But get your romaine in as soon as the thread of frost is over, because it does like the cooler season. So sometimes a challenge you might have is getting it to finish before summer comes. You can grow romaine on kind of both sides of the hot season. So you could grow it in the spring and you could grow it in the fall. So. So two tries a year. I think that's pretty awesome. The main things that you are going to see as a challenge to romaine will be just the typical pest of leaves. So aphids, earwigs, cut worms. And then you might actually have a little trouble with, say, rabbits or woodchucks if you've got those kind of pests around your garden. My favorite way to protect romaine in the garden is simply by covering it. So you can use a mesh cover or you can even do, like, hoop, but a hoop with the mesh cover on it. You just want to make sure that you pin down the sides of the COVID so that nothing can get in. So when you do that, your romaine can still get sun and light and water and fresh air, but those pests can't fly into the garden and, say, the rabbits and the whatever squirrels. I've actually seen squirrels eat lettuce. They can't get under that mesh to eat at your plants. So if you feel frustrated or challenged by those pests, it's really the best, easiest way to deal with it. Romaine loves to grow in that sandy loam soil that I love growing all my plants in, and it'll actually really do really well if you add some compost, a little bit of extra compost to your soil blend. When you plant up your romaine in the show notes, we'll put some sources for seeds for you and some other tips on growing. Romaine can grow pretty much near almost anything in your garden. If you're trying to get the plant to stretch into the warmer parts of the year, it's a great idea to plant taller plants around it to give it a little bit of shade and help it hold on. Like I said at the beginning of the episode, when you cut it and you see that milky white substance, that's a sign that the plant is getting too hot and is starting to turn bitter. So you can still try to eat a little bit if you want, but if the flavor just isn't your style, then you can just pull, pull them up or cut them from the garden, throw them into the compost pile, and start again when the weather gets cool. All right, it is time for a food fight. This is how we're going to finish this episode. So in this food fight, we're going to put one vegetable against the other. And in this particular fight, we've got romaine lettuce versus iceberg. You guys know iceberg, right? So lettuce is good for you no matter what. And I personally grew up eating iceberg pretty much every week, I think. I think it was the only green lettuce I ate. So let's see how these two lettuces shape up against one another. I want to say iceberg was like the lettuce of the 80s, and romaine is like the lettuce of the 2000s. So nutrient wise, romaine lettuce has tons of beta carotene and lots and lots of vitamin A. Iceberg lettuce only has. Let's see. Okay, so in this little number I've got, the vitamin a has like 4,000 units, and the iceberg lettuce has 361 units. So in this particular case, we're going to have to say that romaine wins. Right. If we're talking cost, then iceberg definitely is the winner. If you're trying to decide between Romaine and iceberg at the grocery store and price is the definitive winner for you, then you're going to definitely go with iceberg because it's just almost always cheaper. Part of that may be because it's just kind of fallen out of popularity over the last few decades because everybody said it doesn't have that much nutrients or whatever. Alright. When it comes to vitamin K, I believe that romaine wins again. So far we've got two points to romaine, one point to iceberg. But when it comes to shelf life, so how long the vegetable can hang on after it's been harvested? Can you guess the winner? It's iceberg. Part of this is because the leaves are just a little bit tighter wound and the iceberg can just hang on and on and on. Have you experienced this in your fridge where you pull it out two or three weeks later and it's still okay? It's amazing. So iceberg wins it in terms of shelf life. And another way that iceberg wins is with crispiness. So if you're looking for that super crispy, crunchy flavor with lettuce, iceberg is actually the crunchiest lettuce there is. So iceberg's gonna win if you're looking for texture over flavor. But when it comes to some of the other nutrients, it looks like romaine comes out ahead almost every single time. So when it comes to nutrients, we see romaine winning. And then when it comes to price and crunch and resilience in lasting on the shelf, it looks like iceberg wins. So it's kind of a toss up. Like if you want to save money and keep your lettuce for a long period of time and you just want to have some crunch, then ice iceberg is your girl. But if you want to have as many nutrients as you can possibly get out of that bowl of salad, then you're going to have to go for romaine. So what do you say who wins this food fight? I think I'm going to have to give it to Romaine just because it's the best for you. Right? And it's also popular and I like to be popular. So I hope you enjoyed this episode today. I hope you learn some new things about romaine. Love lettuce. Whatever you do, I want to make sure that you, Romaine, calm about your lettuce situation. And I hope you feel inspired to go beyond buying those bags of three heads from Salinas, California. I hope you now know that you don't have to freak out whenever you hear about the E. Coli. Outbreaks or all the food waste. Because you now have a couple of solutions of what you can do right? First, you can grow a little bit yourself in the cool season. So either the spring or the fall, you can, you can totally plant some romaine from seed. It doesn't take up a lot of space and it's not that hard to grow. So you can grow some yourself, or you can start to look for farmers and local CSAs that can provide romaine lettuce for you. And now, you know, you can be a little bit more conscious about the food miles that are on your romaine lettuce and maybe check the labels when you hit the grocery store and you're trying to buy some lettuce. See where it was grown and how far it had to sit, how long it had to sit on a truck before it reached your local grocery store with your eyes open. I hope that you feel like you are more equipped to grow yourself and that you see romaine in a totally new light no matter what. I really hope that we will Romaine Podcast Friends for Life. Okay, that was so cheesy. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you feel inspired to fill up on the good stuff, to grow a little bit of romaine lettuce yourself and to appreciate your local farmers who are working hard to grow greens. And hopefully we can one day diversify the source of our food and start buying things right down the street and not have to worry so much about bags and E. Coli and all that gross stuff. I love you so much. Thanks for listening and I will see you next time. Sa.