Not Salad Days, So Much As Salad Lunches

Lunch. At work. It can be a Big Mac, a chocolate bar or something you microwave in that little alcove off the conference room. But not for Italian-born, living-in-London art director and graphics designer David Bez. He makes salads for lunch and then he photographs them, and every once in a while he writes about them, most recently in “Salad Love,” 260 beautiful salads in all.

He has his reasons for eating this way, of course, starting with health. He wants food that’s fresh, and he wants food that’s easy on the planet, too. So he decided not only to make his own lunch, but to prepare it at his desk every day. That means he stores a grater, a cutting board, a sharp knife, cutlery, vegetable peelers (two kinds), a mortar and pestle, a strainer, can opener, salad spinner, scissors, latex gloves for when he is slicing beets and a collection of air-tight boxes in various sizes. He also takes over one entire shelf in the lunchroom refrigerator (yes, his colleagues object).

Now this is one organized fellow who does not approach the midday meal without a plan. He advises on assembling a salad which seems to include beautifully photographed leaves of lettuce, vegetables such as tomatoes and broccoli, maybe fruit, a protein of some kind, toppings like nuts and seeds and capers, fresh herbs and, finally, dressings, from vinaigrettes to tapenades and pestos.

And, of course, his salads are divided into seasons.

No salad takes more than 20 minutes to compose, he says. So I decided to see how this works, except I cheated and made my salad at home. There is no room on my desk for a chopping board. Or a mortar and pestle. Just paper. And books. And a camera or two.

I chose the Tuna, Zucchini, Broccoli and Black Olive salad, listed on page 111 in “Salad Love.” Ingredients include  baby spinach, zucchini shaved into ribbons with one of the vegetable peelers, raw broccoli florets, canned tuna, pitted black olives and chopped chives. The dressing, a very simple one, is three parts oil, one part cider vinegar, salt and pepper.

Now, like most cooks, I changed the ingredients, substituting shrimp for tuna, adding some radicchio for texture, blanching the broccoli briefly and chopping up scallions because I was out of chives. It took less than 20 minutes, not counting defrosting and cooking the shrimp, and it was delicious.

“Salad Love,” by David Bez is available in bookstores and from Amazon. It is also on the shelves of Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury.