Life & Wisdom Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland takes a familiar object of suburban abundance - the salad bar - and flips it into body horror with a straight face. Calling it a restaurant's "lungs" is a grotesquely tidy metaphor: lungs are supposed to keep you alive, but they do it by trapping grime. Suddenly the salad bar isn't a wholesome oasis of roughage; it's the filter that collects whatever the room is shedding. The joke lands because it weaponizes the language of cleanliness against the very thing marketed as clean.

The intent feels less like a literal warning than a cultural diagnosis. Salad bars sell the fantasy of control: you curate your own meal, you can see every ingredient, you can pretend you're making a virtuous choice. Coupland punctures that self-soothing autonomy. In public spaces, "choice" is always partly performance, partly contamination. Your tongs have a social life.

There's also a sly jab at how we outsource risk. If the salad bar "soaks up impurities", then the diners get to imagine they're breathing "much cleaner air" - a deliberately absurd payoff that mimics the way institutions reassure us with pseudo-science and vague hygienic theater. It's the same logic as air fresheners masking mildew: sensory comfort as proof of safety.

Contextually, it fits Coupland's long-running project of cataloging North American consumer rituals and the anxious spirituality hiding inside them. The salad bar becomes an altar to modern faith: not in God, but in systems, surfaces, and the idea that danger can be neatly contained in one brightly lit corner.