Would you put whipped cream on jello/jelly? That’s also dairy and features heavily in dessert. Cream cheese is used to make some icing, cheese cake is basically a brick of sweetened cream cheese. So cream cheese also shows up in desserts.

So the person who came up with it was just familiar with how desserts work.

Salad doesn’t mean vegetables. Salad is a dish made of a mixture of discrete pieces. See other things like potato salad, macaroni salad, tuna salad, antipasto salad, caprese salad, etc. You’re going to have a lot of food hangups if this bothers you.

Very few would include all of the things listed above and I’ve never actually seen veggies in one.

The one my family makes is just a dessert that’s primarily jello with a thin layer of cream cheese and pretzels. Has a nice combo of salty and sweet.

Not sure why people are so grossed out by that, what’s wrong with it?

“not to mention” and “let alone” are both typically used with the more difficult or unpleasant things after the phrase. The main difference is that “not to mention” is usually used to bring something new into the conversation or to imply that the thing you’re mentioning needs a whole separate conversation.

“Let alone” is a way to add emphasis when denying something. Usually phrased like “I didn’t even X, let alone Y.” Y being the thing you want to deny, X being some first step toward Y or just something related that isn’t as bad as Y.

Some examples:

“Did you kill Dave?” “I didn’t touch him, let alone kill him”

“Can you walk?” “I can’t stand, let alone walk.”

The first part doesn’t even need to be a complete denial as long as it implies the second part is impossible:

“Can you run?” “I can barely stand, let alone run.”