"I am so glad to hear that people are debating the true nature of salad. This will keep your office busy and out of trouble for weeks, possibly years. It used to be that a 'salad' in America was pretty simple — chicken, or maybe lobster, some greenery, some kind of dressing. Around the turn of the 20th century, though, all the boundaries disappeared and salads ran wild. Basically if you could serve it on a lettuce leaf, it was a salad — a square of frozen cream cheese, a hollowed-out turnip filled with marinated peas, some cut-up bananas and nuts packed into a banana skin, and — one of my favourites in this genre — a fruit salad inside a little pen made of four saltines, and you tied a red ribbon around the whole thing. There was a lot of scope for imagination. So I would say that if the avocado-egg thing appeared on a lettuce leaf, it would be very difficult in a court of culinary law to deny it the name of salad."