Zombie Lettuce
I eat a lot of lettuce. I mean a lot. Likely over 50 kg of lettuce a year. That’s maybe 16 square metres worth of lettuce farming. Now, that’s lettuce that actually makes it to my mouth. There’s a spoilage factor before that 142 g of daily leaves makes it to my enormous serving size salad bowl for one. There’s also the occasional dud box that had gone bad and I hadn’t noticed when I shopped it in the store.
Beyond any vermin, the biggest destroyer of my lettuce is the fridge. In too much zeal to keep things fresh, I stuff the lettuce boxes in the back to keep them cold. But heat isn’t distributed evenly in the fridge and there are areas that at times may dip below freezing. If the box of lettuce is located in that area, then I end up with frostbitten leaves. Ice crystals form inside the leaves’ cells, bursting the cell walls, and leaking intracellular fluid. This accelerates decay.
Zombie lettuce and many other vegetables, like Zombie Cucumbers, are the ones in between that state of just being frostbitten but not yet decayed. Their texture is off but they’re not spoiled yet. They exist between stages of edible and bad.
There are many analogs to Zombie Lettuce. There’s quiet quitting, there’s the little-bit-overcooked, there’s the overstayed-the-welcome. However, just like the Zombie Lettuce can be added to soup to enhance flavours, there’s opportunities for all of these just-past-prime examples. There’s opportunity to extract value.
