Comment by rmunn

I grew up with lettuce purchased from a local farmer's market, so when I first tried iceberg I was all, "What? This isn't lettuce! It has no taste!" Restaurants love it, though: any time I get a side salad at a restaurant it's 75% likely to be iceberg lettuce, unless the salad is a kind that specifically calls for something else (e.g. caesar salad requires romaine lettuce). But give me butter lettuce (which is what I grew up eating), romaine, or even red oak (my least favorite variety but at least it has flavor) over iceberg.

Iceberg does have some things going for it: it's got crunch, and I suspect it keeps rather well without wilting. (It's never around my house so I can't speak from personal experience). Those qualities, I'm sure, endear it to restaurants as a lettuce they can keep around for that one customer in ten who orders a side salad, and it's probably also why all the "salad mix" packages I've had the misfortune to consume (usually at someone else's house) seem to be iceberg-based (with a mix of other types too, but I can always tell the non-taste of iceberg lettuce). But there's just so much flavor in other lettuce varieties that I would say "Iceberg lettuce isn't really lettuce, so if you've only had iceberg then you don't yet know what real lettuce can taste like. Try butter lettuce, or even romaine hearts, and then you'll know what lettuce is. If, after that point, you still prefer iceberg, then go ahead, I won't argue with your taste. But don't think that you hate lettuce if all you've ever had is iceberg; it's like thinking you hate apples because all you've ever had is Red Delicious."