“Lo what fools we mortals be,” to slightly misquote Shakespeare for my own nefarious purposes. Knowing that I am, indeed, a poor player strutting and fretting my hour upon the stage, I have to wonder why am I wasting ‘precious’ brain power internally ranting about why I hate wooden salad bowls?
Because I do. I hate wooden salad bowls in every configuration, from the big old bowl from which the salad is meant to be served to the inadequate little shallow bowls from which it is meant to be eaten.
I hate the sound the salad tongs make as they scrape the serving bowl, and I hate the sound the fork makes as it judders along the sides and bottom of the eating bowl. It is almost as nauseating as the sound of styrofoam in cardboard.
I hate how the bowls never feel entirely clean after washing, and I hate how delicate they are, how if they stay a bit damp, they will warp and split.
Mostly, though I hate them from a functional standpoint. The bowls from which one is meant to eat are so shallow that the moment you try to fork up a bite of lettuce, the salad skids out the other side of the bowl. They’re clunky and chunky and only hold a piddling amount of salad in any event, and the ones I used to have were of a particularly irritating conical design that tipped over easily, so if you didn’t flip the salad out of the bowl while trying to spear a bite on your fork, you could easily tip the salad out of the bowl by an incautious angle of attack with your fork.
I have, in my adult life, divested myself of no fewer than three sets of wooden salad bowls. For some reason, especially in my much longer-haired youth, people seemed to think that I liked and needed wooden salad bowls. Apparently they seemed to “go” with the slightly hippie-ish appearance that hung about me. Fortunately, as I’ve gotten more and more boring to look at as I’ve aged, I no longer appear to be the sort of woman who likes, needs, and wants creepy wooden salad bowls.