From the Archives: The Sabermetrics of Lettuce

Some ideas are too good to stay in the dustbin. Here's an old piece of mine I think you'll like, and there'll be another every other week.

This piece was originally published at LinkedIn.

Why do we eat lettuce? First, it’s 96% water and grown in California and Arizona who have water availability issues. That aside, other than taste, how can we decide what makes sense to eat? Here’s an economics view taken from baseball statistics.

A typical salad contains about 3 ounces of lettuce, and, for a restauranteur, it can make a lot of sense to make a huge portion of the salad from lettuce. The average price of lettuce is about $1.35 per pound in 2023, so that the lettuce in your salad costs about a quarter. Once you exclude all of the other costs of labor delivery, and rent, etc. in your restaurant salad, the cost of all ingredients in a $15 salad is about $4.68 (about 31% of the total).  So, 3 ounces of lettuce is less than 2% of the cost of ingredients. As they add more lettuce, the profit margin goes up. Given its nutritional value, and possibility of getting food poisoning, is lettuce worth it?

Read the full piece on my Substack here.