Celery Should Be Free

A Couple of Cranky Rants

Figures, which I am making up as I go along, state that 90 percent of all celery purchased in the US winds up in the trash. It hardly seems possible, does it? Yet that is what the figures state.¹

Haven’t we all had the experience of forgetting about that celery we bought last week only to discover it rotting and partially liquified in the vegetable drawer? Does anyone even like celery? Multiple articles (here’s one) refer to celery as “nature’s dental floss.” Oh yum. I know I am not the only one who has a negative attitude about celery, because on a recent viewing of The Seven Year Itch, I was amused to spot this joke, which appears in the background to a scene in a vegetarian restaurant where a sad-sack Tom Ewell is dining:

My daughter managed to pause the film at just the right point so that I could take this photo of the screen. Thanks, Casey!

I’m not being facetious here: I genuinely do believe that celery should be free. For one thing, diet culture has soured me on celery. Many of us have read articles that hector us to eat celery because it has negative calories and is thus the perfect diet food.² It seems only fair that if we aren’t getting any sustenance from celery, we shouldn’t have to pay for it. I’ll go further: We should be allowed to grab a single stalk and leave the rest of the bunch behind. After all, most of the time one stalk is all we need for our mirepoix, soup, or chicken salad. Maybe stores could have a bin of celery at the front as a loss-leader. Shoppers could take what they need for their recipes or hand over a stalk to teething babies and restive toddlers, who could wield the stalks like scepters. Fun for everyone!

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I chose the subtitle of this essay advisedly. Long-time readers who are familiar with such posts as College Admissions Should Be Done by Lottery, We Shouldn’t Push Kids to Eat Foods They Don’t Like. No, Not Even Just a Little Taste, Not Even a Single Bite, and Oh Honest to Pete! Just Check Your Bags! will be forgiven for thinking that my whole Substack could as easily be titled Cranky Rants as The Happy Wanderer. What can I say? It can feel really good to let loose with some strong opinions from time to time. For example:

Stop Worrying about “Hydration”

An onslaught of health advice has caused some of us to constantly fret about adequate “hydration.” One wonders how humanity has managed to survive thus far, and how our ancestors—unaware of warnings that we should be dutifully quaffing water by the gallon—managed not to turn into desiccated husks and blow away like dust in the wind.

(That song is stuck in my head now too.)

Anyway, with the exception of people with kidney disease, diabetes, or a few other medical conditions, most of us don’t need to force ourselves to drink water when we’re not thirsty, and still less do we need to equip ourselves with those giant Stanley cups or to purchase bottled water every time we’re away from home, just in case. We can also ignore warnings that caffeine is dehydrating, because unless we are chomping on NoDoz during an all-nighter, we don’t consume caffeine in isolation. We get our caffeine in our morning quart of coffee,³ which is mostly water. It is true that the caffeine will remove a small amount of water from our system, but the water in the coffee more than compensates for that tiny loss. (The same principle applies to beer, incidentally, although not to wine or other alchoholic drinks, which are dehydrating.) And finally, unless we live in Flint, tap water is perfectly fine to drink and likely healthier for us than water that comes in plastic bottles.

Readers may be wondering why I am so het up about this topic. The advice to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day might be misguided, but can’t we just ignore it? Well, the problem is that some people are so nervous about their health that they aren’t able to ignore cockamamie advice and instead act on everything they read or hear out of an abundance of caution. Health authorities contribute to this anxiety by making medical guidelines universal when they ought to apply only to some of us, and by recommending onerous protective measures to everyone, measures that most of us could safely ignore (like toting water bottles around everywhere).

Think of the recent panic over monkeypox. Health authorities, in an effort to avoid stigma, warned all Americans that we should fear this disease, but in fact 98 percent of those who contracted it were gay and bisexual men. People who were at no risk whatsoever from monkeypox, but who had read the warnings from the health authorities, were terrified of catching the disease. Or, to take a more quotidian example, most of us have heard the health guidelines saying that everyone is eating too much sodium. People take these guidelines to heart and become so worried that they confine themselves to bland foods and deny themselves such treats as pizza and tacos out of fear that those foods are dangerous. Or if they do indulge, they feel guilt and stress. While it is true that people who have high blood pressure or kidney disease do need to watch their salt intake, studies show that the rest of us don’t need to be so afraid,⁴ and that the amount of salt in a normal diet won’t harm our health.

Besides, if we have overdone it with salty snacks, perhaps while watching the NFL playoffs [sheepishly raises hand], we can take care of the problem through the simple expedient of walking into the kitchen to grab a quick drink. Or if we’re in a restaurant and have had more than our share of, say, nachos, we can enjoy the free glass of ice water that comes with our meal. (Americans are so lucky! Restaurants in Europe never offer tap water, and if you ask for it, they look at you like you’re déclassé and then grudgingly bring a single, tiny, tepid glass.) To return to my initial point, a subset of people feel outsized anxiety about their health, and it is irresponsible of health authorities and journalists to exacerbate these fears, even about an issue as seemingly minor as hydration. Stress and anxiety are bad for our health too.

