40 Fun Facts About Lettuce

Which British prime minister was outlasted in office by a lettuce on a Daily Star livestream in 2022?

Liz Truss served 49 days, the shortest term of any British prime minister, and announced her resignation while the lettuce beside her photograph had still not wilted.

Which starving marine mammals were fed 3,000 pounds of lettuce a day in Florida after their seagrass died off?

Manatees graze on seagrass, and when the beds died back in 2021 a record 1,100 or so of the animals died in Florida, many of them from starvation.

Which NASA astronaut ate red lettuce grown aboard the International Space Station during his year in orbit in 2015?

Scott Kelly and two crewmates tasted the leaves plain first, then dressed them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Caesar salad, built on romaine lettuce, is credited to an Italian-born restaurateur working in 1924 in which country?

Mexico's border city of Tijuana was home to Caesar Cardini's restaurant, which drew American diners escaping Prohibition; by his daughter's account, a holiday rush in 1924 inspired the dish.

In which author's 1909 tale do the Flopsy Bunnies fall asleep after feasting on overgrown lettuces?

Beatrix Potter turned the nap into the plot: the gardener McGregor finds the dozing bunnies on his rubbish heap and ties them in a sack.

Lactucarium, the dried sap of wild lettuce, was studied in the 1800s as a less addictive alternative to which drug?

Opium and lactucarium even look alike, since both ooze out as a white fluid that dries to a thick solid, and the lettuce version went into cough lozenges and sleeping syrups.

Which Brothers Grimm heroine shares her name with a German word for the salad leaf called lamb's lettuce?

Rapunzel is a regional German name for lamb's lettuce, which is no true lettuce: Thomas Jefferson grew it at Monticello under its French name, mâche.

At Lunar New Year, which costumed dancing animal plucks a hanging lettuce, chews it and spits it out for luck?

Lion dancers call the custom plucking the greens: the lettuce hangs outside a shop or home with a red envelope for the troupe, and the leaves the animal spits out are a good omen.

Which dense, pale-headed lettuce made up about 95 percent of the lettuce grown and eaten in the US after the 1940s?

Iceberg is often said to be named for the crushed ice it was shipped in, though the seed firm Burpee launched it in 1894 and credits its pale, crisp heads instead.

The Romans called lettuce lactuca, after the white sap in its cut stalks, borrowing their word for what?

Milk in Latin is lac, and lactuca passed through Old French laitues to become the English word lettuce.

Lettuce cannot be successfully frozen, canned or dried because almost 95 percent of each leaf is made of what?

Water makes up 94.9 percent of a lettuce, which defeats every method of preserving it, so the whole crop has to be eaten fresh.

Which ancient civilization left the earliest known pictures of lettuce being grown, dating from about 2680 BC?

Egypt held lettuce sacred to Min, its god of reproduction: the plant was carried in his festivals and set beside his images.

Which explorer is credited with first bringing lettuce from Europe to the Americas in the late 15th century?

Christopher Columbus took it west, and within a century a German botanist could describe the three basic kinds still grown today: head, loose-leaf and romaine.

Which country grew 53 percent of the world's 28 million tonnes of lettuce and chicory in 2023?

China was a latecomer to lettuce, which arrived from the west during the first millennium AD, and nobody is sure how the plant first got there.

Lettuce belongs to the Asteraceae, a family that botanists also name after the aster and which tall garden flower?

Sunflower, daisy and aster all lend their names to the family, which has more than 32,000 known species and is rivalled in size only by the orchids.

Ssam, a mouthful of meat such as pork wrapped in a fresh lettuce leaf, belongs to the cuisine of which country?

Korea's leaf wraps go back centuries: a Chinese poet of the Yuan era wrote that the people of Goryeo ate rice wrapped in raw greens, and praised the scent of their lettuce.

At which Jewish festival meal is romaine lettuce commonly eaten as maror, the bitter herb?

Passover's bitter herb stands for the bitterness of slavery, and lettuce is the first of the five plants that the Mishnah names for it.

Sea lettuce, eaten raw in salads and cooked in soups from Ireland to Japan, is which kind of organism?

Seaweed of the genus Ulva grows along coasts all over the world, and in Japan it is eaten under the name aosa.

Which burger chain's Protein Style order, introduced in the 1970s, swaps the bun for large lettuce leaves?

In-N-Out keeps the lettuce-wrapped burger on its unadvertised secret menu, and Health magazine once rated it the best low-carb sandwich in the United States.

In American slang, lettuce is a nickname for which everyday thing, also known as cabbage?

Money is the meaning, and dictionaries narrow the slang sense of lettuce to paper money, the folding kind.

