Jennifer Aniston DOES Love Salad. Just Not the One We’ve Been Talking About for Weeks.

Rochelle Bilow
Rochelle Bilow
Rochelle Bilow is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, and the former social media manager at Bon Appétit and Cooking Light magazines. She has also worked as a cook on a small farm in Central New York and a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City. Her first book, a…read more
published Jun 16, 2022
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Actress Jennifer Aniston arrives at the premiere of Universal Pictures' 'Wanderlust' held at Mann Village Theatre on February 16, 2012 in Westwood, California.
Credit: Getty Images/ Jason Merritt/TERM / Staff

According to TikTok rumors, Jennifer Aniston loves salad. Hey, I love salad too! It’s cool finding out I’ve got stuff in common with celebrities. But enough about me; you’re here for wellness tips from ’90s sitcom stars. If this is your first visit to the internet this summer, here’s a brief primer about #AnistonSaladGate (not a real hashtag).

A while back, TikTok content creators began circulating videos that claimed to have the recipe for a gussied-up Cobb salad that Jennifer Aniston allegedly ate for lunch everyday on the set of Friends. The ingredients included quinoa, chickpeas, parsley, pistachios, mint, and feta. Friends, I posit that this is not a Cobb salad. This is something else entirely. But what’s accuracy in the face of celebrity gossip?

The recipe spread like wildfire — we even got in on the trend here at Kitchn. For a while, everything was chill: Gen Z-ers consumed an entire can of chickpeas on the daily, and the content wheel kept churning. But in a recent interview in Elle, Aniston delivered some bad news for us: That’s definitely not the salad she ate on set. She says she feels awful about the whole misunderstanding — but the fact of the matter is that she just isn’t the type to consume 15 ounces of legumes at one time due to their being “not good for the digestive tract.”

So where did this spicy (or rather, farty) rumor come from? All signs point to a 2020 Instagram takeover with her beauty company Living Proof. During the takeover, Aniston posted a lunchtime update she claimed was her “perfect” salad: bulgur wheat, cucumbers, parsley, mint, red onion, feta, pistachios, and … chickpeas. I scrolled through a disturbing amount of posts on Living Proof’s IG feed (you’re welcome), but couldn’t find any images of the takeover, which means it must have been on Stories, and we’ll never know how many chickpeas Jennifer Aniston puts on her salad. Sorry about that!

But the rumor is more layered than a social media story: Add to the mix a 2010 interview in which Courteney Cox casually shared that Aniston added turkey bacon and chickpeas to her Cobb salads during the Friends run, and you’ve got a complete recipe for citizen journalism with very lax fact-checking.

So what does this mean for you and me, the salad sheeple of the world? Here’s my take: Eat the quinoa-feta thing. It sounds delicious. Just don’t credit J-An with it. And please, please, please don’t call it a Cobb.

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