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The Conservative leadership contest has been meandering on – that “thigh-rubbing experiment in humiliation and self-harm” as Russ Jones so memorably describes it – and I find myself drawn inexorably back to the summer of 2022 and the race to see which would last longest before wilting: Liz Truss’ premiership or an iceberg lettuce.
The Daily Star-sponsored YouTube video might have gone viral, and the lettuce might have won, but it has rankled with me ever since. The lettuce deserved better.
I’m guessing the lettuce was chosen for its apparent lack of remarkable qualities. It has become the most boring of all salad vegetables, the vodka of greenery, something we mix with other more interesting things to make a salad. But the truth is rather different, for lettuce was once the lifestyle drug of choice.
The first cultivation of lettuce was in Ancient Egypt, almost 5,000 years ago. It became associated with Min, God of Fertility, who was said to have an extreme love for the leaves and whose image usually appears with an erect phallus in wall paintings and papyri. Lettuce seems to have had an aphrodisiac quality: in a Middle Kingdom text from the city of Edfu, Min is called “Great of Love” and consuming lettuce enables him “to perform the sexual act untiringly”.
Also, Egyptian lettuce was long and vaguely phallic in shape (most similar to today’s romaine variety) but also filled with milky white sap that closely resembled semen. This association reappears rather messily in the Chester Beatty Papyrus from 1147 BC in which the Chief God Horus (often associated with Min) empties his semen onto a lettuce plant and offers it to his arch enemy Set (God of the Desert and Chaos) who proceeds to eat it, thereby losing this round of their ongoing battle for supremacy.
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As well as venerating it as a sex plant, the Ancient Egyptians made oil from its seeds which was used medicinally to stimulate hair regrowth, but also in cooking and mummification.
This medicinal use was picked up by the Romans, who used it not as an aphrodisiac but as a mild sedative, serving it at the end of the meal to induce sleep.
The Latin name for lettuce – Lactuca sativa – derives from ‘lact’ meaning ‘milk’ because of its sap which looks and smells like milk (as well as semen), but also closely resembles the latex produced by the opium poppy.
This association has persisted over the centuries.
In the 19th Century, lettuce sap or lactuarium was known as ‘Lettuce opium’ and used as a painkiller, as well as to treat insomnia, coughs, and flatulence, and as a “galactagogue” – a breast milk stimulant. It was listed in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1916. Recent analysis suggests some of the older lettuce varieties – the ones that are more bitter and contain more sap – do contain tropane alkaloids, the active ingredients in cocaine.
That might explain why, by the mid-1970s, lots of smokable extracts of lettuce opium were sold throughout America under names such as L’Opium and Lettucene. Unfortunately, most were made from modern garden lettuce, which have had the intoxicating lactuarium element bred out of them.
The idea of lettuce as a sedative surfaces in Beatrix Potter’s 1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit, as the bolted lettuces the Flopsy Bunnies feast on prove “so soporific” they fall asleep and only narrowly escape ending up in Mrs McGregor’s rabbit pie.
More recently, the RSPCA have advised against feeding it to rabbits, claiming that large amounts “can cause digestive upsets” and “light-coloured varieties are high in water and have very little nutritional value”.
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The Yazidi people go even further – they have a religious ban on eating lettuce. The Yazidi now live mostly in northern Iraq and their ancient and mysterious religion incorporates elements of Sufism, Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. One theory about their issue with lettuce is that it is a reminder of the many massacres against the Yazidis by Ottoman Turks in the 18th and 19th Centuries, in which thousands were slain in the lettuce fields that were then common in north-eastern Iraq. Another is that a 13th Century Yazidi saint was executed in Mosul and his corpse was pelted with heads of lettuce.
So, not so dull, the old lettuce leaf.
Even in its bland sap-free modern form, it has its uses. Victorian picnickers would wrap butter in lettuce to keep it cool. The baseball star Babe Ruth slipped a couple of leaves into his hat for the same reason. And it’s broad, crisp leaves offer a wonderful surface area for carrying dressings.
In his classic On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee recommends putting your vinaigrette in the freezer for half an hour to make it more viscous. Another great food historian, Alan Davidson, once coined an excellent word for lettuce-free salad: “sinelactucate.”
I don’t want a sinelactucate world. After all, lettuce has something that so many politicians lack – a proper hinterland.