Lettuce

If Indian animal rights activists have their way, mega-selling singer and sex symbol Lady Gaga will wear a lettuce dress (a dress made out of lettuce) during her sojourn in New Delhi this weekend. Her Gagaiosity is performing at an invitation-only party Sunday to celebrate India's first Formula 1 auto race. PETA India wants her to promote vegetarianism. (It's a counterpoint to the famed meat dress Gaga wore at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.) "We'll make her a dress entirely of lettuce," says org rep Sachin Bangera . "It will be a full-length gown, and we'll make sure it looks sexy.

I should have known better. When I saw a long line of customers waiting in the express-checkout aisle at the Cherry Hill Pathmark the other day, I decided to try out a self-checkout machine nearby. Only a few people waited there. I got through the first few items OK. All you have to do is scan items and place them in a shopping bag. No sweat - until I got to the last item, a head of romaine lettuce. I could not find the item number on it, and kicked myself. It was the same mistake I had made during my first encounter with a grocery store's self-checkout machine some time before.

Market Basket food costs for December totaled $44.52, bringing in this month's grocery tally at 0.6 percent under the $44.77 recorded in November. That slight dip helped to hold the cost of our sample shopping list at a modest 0.6 percent increase over prices in December 1986. The year's average is 2.1 percent higher than that of 1986. Individual food prices on the accompanying chart are based on the best available price from among three area supermarkets. All items are priced by brand, size, weight or grade.

As far as we know, Pat and Geno are not planning to sell frozen poundcakes at the intersection of 9th and Passyunk. But Sara Lee (no relation to Pamela Lee) is now making hoagies. She plans to introduce them to Philadelphia on Friday, when her minions, wearing Ed Rendell face masks, will be handing out freebies at City Hall, Independence Hall and Rittenhouse Square. She'll sell them at Amoco's new Split Second gas station/convenience stores, a chain-to-be with prototype locations in Roxborough, East Falls and Media.

Hidden Valley Ranch Salad Dressings for Kids. Pizza ranch, nacho cheese ranch, taco ranch and super creamy ranch. $2.95 per 16-ounce squeezable bottles. Bonnie: Hidden Valley Ranch is playing on its reputation for ranch dressing and on research indicating ranch to be kids' favorite flavor by coming out with a creamy line of salad dressings designed just for kids. While the company seems to care about kids' flavor preferences, it has shown little concern for the nutritional worth of the meals they eat. The most glaring piece of evidence of this is that these new dressings contain partially hydrogenated oils.

Could you be tempted by green bell peppers at 50 cents a pound, white mushrooms or tomatoes at $1 a pound? This, when some supermarkets have peppers at $1.99 and mushrooms and tomatoes at prices up to $2.49 a pound? How about six pounds of onions for $1, iceberg lettuce at 50 cents a head and broccoli at 63 cents a head? And when markets nearby have onions at three pounds for $1.49, lettuce at 99 cents a head and broccoli at $1.19 a head? The bargains are yours, if you're willing to shop in no-frills markets that look more like warehouses than streamlined food stores.

What went skyward at Chernobyl fell to earth here, along a country lane 1,000 miles away, on Konrad Schwarz's 80,000 heads of field lettuce, just as they were ripening. How much radiation, he doesn't know, but it doesn't matter. No one in West Germany is buying lettuce now, acceptable or not. So, instead of harvesting, Schwarz stood by the road last week and watched $15,000 in revenue slip past ripe into rot. It was odd, he agreed: The lettuce looked delicious, so lush and green and full.

If you haven't started your crucifers yet - (What! You've forgotten what they are already?) - this weekend will be perfect. The moon is right, and the Flower Show will certainly make you feel like spring. It's also a good time to start composites like lettuces, too. You can plant three seeds of each sort of lettuce every week for a month; plant each set outside when it's 4-5 weeks old and have just enough to eat without getting lettuce crazed. I can't believe you've really forgotten, but the crucifers you should be starting this weekend are: Asian cabbages and mustards, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and such like.

It's easy to get cranky about modern American supermarket vegetables, raised more for beauty than for flavor, weeks out of the soil by the time they are sold, tainted by who knows what assortment of biocides. On the other hand, a recent trip to the Caribbean has convinced me that it's mighty hard to do without them. I ate in Santo Domingo and ate well: the smooth, tart tropical fruits called soursops, fragrant pineapples, deep-flavored bananas unlike any that are sold here. There were crisp-crusted yuca fritters, crunchy casabe bread, and creamy, long-simmered beans.

Major food retailers offered super sale prices on canned goods, frozen foods, meats and other food items this week to help soften the blow of freeze- escalated produce prices on shoppers' pocketbooks. They did such a good job, in fact, that the total cost of the 35-item representative grocery list tracked in this monthly survey actually dropped, by 1.6 percent, from $51.50 in December to $50.67 on Sunday. Icy weather in Florida pushed fresh cabbage and tomatoes up more than double in price at most markets.