Someday, thousands (maybe just hundreds) of years from now, aliens will comb through the bales of dust formerly known as Earth's great cities and find, among the charred furniture and shattered computer monitors, an inordinate number of half-shredded magazines containing advertisements featuring women laughing alone with salads. At that point, of course, salad will be a relic of the past, and perhaps the aliens will stare at these pictures and wonder: What is it about pale green chunks of iceberg, frigid tomatoes, cucumber slices, goat cheese, olives, herbs, carrot sticks, beets, walnuts, tuna, croutons, dressings, and so forth that make female humans stretch back the corners of their strange, painted mouths and show their platinum teeth?

For our benefit, and perhaps that of the aliens monitoring our planet from above, Edith Zimmerman of The Hairpin has assembled a dazzling collection of photographs of women laughing alone while tossing, tasting, and simply beholding a variety of healthful-looking salads.

law logo2x bSome studies say that women order salads at restaurants to impress men, specifically, of course, the weird minority of men who think women should eat salad instead of barbecue, tacos, and delicious fried shit.

While Eddie Murphy covered the I'll-just-have-a-salad thing pretty thoroughly 23 years ago, neither he nor anyone else has delved into the laughter-inducing properties of raw vegetables and healthy toppings. There's only one explanation: Salads don't merely provide antioxidants and vitamins and a minimum of calories; they also tell jokes.

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