Buzz
The large-scale systems that cultivate and process our food can be baffling and even unsettling. However, just like with myths such as 'whitened' milk and McDonald's worm burgers, our imaginations often run far beyond the truth. The latest food myth? Plastic covering our lettuce.
Countless TikTok videos show various people peeling off what seems to be plastic from lettuce. (Note: this is unrelated to the mesmerizing clips of people crafting plastic lettuce models.) What’s truly happening here?
What’s behind the belief that there’s plastic on lettuce?
In these videos, the person usually starts by explaining how they bought their lettuce at a store, possibly washed it beforehand—just the usual routine. Then, they reveal that their lettuce has this on it. They scratch it with a fingernail, and a thin, transparent layer begins to peel away. It often stretches as they pull, tearing as they continue to peel it off.
That’s not exactly how plastic generally behaves, but it’s certainly not a regular characteristic of lettuce. All the videos I found appeared to show romaine lettuce specifically, and the 'plastic' layer usually starts coming off right around or near the central rib. (And most of them use the 'oh no, oh no no no' sound clip.)
Possibly inspired by the peeling-plastic videos, there’s also a video where someone claims a lettuce leaf is 'melting' like plastic when exposed to a lighter’s heat. (It’s actually wilting. Wet leaves don’t burn, but they soften when exposed to heat, as anyone who’s ever cooked one knows.) The same TikToker also asserts that Wendy’s lettuce being 'hybrid' means it's GMO, but that’s a misunderstanding of what those terms mean.
What’s actually happening
No need for any plastic-related conspiracy theories to explain this. There’s a simple explanation, even before we get to the bigger questions about feasibility. (Why would anyone coat lettuce leaves in plastic? How could they coat the leaves, including those on the inside of the bunch?)
The peeling of delicate, transparent layers on lettuce leaves is a widely discussed topic within the lettuce farming world, albeit in hushed tones. While this occurrence might seem strange, it is a common, albeit unwelcome, phenomenon that happens frequently to lettuce.
The University of California Cooperative Extension notes that freeze damage in mature lettuce manifests as blistering and the shedding of its outer layers, which eventually turn brown. (The lettuce in the TikTok videos has reached the peeling stage, but has yet to show signs of browning.)
A lettuce farmer demonstrates the blistering and peeling of lettuce exposed to brief freezing conditions in the field in this video. Workers aim to remove any leaves showing visible signs of blistering or peeling before shipping the lettuce, but if an entire field experiences this damage, some affected leaves might make it through undetected.
Claims of 'plastic' found on lettuce are not new—these types of videos predate TikTok. In fact, Snopes wrote about this phenomenon in 2018 and referenced a source debunking similar stories from 2012. When lettuce freezes, its outer layers peel off, and sometimes those affected leaves end up at the grocery store. Fortunately, this peeling is a “purely cosmetic defect” and doesn't alter the taste of the lettuce—so feel free to put it back on your burger and enjoy it.
