Restaurants should stop using “autumn blend” or “fall mix” in their food

This may seem like a weird thing to vent about but hear me out…my aunt made chicken salad the other day and put something like “autumn blend” in it and I looked it up and it’s got some kind of carrot/raisin/dried cranberry combo. That’s not really autumnal, that’s just a mix of ingredients that’s cheap to produce and is conveniently pre-mixed in one bag.<br><br>I think it’s used primarily for salads or chicken salads, and I also think it’s the devil’s work. My aunt made the aforementioned chicken salad with this stuff in it and those carrots overpowered everything, I couldn’t stand it and it was such a simple solution to fix after I picked them all out - make your own mix without the carrots…It’s not that hard.<br><br>But the worst offenders are places like Panera that claim to use high-quality ingredients and then they’ll say something like, “Hello, Panera! Here’s 3,000 lbs of chicken salad mix please, sure that’s fine.” I’m not talking about the actual salad kits, I’m talking about when they make chicken salad in-house and put it on their menu. I used to work at one, we literally had a 5lb bag of carrot/raisin mix…It was awful.<br><br>I’d rather have them use whatever pre-cut and pre-bagged ingredients they want than to sully the good name of autumn with this abomination. We get it, you don’t value quality and you want to make food cheaply and efficiently. But don’t pretend like your food is made with love or that you care about quality when you’re using pre-bagged mixes in your food. I can’t describe how happy it makes me that the chicken salad from Chick Fil A doesn’t have these carrots in it.<br><br>Restaurants, stop this. Stop letting your culinary schools fail you in the simplest of ways.