Neither a pot of goo nor trapped in a salad bowl

Remember the “we are not a melting pot, we are a salad bowl” lesson? Something in the news reminded me of it recently.

The original melting-pot metaphor, from the 19th century, sought to portray the U.S. as a single nation, forged by immigrants who came here and created something new. E pluribus, unum. From many, one. People from everywhere come together to create something different, something distinctly American. The imagery was industrial, referring less to butter melting slowly in a sun-dappled kitchen and more to factory crucibles, blast furnaces, and the importance of melting down the ores and the scraps to create the new and stronger steel that is America.

In the only-somewhat-gentler food-based version of the metaphor, you are no longer a uniquely craggy block of cheddar cheese, standing alone being cheddar cheese. You lose yourself, you sacrifice yourself, into the glory that is the one grand American fondue.

Somewhere around the 1960s, of course, this industrial 19th-century and distinctly cheesy melting pot metaphor came increasingly under two prongs of attack.

First, sociologists and other cultural observers began to notice what they perceived to be a different kind of immigrant. The immigrants of the mid 20th century, as compared with those of the 18th and 19th centuries, appeared to these observers to be retaining more of their own heritage, habits, foods, clothing, languages, religions, and other cultural features. They seemed, to sociologists of the mid 20th century, to be less interested in disappearing into an industrialized American boiler vat and more interested in (gasp!) being themselves in America.

Second, an increasing number of social justice reformers began to question the premise of the entire silly melting pot idea and began to push back against its patently untrue “observations.”

As to the premise, why had anyone ever accepted the metaphor that a homogeneous pot of goo was the ideal or the goal for the U.S.? It may have been the ideal for the factory owners, the so-called and self-described Titans of Industry, but obviously what they meant, and what they wanted, was not that all of American society should become the same. They had no intention of becoming the same. What they needed, what they meant, was a compliant and unified workforce. The workers should melt together and commit themselves always and only to their factory jobs or to building the railroad, yes, but the factory owners and the rail barons had no intention of immersing themselves into that same pot.

And, secondly, how had observers ever managed to look at the U.S., or even look at what they perceived as certain tiers of U.S. society, and see a homogeneous pot of goo?

Nineteenth-century immigrants did not come to the U.S. and throw themselves into industrial boiler kettles to be melted. Immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Italy and China and Japan took the distinctly American work they could find, yes, and tended to learn English or at least want their children to learn English, yes. But they absolutely did not give up all aspects of their heritage or seek to melt themselves into an undifferentiated mush.

The melting pot metaphor might have served the purposes of 19th-century steel barons, in other words, but it did not describe how people lived, or how actual communities flourished or were not allowed to flourish, at any time in U.S. history.

Keep thinking: In the American South, enslaved people were not allowed to melt into anything at all. They were kept utterly separate from other people and other opportunities throughout the 1700s and 1800s. On the west coast, immigrants from China came to the U.S. during the 1800s and worked on distinctly Chinese labor teams under conditions that might as well have been called slavery. Throughout the American cities of the industrial age, separated neighborhoods were Italian, or Irish, or Russian, or Jewish. In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up U.S. citizens whose grandparents had come from Japan, Germany, or Italy precisely because they were not viewed as having melted in to the mush at all. (Read my parents’ friend’s sister’s book.)

Enter, as of the mid 1960s, Degler’s (1959) metaphor of America as salad bowl. America is not one undifferentiated pot of goo, says the salad bowl metaphor. America is a salad, a mixture, a “one from many” that is “one” and that also retains the distinctive characteristics of the “many.”

The salad bowl metaphor begins with the notion that salad is a good thing, a positive thing — that we like salads. It also begins with the notion that a bowlful of lettuce is not a salad. Salad happens when you add some tomatoes, or some croutons, or some chickpeas, or a bit of dressing.

Equally important to the metaphor is the fact that when the cucumber joins the salad, it does not become lettuce or disappear into an undifferentiated goo. It retains and contributes its own unique cucumberness. It, as cucumber, is an important part of the salad. Having both tomatoes and cucumbers is what makes the salad a salad. Salad is salad, it is one thing, but it depends on and requires its recognizable parts — and, equally, it requires those parts to come together in some way, to work together toward the shared goal of salad, rather than to pursue only their disparate goals of fried onions, stewed tomatoes, and carrot sticks.

The salad bowl metaphor lends itself to multiple adaptations and to both silly and serious applications. It has been used to inform everything from analyses of residential geography in the American South to high-school curriculum materials.

It has also been criticized, often in the form of claims that immigrants need to assimilate, or need to be melted in to a single America, because otherwise there is no single America.

Such critics (I would say) miss the reality that America has never been a single undifferentiated pot of goo, and they also miss the reality that a salad actually is a “single” thing, a recognizable entity on its own. A salad is not lettuce separated from cucumber separated from canned tuna separated from water chestnuts. Salad is what happens when the different ingredients and flavors and textures somehow come together, each making their unique contribution and also all coming together to create a whole that makes sense as a whole. Critics who want the salad metaphor to become a chili metaphor (for example) seem to me to be willfully missing the point, in what I see as a poorly disguised attempt to defend the good old “salad means iceberg and bottled Thousand Island” days of their childhood.

What does any of this have to do with speech therapy, you ask?

Let’s bring it back around.

Your clients are not goo. Our profession is not an industrial smelting kettle. Your goal is not to turn your clients into mush.

You are not mush.

We are not mush.

If you are a tomato, be a tomato.

If you are a tomato, you can help spinach communicate.

If you are a tomato, you can help spinach communicate in ways that respect everything about the importance of being spinach while still remaining a tomato yourself.

And your world, and the spinach’s world, and the mushroom’s world, will all be better for the presence of the others, because together we are, and we are creating, whatever the whole salad might actually become.

And also, can we maybe think a little more creatively here?

America as salad bowl is better than America as industrial smelting kettle, but why have our metaphors been so self-limiting? We are neither a pot of goo nor trapped in a single salad bowl.

Why not America as feast and buffet, with celebrations and dancing?

We are a “one from many,” absolutely, but why must our image of our “one” be as limited as a pot or a bowl? We are the entire event! We are the party! America as the entire celebration. America not merely as the salad but as the drinks and the decorations and the salad and the old friends and the main course and the new friends and the dessert and the speeches and the favorite cousins and the dancing and the conversations and the collapsing happily into a taxi at the end of the evening carrying your high heels. It has distinct parts, yes, but it’s one event — and it needs all the parts. A Bat Mitvah party or a wedding reception or a retirement party without dancing or without cousins or without dessert simply is not as amazing as one with dancing, and also cousins, and also dessert.

Our job as speech-language professionals is to make effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all. We can’t do that unless we make the effort to see who “all” is, to allow everyone to be who they are, and to support everyone in their uniqueness. And we also can’t do that unless we make the effort to see that we all need to be here, that we are all contributing our unique and important parts to the evening. Even if you see yourself as the main course, I’m guessing you would rather go to a party that includes some drinks and some conversations, too.

And besides, really, who wants to be melted into a pot of goo or trapped in a salad bowl?

Anne Marcotte | October 17, 2025