Rabbit food is a slightly mocking name for lettuce, raw vegetables and salad generally, the sort of plain green plate that someone might eat instead of a cooked or meaty meal. It is used by people who think such food is thin fare compared with a proper dinner, and also, self-deprecatingly, by people describing their own diet when they are trying to eat lightly or lose weight. The joke in the phrase is the comparison between a human eater and a rabbit, an animal whose whole diet is grass and leaves, so that a person living on salad is cast as living like a rabbit.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘rabbit food’?
The phrase belongs to twentieth century American slang before it became common in Britain. Green’s Dictionary of Slang traces the figurative sense, applied to human food rather than literal rabbit feed, to a 1925 newspaper piece about railway dining cars. It describes passengers who avoided the costly dishes on the menu and instead stuck to what one Mr Sharon called “rabbit food”, with the writer noting that dining car staff were “not particularly sympathetic toward passengers who eschew all the costly viands and subsist on” it. The joke there is partly about thrift as well as diet, with the cheap, plain option set against the “costly viands” on offer.
The term soon attached itself specifically to lettuce. By 1936 the variant “rabbit’s food” had entered American slang glossaries, recorded in H. W. Bentley’s study of soda-fountain jargon in the journal American Speech, which glossed it simply as “Lettuce”. The word had clearly moved from the dining car into everyday counter-talk by this point.
The phrase also crossed to Britain and took root among children. Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites Iona and Peter Opie’s study of schoolchildren’s lore, in an edition dated 1977, which records “‘Rabbit’s food’ is any green salad”, showing the phrase had become an ordinary piece of playground vocabulary for any plate of greens, not just lettuce on its own.