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There is nothing more perplexing as to why soiling some cold chicken or pasta with a mayo adhesive gets to be called a salad?  Originally, a salad was only supposed to be a colorful, lite, and nutritious dance of fresh vegetables. Well, the history behind this brutal word-twisting can no doubt be attributed to Big Mayo. Their motive was to make people feel better about themselves, after consuming their white poison! By the way, for those not familiar with the term, Big Mayo, it applies to the “big three” mayonnaise corporations in the United States and United Kingdom. (i.e.  Hellmann’s, Heinz and Kraft Foods)  So it’s always inspiring when we get to report about people like Colleen Cheechalk, who is taking on Big Mayo head on.  Ms. Cheechalk  is a well known private caterer in upstate NY, and President of the Eat Local Southern Tier. (a great organization  that connects food-service professionals, farm, and community together to promote eating that is good, clean and fair)  But most important, (for our purposes, anyway) is that she's the author of the cooking blog, foodwineartdesign.com.  Last year around this time, she created the 12 days of mayo-free pasta salad to lead us into the July 4th  celebration. Although this ground-breaking piece fell under our radar at HoldThatMayo Headquarters, fortunately we caught it in time for  this year’s Independence  Day. (which thanks to Ms. Cheechalk, can also mean independence from mayonnaise for salads all across our great land)  Each of the 12 days features a creative and refreshing  recipe, completely void of mayo. She really showcases just how far one can go with items like  lemon juice, olive oil, soy sauce,  the right combination of spices and  farm fresh ingredients. As far as the more traditional pasta salads, oozing with empty calories  that comes only from adding  the creamy tasteless filth, we can all help show its true colors by coming up with more appropriate terms. For example, instead of  macaroni salad, call it  macaroni massacre. It's not chicken salad but chicken gunk.  We’d love to hear your own ideas as to what we can call these “imposter salads” in our comments section!

Happy eating,

Craig Horwitz