What's A Salad? A Complete Meal Or A Part Of It???

Today I came across an interesting contest by @chetanpadaliya - a green salad recipe challenge. It put me thinking what exactly a salad is and could it have any standard recipe!

So I googled for its meaning and got the following answer to my query:

salad
_noun
a cold dish of various mixtures of raw or cooked vegetables, usually seasoned with oil, vinegar, or other dressing

Many dictionaries gave different meanings to this terrm which made it difficult for me to differentiate it from a complete meal. So I was still wondering if a salad is a side dish or a complete meal. Wikipedia gave more descriptive answer to it:

Salads may be served at any point during a meal:
Appetizer salads - light, smaller portion-salads served as the first course of the meal.
Side salads - to accompany the main course as a side dish.
Main course salads - usually containing a portion of a high-protein food, such as chicken, salmon, beef, legumes, or cheese.
Dessert salads - sweet versions containing fruit, gelatin, sweeteners or whipped cream.

So salad is a very general word which could mean anything. Perhaps this was the reason @chetanpadliya used the term "green salad" in his contest. I guess he was referring to "garden salad" here. But on further reading down the contest rules, I found fruits and sprouts can also be added to this salad and we can also use any vegan salad dressing. Now this put me back to square one:

what exactly a salad is!

So I took a few photographs while I was preparing my meal today. I generally love to eat my meal in a single bowl. So I mix whatever I have to eat in one big bowl and eat it all 😊.

Now you need to tell me, upto what stage it's a salad and when does it ceases to be one?

Here's what I ate today for my meal:

So to start with I took the following ingredients in Step-1:
1 grated carrot
1/2 grated radish
1 cucumber chopped into small pieces
1 riped tomato cut into small pieces.
1 beetroot peeled & grated

And I mixed them all. Hope all these are veggies and qualify to be called a salad so far.

But next I added in Step -2:

30-35 grapes (a fruit)
15-20 raisins (a dry-fruit)
25 gram soaked (unsprouted) green grams (beans / legumes)

Is it still a salad?

If you think yes, let's move over to next Step -3:

I added:

2 tsp raw seasme tahini (unsalted) (as a dressing)
10-15 roasted pea-nuts (is roasting permissible for a salad ingredient?)

Okay, so are you still advocating to somehow call it a salad? Here comes the bummer.

Step -4:

I added 1 tbsp boiled rice to it 😜

See what I got to eat at last:

This is my today's recipe for green salad 😉

I know it doesn't have any fancy presentation but I love the natural presentation as I get hungry while I prepare it. However it may look like, it's yummmiiiieee to say the least 😊.

I love my food and enjoy it a lot. But I don't know what it's called or what name this world gives to it. As long as it satiates my hunger, I'm not gonna look for anything else.

I do a different recipe to prepare a new bowl for me everyday. But this is all I have for my meal. Now I dunno if it's a meal or a salad. What percentage of it is salad if it's a salad in your opinion? or is it just a meal?

P.S.:

This is just a fun post. Please take it light-heartedly 😊