Every generation must answer the great questions of its age. Our grandparents answered whether a man should wear a hat to the bank. Our parents answered whether a television could be left on during dinner. And we, in our turn, are being asked whether ranch dressing belongs on everything, including pizza, which already has a dressing, which is pizza.
When I face a question of this magnitude, I do what any serious person does. I ask what the Founders would have said.
Let us begin with first principles. The Founders were men of restraint. They wore plain coats. They ate plain food. They did not put anything on their salads, chiefly because they did not have salads, which had not yet been invented, because the Founders were busy. A man of restraint does not drown a vegetable in buttermilk. On this the Founders were, by their silence, unanimous. Ranch dressing, therefore, is out.
But we must also remember that the Founders were revolutionaries. They looked at the received wisdom of their day, the inherited customs of the Old World, its kings and its sauces, and they rejected it. They did not ask what their forefathers would have put on a salad. They put something new on the salad. And what is ranch dressing, if not the newest thing one could put on a salad, at least as of the 1950s? The Founders would have embraced it. Ranch dressing is in.
Here a lesser columnist would stop, satisfied. I will not, because the Founders did not stop, and neither will I.
If the Founders’ tradition is to reject tradition, then to honor them we must reject our own traditions, and ranch dressing is now, after seven decades, one of our most cherished traditions. To keep faith with the Founders, ranch dressing must go. But to reject ranch is to follow the tradition of rejecting tradition, which is itself a tradition, and therefore must also be rejected, which would put ranch back. I worked through this at my kitchen table for most of a Sunday, and I want to be honest with my readers: it does not resolve.
What it does do is point the way. The only position consistent with our heritage is to put on one’s salad something that has never before been put on a salad, and to do it every time, forever. On Monday I dressed a salad with the contents of a snow globe. On Tuesday, maple syrup and a single birthday candle, lit. On Wednesday, at a dinner party, I dressed my host’s salad with a small amount of her own lawn, and I was not invited back, which is what happened to the Founders, too, eventually, with the king.
It was very bad. All of it was very bad. But liberty was never supposed to taste good. It was supposed to taste free.
This, then, is what our heritage teaches us: when your principles lead you to the snow globe, you eat the snow globe. You do not turn back. You do not ask the waiter for the dressing on the side. The side is where the Founders were standing when they started all of this, and you will notice none of them stayed there.
So what would the Founders have said about ranch dressing? Having spent a great deal of time with this question, and a great deal of time with my salad, I am now certain. They would have looked at it, in its little white cup beside the pizza, and they would have said, “What is this?”
And they would have been right. Nobody knows what is in ranch dressing. Not the people who make it. Not the people who eat it. Not the Founders, who never saw it, and who therefore saw it more clearly than any of us ever will.
Next week: why the Founders would have opposed daylight saving time, and supported it, and what I intend to do about the clocks.