It is high summer, and even though cold beer awaits the hamburgers currently sizzling on the BBQ, I’m pleased to bring you more of the hard-hitting investigative journalism you expect from me. This journalism involves in-depth, rigorous reporting on issues often concealed from public view, holding those in power accountable and revealing wrongdoing.

Which brings me to lettuce.

As you know, the proper place for vegetables in genteel society is as a quiet accoutrement to the main course, which is to say, a minor accessory to what you really want for nom-noms. For example, when I say “lettuce,” you rightly think something along the lines of “side salad,” or maybe “topping with a slice of tomato.” What you don’t think is “sexy Egyptian fun-time drug.”

And yet that’s exactly what people thought about the common lettuce, three thousand years ago. Ancient Egyptian murals of Min, the god of fertility, depict a particularly, uh… erect version of the plant with, er… a thick stem and milky sap. Maybe send the kids out of the room for the rest of this hard-hitting journalism because the naughty hieroglyphics make it clear lettuce had certain connotations for Min and ordinary Egyptians, who ate the sacred plant avant nooky, as the French say.

Wicked lettuce led to more sex and violence when the Greeks learned how to grow it. The Greeks — I swear I am not making this up — used lettuce as a sedative and popular funeral decoration,........

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