How much lettuce have you eaten?

Have you ever thought about how much lettuce you have eaten over the course of your life? As of yesterday I can say I have. In fact I became so interested in the answer that I came up with a way to figure out your (approximate) lettuce count. Here is what I did.

First I found out what the serving size of lettuce is. Since there are so many different kinds I decided to use romaine since it is a good middle ground between iceberg and dark greens and I have eaten a variety. It turns out that a serving size is two cups. There are six cups of torn romaine in one head, and there are about 10 leaves per head. This means that a serving size is actually 1.66 leaves. I approximated that one leaf is broken up into seven pieces, so there are about 23.33 pieces of lettuce per entree salad. Or 11.66 pieces in a side salad.

Now for the less complicated part. I would say that between the ages of five and 12 I ate a side salad about twice a week. From the age of 13-20 I would say I eat an entree salad about three times a week. There are 52 weeks in a year so I took the total amount of times I ate a side salad a week and calculated about how many I ate in a year. It turned out to be 104 side salads, or 728 total salads. This means that I ate about 1,208.48 pieces of lettuce before I became a teenager. To figure out how much from age 13 on I did pretty much the same thing. Three salads a week for 52 weeks, multiplied by seven years. The total was about 1,092 salads and 25,476.36 pieces of lettuce.

Finally I added the 1,208.48 pieces to 25,476.36 to find my total lettuce count. If my approximations and calculations are correct that means that I have eaten about 26,684.84 pieces of lettuce during my 20 years on Earth. Now this does not count lettuce that is not part of a salad, so the numbers are definitely an educated guess. It is next to impossible to count the lettuce used on sandwiches, for lettuce wraps or other recipes. The answer might also be skewed if you prefer a certain type of lettuce, but this satisfied my curiosity.

Are you curious about your lettuce count? Use the graphic to find out and let me know your results in the comments!