I don't venture to Burger King too often. No, I'm not a fast food snob, I just prefer the myriad of other drive-throughs along Hempstead Turnpike to Burger King's rubbery meat and cardboard fries. However, last night BK was participating in a fundraiser for my son's school, so off we went. I would suffer so that the sixth grade can have their class picnic.

Have you noticed the proliferation of salads among fast food places these days? It's like they all got together in a show of unity to figure out ways to combat the Atkins diet. Lettuce! Tomatoes! One for all and all for one! And then the CEOs went their separate ways and ordered their product and development teams to come up with a better salad than their competitors.

So McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and whatever other franchises are floating around out there all came out with tasty, fresh and exciting salads at the same time. Not Your Mother's Salad! Taste the mandarin oranges, the cranberries and sesame seeds and apples! It's a fruit! It's a salad! It's a dessert topping!

Anyhow. I went for the salad at BK last night even though, in my heightened state of starvation, those Angus burgers looked tasty (turns out, according to my husband, that they - surprise! - taste like rubber).

I had a bad feeling about ordering the salad, but that had more to do with the cashier's reluctance to speak or understand English than with the food itself. Once we got it clear that I wanted the Fire Grilled Salad (r) and I wasn't trying to tell her that her hat was on fire, and once I got past the fact that the odor wafting from her armpits was what one would imagine Michael Moore might smell like if he had just chased the ice cream man for ten blocks on the hottest day of the year, we proceeded.

You get a choice with the Fire Grilled Salad (r); chicken or shrimp. I have this thing against ordering anything that comes from the sea in a fast food place, but I was feeling daring so I stared the cashier right in the eyes, slapped my palm on the counter and whispered in a low, John Wayne-as-gunslinger voice, Shrimp. I'll try the shrimp.

We get our food and move over to the nearest table that could accommodate all of us, which turned out to be the table right under the air conditioner vent. This has nothing to do with the salad, but everything to do with creating the proper dining atmosphere. Granted, you're not going to get a quality dining experience when there are kids in the partly padded cell to the left of you throwing brightly colored balls at the plastic window in an effort to interrupt your conversation and ruin your dinner all at once. But let me tell you, it takes only one time for an adult to press their face against the window and mouth the words "I will eat you and your little sister for dinner if you don't stop throwing those balls right now" for a kid to really get it. The balls stopped coming at us and we made the attempt to get comfortable in the frigid air, though I had to keep putting my arms across my chest because apparently the town workers that were standing on line thought they could determine the temperature in the room by staring at my boobs.