The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [87]
There are thirty-five low-salt cookbooks on the market today. Most of them substitute heaps of herbs, spices, garlic, and onions for salt. When you try these recipes, the food tastes mainly of herbs, spices, garlic, and onions instead of what you wanted for dinner in the first place, like a nice plump four-pound chicken rubbed with a tablespoon of poultry fat and then a teaspoon of salt and roasted at 425 degrees for ninety minutes until the skin is golden and crackling and the juices run rich with flavor. Be sure to baste every ten minutes.
We are probably the first generation since the beginning of the world to be paranoid about salt. We would all die without salt. It is the only mineral we eat straight out of the ground. Salt was venerated in primitive cultures and exchanged as money where it was scarce. Our blood and our bodies are as salty as the seas from which life emerged, which may explain cannibalism in places where salt is in short supply. The earliest roads were built to transport salt, the earliest taxes were levied on it, military campaigns were launched to secure it, and African children were sold into slavery for it. Salt gave Venice its start in the sixth century as the commercial capital of Europe, caused the French Revolution, nearly defeated Mao Tse-tung, and helped Gandhi bring India to independence.
Because we need salt to live, we are genetically programmed to crave it starting four months after we are born. Salt phobics argue that since only a fifth of a gram of salt a day—200 milligrams, or a medium-large pinch—is absolutely essential to our survival, anything more than that must surely be excessive. This reasoning is absurd. How much music or poetry a day is essential for our survival? How much sex do we absolutely need to propagate the species? How much salt must we eat to survive, and how much do we need to have a very nice day? Every human society with easy access to salt eats forty times the minimum, and the reason is simple. Salt gives us pleasure by making food taste better. Then, after dinner, our bodies eliminate the salt we don’t need. That is why God gave us kidneys.
Even lowering your intake to 500 milligrams of sodium a day, about 10 percent of the American average, would involve exquisite torture. First of all, you would have to eliminate all processed foods—canned, frozen, and packaged—which account for at least a third of the salt in our diet. Canned peas or a frozen side dish of rice can contain a hundred times the salt in raw peas and rice. A cup of fresh corn has only 7 milligrams of sodium, but a cup of canned creamed corn has 671, more than your allowance of sodium for an entire day; a serving of canned soup contains one full gram of sodium, two days’ supply. An ounce of cornflakes contains as much salt as the same amount of salted peanuts.
Even after you eliminate processed foods and salt added in cooking or at the table, you will still be eating double or triple your 500-milligram sodium ration. That’s because many foods are inherently salty, like dairy products (an ounce of cottage cheese is saltier than a bowl of thirty potato chips), breads, spinach, celery, Swiss chard, seafood, turnips, kale, and artichokes. If you want to eat a wide range of foods, you will have to leach out the salt and most of the taste from these vegetables by boiling them in distilled water. (In some places, tap water is too salty for a 500-milligram diet.) And meat is considerably saltier than vegetables.
If salt caused high blood pressure, the average American would be hypertensive, which is not the case. I eat all the salt I want, much more than the Yanomami do, and my blood pressure is slightly below normal. My wife’s is even lower—not much different from the Yanomami—and she eats what I do because I do all the cooking. American vegetarians generally have lower blood pressure