10 Reasons You Might Want to Skip the Salad Bar

6) I’ll Just Have The Salad Bar

Many people trick themselves into thinking that if they go for the salad bar that it will be less fattening than, let’s say, a cheeseburger and fries. This isn’t necessarily so, though, considering all that fattening stuff that gets piled on top of the chopped lettuce. You start adding salad dressing, croutons, pasta salad, and crumbled bacon and suddenly you have a plate that has more calories and fat than the aforementioned cheeseburger.

7) Eat Your Dirty Vegetables

There is nothing worse than gritty spinach leaves and dirty mushrooms. Some restaurants are in such a hurry that they don’t adequately wash the vegetables, or don’t bother washing them at all. Yikes! Even more dangerous than this bad practice are veggies, like green onions and spinach, which have been tainted with E. coli, an incredibly nasty bacteria that comes from animal and human feces. (This has been a problem in recent times.) E. coli can actually kill you, but it will most likely just make you wish that you would die. Double yikes!

8) That’s Mighty Green Salad

How could it possibly be that a bowl of chopped lettuce, usually mixed with shredded red cabbage and carrot, can look so green for so long? It’s purely science, man. Most restaurants that have salad bars use chemical additives in their lettuce mixes, or they buy it already chopped and treated. It doesn’t take a refined palate to taste this chemical preservative, but once you add all that blue cheese dressing and other stuff, it’s kind of hard to tell.

9) Poppin’ Cans

Salad bars don’t always equate to fresh food, as the concept implies. Those beets probably came from a can. So did a good number of the other items, not limited to peas, corn, roasted peppers, pineapple, and, believe it or not, chopped tomatoes. But, in defense of the restaurants, it’s kind of hard to get fresh corn in the dead of winter. (Tomatoes, now that’s another story, thanks to hothouse technology.) You expect items like olives, pickles, and artichoke hearts to come out of a can (or a big jar), but enough already with the canned tomatoes and tinny pineapple.

10) C is For Crab; K is For Krap

This last one relates to deception, which is more of an annoyance than anything dangerous. Why is it that some restaurants insist that they are serving real crab (in the Asian crab salad, let’s say), when it’s actually imitation crab that should be spelled with a “k?” What! Do they think we are stupid? Most places try to be on the up-and-up about the crab they use in their salad bars and buffets, yet it’s so obvious when it’s krab–you know, rubbery pollock fish with a red ribbon of dye–and not the real stuff.