Of course, another reason to object to hydration panic is that plastic water bottles are a scourge. An average liter of bottled water contains hundreds of thousands of bits of micro- and nanoplastic, which concentrates in our tissues and is passed along to babies in their mothers’ breast milk. Bottled water companies deplete reservoirs, and transporting the bottles from the countryside to distant cities adds tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Most obviously, the empty bottles pollute the environment. In 2021, discarded plastic water bottles resulted in 25 million tons of plastic waste, a quantity “so gargantuan that it would be enough to fill a line of 40-ton trucks stretching from New York to Bangkok every year.”

What can we do? If my arguments above aren’t convincing, and we’re still worried about hydration, we don’t need to run out and purchase a new Stanley cup, still less does it make sense to hoard (or riot over!) them. We don’t need to buy water in plastic bottles all the time either. We all have water bottles lying around the house already. We can be content with them; they hold and dispense water just as well as the trendy, expensive, new bottles. Or, if we have forgotten our bottle and get thirsty when we’re out and about, we can take a drink from a water fountain, just as people used to do before bottled water became the norm.

Public water fountains have been around for centuries. I took this photo of one of Bern’s Reformation-era municipal fountains—and only noticed afterwards that this gentleman is sporting an EPIC codpiece. Well done, sir!

But really, it is a scientific fact that no one has ever experienced dire health consequences from waiting an hour or so to take a drink. If we get thirsty when we’re away from home, we can be confident that we will be fine if we wait until we return home to fill up a glass from our kitchen tap. It is a useful spiritual practice to sit with minor discomforts like thirst on occasion. We can remind ourselves that we have the power to cope with mildly unpleasant experiences. And then when we do quench that thirst, we can take a moment savor the cold, clean, delicious water,⁵ and to be grateful that we live in a country where we can get potable water right from the tap.

A common thread woven through this post, which unites celery and bottled water, is the problem of waste. My celery rant is somewhat fanciful, but my point is serious: We should strive to purchase only what we actually need, and to make good use of what we have bought, whether it be disappointing vegetables or old water bottles. Future generations, and people living near landfills right now, will thank us.

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Whew! Glad I got all that off my chest! How about you, readers? Do you agree? And what are your cranky rants? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Sorry, readers! The soup below will not be much help in getting rid of surplus celery. It features fennel, which is infinitely superior to celery in both taste and texture. If you make your own vegetable stock (here is my recipe), you will need a stalk of celery, but otherwise not. This soup recipe, which is inspired by one in Simple Vegetarian Pleasures, by Jeanne Lemlin, is quick and easy to prepare. With crusty bread and a salad, it makes a delicious meal for a chilly winter night—and is even better for lunch the next day.

See? The perfect lunch!

Fennel Soup

Ingredients

1/4c olive oil

1 small yellow onion, finely minced

1 large fennel bulb with fronds

1 small garlic clove, finely minced with 1tsp salt to make a paste

plenty of salt, freshly-ground black pepper, and dried oregano

red pepper flakes to taste

1c good-quality dry white wine

4c vegetable stock, either homemade or store-bought (Pacific Foods and Beyond Bullion are good options)

2c water

1-15oz/400gm can diced tomatoes

1/2c orzo or other tiny pasta

a mix of chopped fresh herbs: dill, fennel fronds, thyme, and Italian flat-leaf parsley (about 1/2c total)

about 4oz/120gms feta

Method

1. In a large soup kettle, heat the olive oil. When it is shimmering, add the onion and sauté, stirring occasionally and sprinkling salt over it to help it purge its juices.

2. Meanwhile, prepare the fennel as follows: Cut off the fronds and reserve for later. Then halve the fennel bulb lengthwise and cut out and discard the woody core (first photo). Quarter the halves lengthwise and then slice thinly (second photo).

   

3. Add the fennel to the pot and sprinkle more salt over it. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the fennel begins to soften—about 10 minutes.

4. Add in the garlic, black pepper, oregano, and red pepper flakes and sauté briefly. Then pour in the wine and bring to a boil.

5. Add the stock, water, and tomatoes and bring to a simmer. You can prepare the soup ahead to this point.

6. About half an hour before serving, bring the soup to a boil and add the macaroni. Cook, stirring occasionally. When the macaroni is al dente, add in the herbs and stir until they are partially wilted.

7. Taste for seasoning and adjust if necessary. Serve in large bowls with another grind of black pepper and some crumbled feta on top.

1. So as not to pull a Claudine Gay, I’ll note that the previous sentences are not mine. They are a paraphrase of a parody essay (about aquariums) by S. J. Perelman.

2. This article debunks that factoid, but you have to admit that celery, at six calories per stalk, is hardly adequate nutrition for anything other than lying around wanly on the sofa.

3. What?! This is a totally normal amount of coffee to drink!

4. In fact, some of us need to consume more salt than we currently do. When I was in my teens and twenties, my blood pressure was so low—90/40!—that I fainted constantly. My doctor instructed me to eat more salt, which solved the problem.

5. Many years ago, my daughter’s wonderful fourth-grade teacher gave her The Search for Delicious, by Natalie Babbitt. An entire kingdom goes to war over the question of what the most delicious thing is, only to discover at the end of the book that there is nothing more delicious than a big, cold glass of water when you’re thirsty. Highly recommended!