The Lettuce Bag

The loveliest lettuce comes in a plastic sleeve that expands, weblike, to cradle the largest red-leaf or the smallest butterhead. If a rose were the size of a head of romaine, its petals would be held unbruised. The lettuce bag would not distort the most bouffant beehive hairdo and indeed, you could slip it over an actual beehive—a small one—and its grid of plastic tethers would barely impress the delicate wax. If labias were in season, their tender interiors, their roundness, would be touched by the grocer’s mist. The lettuce bag has the same selflessness that a good translator has for a French poem. The little plastic sleeve moves me like a suffragette! But I am being too grand. Abundantly soft and pliant, its perforations clean, the bag has a modest beauty. In the modern refrigerator, though, lettuce goes limp as a peignoir unless stored in an astronaut helmet.

—Joy Katz