If I had to make a bed from one vegetable, it would be butterhead lettuce. Its soft, velvety leaves and bouncy heart would make a good mattress, I think. And, if I had enough and they’d never seen a fridge, the largest leaves could provide a floppy cover. My green bed would not only be comfortable; it would also be useful: despite modern conclusions that the milky lactucarium that seeps from lettuce stems is not a sedative, I’m with ancient doctors and hopeful that eating my cover would send me to sleep.
The ancient Egyptians – great cultivators of lettuce – saw it as sacred, though for different reasons. In Egyptian mythology, Min, one of the earliest known Egyptian deities of rain, fertility, crops and male potency, and often represented by an ithyphallic figure, was often associated with lettuce. But it was not the butterhead from which I am going to make my bed, but rather a tall variety with a “straight vertical surge of growth and milky juice”, as Jane Grigson describes it. Yet research in 2015, by Pauline Norris at the University of Manchester about the association of Min with the lettuce plant, concludes that lettuce was offered to Min simply to ensure the fertility and regeneration of agriculture, rather than as an aphrodisiac to increase sexual desire. Even so, buying a cos at the corner shop is now forever changed.
