TikTok Myth of the Week: Your Salad Has Plastic in It

The industrial scale systems that grow and process our food can sometimes be bizarre and intimidating. But, as we’ve seen with myths like “clarified” milk and McDonald’s worm burgers , our imagination runs wilder than the truth. The latest urban food legend? Plastic coating of our salad.

There are tons of videos on TikTok from different people peeling off a layer of what appears to be plastic from a salad. (Note that this has nothing to do with the mesmerizing videos of people making plastic model lettuce leaves .) What’s really going on?

Why do people think their lettuce has plastic in it?

In such videos, a person usually explains to the camera how he bought a salad in a store, maybe washed it in advance – well, normal things. And then they show what it is on the salad. They are scratched with a fingernail, and a thin transparent layer begins to peel off. It often stretches when pulled and breaks when brushed.

This isn’t quite how plastic usually behaves, but it’s definitely not a normal feature of lettuce. All the videos I found showed romaine lettuce in particular, and the “plastic” layer usually starts peeling off right around or near the center rib. (And they’re usually set to an “oh no, oh no, no” sound clip.)

Possibly inspired by the plastic peeling video, there is also a video in which someone claims that a lettuce leaf “melts” like plastic when exposed to the heat of a lighter. (It wilts. Wet leaves don’t burn, but become soft when exposed to heat, as you might know if you ‘ve ever cooked them .) The same TikToker also claims that Wendy’s lettuce, being “hybrid”, means it’s GMO. . That’s not what any of those words mean.

What’s Really Happening

No plastic conspiracy is needed to explain all this. There is an obvious answer, without even touching on the big questions of plausibility. ( Why would they cover the lettuce leaves with plastic? How do they cover the lettuce leaves with plastic even though they are inside the bundle?)

The big secret behind the thin, flaky, transparent layers on lettuce leaves is actually being openly discussed within a sinister cabal that we might call the lettuce growing community. It turns out that this is a completely normal (albeit undesirable) phenomenon that happens all the time with lettuce.

“Frost damage on mature lettuce appears as blistering and flaking of the epidermis followed by tissue darkening,” writes the University of California Cooperative Extension in its leaf lettuce production guide . (The leaves in the TikTok videos have reached the stage of peeling, but have not yet turned brown.)

Here is a video of a lettuce farmer showing blistering and peeling of the epidermis on lettuce leaves that were briefly exposed to low temperatures in the field. Workers will do their best to remove leaves with visible blistering or flaking before they are sent to consumers, but when an entire field of lettuce has flaky skins, they will not be able to detect all affected leaves.

Incidentally, videos of people claiming to have found “plastic” on their salad are older than TikTok. Snopes wrote about the phenomenon in 2018 and cited a source denying similar videos from 2012. The lettuce peels when it freezes, and sometimes the peeling leaves end up in the grocery store. Luckily, this peeling is a “purely cosmetic defect” that doesn’t affect the taste of the salad, so you can put the salad back on your burger and eat it.