Which California city, the hometown of novelist John Steinbeck, is nicknamed the Salad Bowl of the World?

Salinas lies in a valley where lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes and spinach are the dominant crops, a landscape Steinbeck used as the setting of East of Eden.

Cos lettuce takes its name from Kos, an island that was an early source of its seeds, in which country?

Greece's island of Kos was a centre of lettuce farming in the Byzantine period, and the first seeds of the tall, upright type to reach the rest of Europe came from there.

Which US state's Yuma County grows about 90 percent of the country's leafy vegetables between November and March?

Arizona's Yuma is known as the Winter Lettuce Capital of the World, and Guinness World Records lists it as the sunniest city on Earth.

Which union leader was jailed in December 1970 during a lettuce strike and boycott in California?

Cesar Chavez had never been in jail before; Ethel Kennedy visited him there, and the dispute grew into the largest farm worker strike in US history.

Which 1980s McDonald's burger came in a two-sided box that kept its lettuce cool and its beef hot?

McDLT was short for McDonald's Lettuce and Tomato: buyers put the two halves together themselves, but the bulky foam box drew environmental complaints and the burger was dropped in 1991.

Miner's lettuce is named after California Gold Rush miners, who ate the wild plant to ward off which disease?

Scurvy comes from a lack of vitamin C, and the plant's fresh leaves supplied it when miners had few other greens to eat.

The frilly lettuce sea slug of the Caribbean gains solar energy by keeping which parts of the algae it eats?

Chloroplasts taken from its food go on making sugars from sunlight inside the slug's frilly back, which is why its relatives are nicknamed solar-powered sea slugs.

Lettuce leaves have been used commercially to make tobacco-free versions of which product?

Cigarettes made from lettuce have been sold as a tobacco-free smoke, though the leaves of the plant's wild relatives look far more like tobacco than the garden kind does.

Celtuce, a lettuce popular in Asian cooking and also called asparagus lettuce, is grown mainly for which part?

Its stem is the thick part that is eaten, raw or cooked, and it is ready to cut once the plant stands about 30 centimetres tall.

What do gardeners call it when lettuce, prompted by hot weather, sends up a flower stalk and turns bitter?

Bolting makes lettuce unsaleable, so centuries of breeding have favoured plants that delay it, and growers in hot places shade their crops to slow it down.

A 100-gram serving of crisp head lettuce gives a fifth of the daily value of which nutrient, needed for blood to clot?

Vitamin K takes its letter from koagulation, as coagulation is spelled in Danish and German; without it, blood clots poorly and bleeding is hard to stop.

Which Swedish botanist gave lettuce its scientific name, Lactuca sativa, in his Species Plantarum of 1753?

Carl Linnaeus kept the Romans' own word for the plant as the name of the whole genus, which also takes in the weedy wild lettuces.

Mesclun, a mix of young lettuces, chervil, arugula and other small salad leaves, originated in which region of France?

Provence had the tradition long before English had the word: the first recorded use of mesclun in English dates only from 1976.

Frisée, a salad leaf with narrow, curly outer leaves, is not a lettuce but a variety of which bitter plant?

Endive belongs to the chicory genus, and its broad-leaved form, escarole, is eaten in Naples at Christmas stuffed with raisins, pine nuts and olives.

Ancient festival-goers sowed fast-growing lettuce and fennel in pots as gardens named after which lover of Aphrodite?

Adonis died young, gored by a wild boar, and the pots set out on rooftops for his festival sprouted quickly and soon withered, as short-lived as he was.

Wild prickly lettuce is known as the compass plant because its upper leaves twist to point in which directions?

North and south is roughly where the upright leaf edges point; the same weed is the closest wild relative of garden lettuce and crosses with it freely.

Bibb lettuce, first known as limestone lettuce, was developed by War of 1812 veteran John Bibb in which US state?

Kentucky's capital, Frankfort, still has the house on Wapping Street where Bibb developed the lettuce, and a state historical marker now stands outside it.

Under which Roman emperor, who reigned from 81 to 96 AD, did the custom of serving lettuce salad before a meal begin?

Domitian's Rome more often ate its lettuce cooked, dressed with oil and vinegar, and only the smaller leaves were sometimes eaten raw.

DNA analysis of 445 kinds of lettuce suggests the crop was first domesticated from a wild ancestor near which mountains?

The Caucasus is where growers first bred out seed shattering, so the seeds stayed on the plant to be gathered and pressed for cooking oil.

Which chopped salad of lettuce, bacon, chicken, egg and avocado is named after the owner of Hollywood's Brown Derby?

Cobb was Robert Cobb, the restaurant's owner; in one telling the salad dates from 1937 and quickly became the Brown Derby's signature dish.