How Emily Nunn Turned Salad Into a Soapbox

ATLANTA — Emily Nunn won’t drive on the freeways here, so it can take 45 minutes to get from her apartment to the cavernous indoor Your Dekalb Farmers Market, whose inexpensive and bountiful produce selection she prefers.

We hadn’t even reached the lettuce bins before she started in.

“Everybody in the food business hates me,” she said, taking a moment to defend both her vigorous use of mint and her penchant for social-media agitation, particularly when it comes to ageism. “It’s because I have so much fun. And I don’t care anymore.”

The word “everybody” is hyperbole, of course. After years as a food writer at high-profile publications like The New Yorker, Ms. Nunn now swims in a much smaller part of the food-media sea: She writes a twice-weekly newsletter about salad.

Ms. Nunn, 61, is as surprised as anyone that The Department of Salad is holding steady as the sixth-most-popular paid food newsletter on Substack, which is home to hundreds of newsletters about food and cooking. Hers was a career Hail Mary pass during the first year of the pandemic, when she was eating a lot of salad. She would post photos of them on her Twitter feed with a comment like “Here is another damn salad.”

She sometimes mentioned her tiny hometown, Galax, Va., and her Aunt Mariah’s antics, suggested that Republicans perform specific sex acts, or crowdsourced tuna salad recipes.

She also tweeted about how life looked from the vantage point of an older single woman: “I once went to a dinner party with all couples and one of the wives asked me: But what do you do at night? I told her I freebased.”