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I grew up eating salad after dinner--my parents still do. We keep our dinner plates, my mom dresses the salad and toasts a bit of ciabatta or something (important to mop up the extra dressing) and we pass it around. These days if I'm making salad for me and my husband I serve it after the main course, or very occasionally alongside it, but if I'm doing a cold salad-type course for a dinner party I serve it before. That's more like a salad with a hot goat cheese cake, or a tomato salad or something. Now that I think of it I guess I haven't ever served a plain green salad before dinner. The vinegar is good for digestion, my mom says!

At home, I prefer to eat salad after the main course. Oftentimes, salad dressings have a pretty strong flavor (and if they don't, I don't usually like them), so I don't want that to interfere with the main dish.

I agree that it's refreshing too...

In my family we usually have the salad in the middle--we eat a serving of the main dish, pause for salad, and then pick at the main dish until we are full.

I always eat salad after the main course, for both of the reasons mentioned.

We usually have salad after, although depending on what is being served, I may serve it alongside. Love it as a refreshing palate cleanser.

We are green salads after dinner people. If it's something like Caprese Salad, or tomato, cucumber, & red onion, wilted spinach salad or other non-lettuce salads we'll eat it with dinner.

I always eat the salad first as a way of filling up on vegetables before the main course (and therefore lowering the desire to eat as much of a main course). My husband eats his with the meal. We don't eat dessert so there's no need for a "palate cleanser".

The "roughage" aiding digestion is unrelated to eating before or after the meal. It's not like you digest so rapidly that eating it first is going to be meaningfully different than eating it last.

Yeah, as Orchid mentioned, during the average time span of a meal, it's going to end up being held in the stomach and mixed up. You're not going to end up with a big plug of fiber pushing the rest of your foodstuffs through your system.

Oh right. I eat my salads before. Never really thought about it until now. I guess I just do it because that's they way it's done most of the time in the US.

In Australia we mostly eat salads with our main meal - either served on the plate alongside the other food or in a large bowl in the middle of the table so you can help yourself. We never have separate salad plates - as the other small plate is used for bread.

So salads are made with the main meal in mind - as a compliment rather than a separate meal. Salad is a summer thing and vegetables tend to be the winter thing

Most Australians would find it quite strange to eat salad at other times. But I love that there can be such diversity for one dish!

In my family, we usually serve salad with the meal, and i always eat it last as a refresher, but I usually eat the vegetable component of the main dish first.

My parents usually have salad after the main course, but I prefer it first... I'm much more aware of the subtle flavors of salad, and I savor every bite, when I'm hungry and my appetite is unspoiled. After the main course I'm full, I eat less salad (and so does everyone else, leading to pointless salad leftovers), and my senses are not as attuned to those delicate flavors, so I enjoy it less.

We serve ours together, but I always eat my salad first. I'm not a big salad fan, and wouldn't put it past myself to "accidentally" fill up on yummy pasta or whatever the main dish and, oops, not have room for boring salad. I know that it's healthy for me, so I eat it first and get it out of the way. Plus, I hope that it fills me up with slightly fewer calories than my main dish will, so that I don't end up needing to buy new pants in a larger size.

My parents always served/ate salad after dinner...I don't know if the habit came from my German grandfather...but yes, a palate-cleanser, and eating hot food right when it's ready...

Before. Well, sometimes I serve it as a side dish.

I grew up eating them with the meal, but as an adult the placement of the salad isn't important to me. I'm equally content eating salad before, during or after the main course, so long as I *get* to eat salad.

Unless I'm dieting. Then salad first.

In our house when there was a salad being served it WAS the meal. Our salads consisted of mostly non lettuce items like: raddishes, carrots, onion, corn (canned), artichoke hearts, sometimes palm hearts, spinach, sometimes beets. With that kind of effort and hearty-ness put into it, there was no room for a meal.

Like most from the US, I grew up eating it in advance. I adopted the after practice, though, after a few visits to Italy. I especially like a salad after pizza or pasta. The hot, then cold makes sense to me. A salad is like a denouement to the meal, with the entree as the climax and the cheese/dessert/beverage at the proper end.

Uuumm... I´m European (German) and have never heard of the habit of eating salad after dinner ;-) It actually sounds strange to me...

I like to fill up on lots of salad greens first... that way I'm more inclined to get lots of phytonutrients and eat less of a heavier 'main' meal.