What Your Salad Toppings Say About You

Last month, Silvia Killingsworth wrote a New Yorker blog piece about attempting to eat salad every day for a week. Such a change is admirable but too ambitious for me, so I chose to adopt and modify the plan: one salad a month.

Last week I checked out the salad bar at Flavors, a place that delivers on its name in multitudes. There are five types of chicken alone to choose from, and the breadth of the salad dressing rivals the counter at Baskin Robbins. The options were overwhelming, and I wish I had some guidance as I went to coordinate my "$10 bowl of roughage," as Killingsworth calls it. And the stakes are high, which adds to the pressure: Pick a topping out of panic — an impulse topping — and you may regret it. You can't go back. Your lunch is doomed. Maybe your whole afternoon. Maybe your relationship with salads will change forever.

But I learned a lot from observing the options and evaluating what other customers picked. So here are some notes on what your salad fixings reflect about you as a person:

THE LEAVES

Mixed greens: You're a sophisticate. You like what you like, and you're not ashamed that it's the most high-maintenance of the greens, because damn it, you deserve a number of different types of roughage.

Spinach: You're a health-conscious person, but you get thrills from taking risks (i.e. E. Coli).

Iceberg: Do you prefer Myspace to Facebook, too?

THE TOPPINGS

Vegetables: Cool, yeah, whatever, you dig broccoli.

Feta cheese: You're adventurous, and you get annoyed when people mispronounce really important words like "feta." (I hadn't heard the word aloud, okay?)

Hardboiled egg: You enjoy simple things, like eggs.

Croutons: These are basically French fries! Totally, totally bad for you! You little vixen!

THE DRESSING

Oil and vinegar: You think life's an imperfect art — but you know when enough's enough, and you're not a fan of heavy hands.

Ranch: You're so exotic!

Thousand island: You don't exist!

Blue cheese: At this point, throw some cigarettes on there and swap utensils with used syringes. You're done for.

Good luck out there, fellow rabbits!