Litely Salted

So tonight, I'm a house guest with full permission to eat whatever I find. I don't have the things I usually like to cook with and had to stay in this evening, (and it could perhaps be that I've come over a bit lazy tonight,) so I've been nibbling.

Looking around for desert, I served out a dish of 'super premium' vanilla ice cream whose main flavoring was lots of sugar. Ick. (This is my test for ice cream brands: Try the vanilla with nothing on it. If I'm not overwhelmed by the bland gumminess of thickening agents, if there's more to taste than sugar, that's a good brand of ice cream. But still probably not as good as the homemade stuff my mom sometimes made for us in an antique-looking churn when we were kids.) Couldn't have more than a couple small bites.

We're looking ... we're looking ... hey, avocado!

It was a little past prime, but some judicious trimming yielded about half an avocado's worth of tasty snacking. So, salt. (A ripe avocado and a pinch of salt is pure heaven, very satisfying.) We're looking ... we're looking ... hey, wtf is that!? "Lite Salt"!!? "1/2 the sodium of table salt"!!!?

Sweet Jeebus.

Fortunately, there was regular salt sitting right next to it. There's science, and then there's science, and then there's food science. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of companies that make loads of money off of turning food into food products, all aspects of it have been corrupted and the lousy health of its American citizen guinea pigs speaks volumes.

So to heck with it. I'm eating real food. It tastes great and it's more filling, so I don't have to eat a damn ton. As Michael Pollan said in his book, In Defense of Food:

[F]or the most part it is the products of food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often erroneous science - the dubious fruits of nutritionism. Don't forget that trans-fat-rich margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim it was healthier than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. Since that debacle, the FDA, under tremendous pressure from industry, has made it only easier for food companies to make increasingly doubtful health claims, such as the one Frito-Lay now puts on some of its chips - that eating them is somehow good for your heart.

Your body has brilliant analytic chemists at its beck and call in the form of our tongues and livers, presuming that they are healthy. It has a portion controller, a stomach, which will tell you when it's full if you take the time to eat slowly and pay attention to it.

Food science as applied to the processed and fast food industries exists solely to confuse and bypass your clever body. After processing takes all the flavor out, food science injects clever replacement flavors and smells that make you hungrier than you ought to be for things you wouldn't otherwise enjoy.

So eat the real salt. Just a pinch. Have it on top of identifiable food that clearly came from a plant, or sometimes an animal if you're into that kind of thing. Have it with water, real milk, or tea that had to be steeped. Have a little honey in your tea, which won't kill you if aren't drinking soda and sugared fruit drinks.

Because that stuff is all food, which we evolved specifically to eat, and there's nothing about it that should be inherently guilt-inducing.

We've known for, oh, ever, that eating too much of it isn't a good idea. But never have we spent so much time confusing ourselves into eating a Whole Goddamn Bag Of Chips because they're 'low fat' or some nonsense.

(Photo credit: kevindooley on Flickr.)