Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty
Jacq Kelly
There’s no way I could get by on a bowl of Coco Pops – give me sliced tomatoes and cucumber every time
I recently got into a row on X about the unlikely subject of salad. I want to acknowledge that arguing with strangers on social media is definitely for babies and I should know better by now, but I’m a work in progress. And so I mentioned that I had enjoyed how readily available salads had been at breakfast buffets while I had been travelling in Denmark and Sweden this year compared with the UK. Salad has been a part of my breakfast for about a decade now, and I think a lot of people would benefit from it. It’s a pretty easy way of getting a couple of portions of fruit and veg before you have even left the house.
All hell broke loose. Salad for breakfast is “not normal in a northern European climate”, according to one agitated typer in a response to my post about its availability at breakfasts there. In one of the towns we visited, Luleå, we were just 100km south of the Arctic Circle and the sea was still frozen in April. The hotel had an excellent breakfast buffet – a rotating assortment of freshly prepared salad items with fruit that hadn’t even been poured from a can. Someone should alert the authorities.
“Only freaks eat salad for breakfast,” another wordsmith reported. What really took the rice-crispy cake was the person who explained: “It’s the uk [sic], our food is heavy and warm here. Cold island nation that had to be out in the fields with constant rain”, which was presumably typed on a precariously balanced laptop by someone driving a tractor somewhere on Shetland. Obviously the people I worked with in UK offices who I witnessed spooning sugary snack foods into their faces while staring at their computer screens are the outliers here.
Don’t misunderstand me – I love a bowl of Coco Pops. Not as a morning food option but as an after-lunch-and-too-early-for-dinner hangry-management solution. There’s no way I could get through an entire morning on a bowl of crispy rice dusted with cocoa sloshing around in semi-skimmed cow juice.
A selection of Danish smørrebrød: ‘a pretty easy way of getting a couple of portions of fruit and veg before you even leave the house’. Photograph: Sofiia Popovych/Shutterstock
I need sliced salted tomatoes, a generous handful of fresh assorted leaves, the crunch of a cucumber and, if I am being fancy, thinly sliced mangetout with a handful of finely chopped dill, mint or parsley to set me up for the morning, and ideally I want to have it sitting at a breakfast table. Whatever curveballs might come my way throughout the day, I can start it knowing I have done something for me and by me that was not only healthy but also delicious, and that made me sit down with a knife and fork to actually make time for at least one civilised meal.
So no thanks to the people who told me I could go into a supermarket or McDonald’s and buy salad whenever I like. That sort of misses the point – I want to eat breakfast in the place where I am staying. I don’t want to pick wilted leaves from a plastic bowl with my fingers in the middle of the high street.
Complain all you like, but I’m eating salad as part of breakfast whenever I can. There’s a reason those Scandinavians have colour in their cheeks and live long and healthy lives, and I want in on that. As for the person who responded to the photo of my breakfast of salad, garlic mushrooms and boiled egg on toast with a sophisticated total of three “being sick” emojis, thanks for proving my point – cereal for breakfast really is for babies.
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- Jacq Kelly is a Toronto-based writer and disability rights campaigner
