I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
A pinch of salt and pepper, small amount of olive oil, oregano and lemon? Now we're talking.
Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to.
We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off.
Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
"Low salt" was a fad in the 2010's, it cropped up everywhere. It's not particularly her fault for going with the mainstream of the time.
Chefs use lots of salt to optimize for taste rather than health. (And restaurants don’t have to declare how much salt was in your meal.)
That’s why it’s a bad idea to eat out and/or get take-away every day. Your salt intake would be extremely high.
It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem
To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
Your first comment that kicked off this sub-thread missed the context. We’re talking about school food kids eat every day, not occasional restaurant meals. So the appeal to authority of “best chefs in the world” doesn’t make sense here.
My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
Your implication is that high salt in meals causes these health problems. It does not. You might as well say high vitamin, high nurrient meal.
Don't conflate the effects of eating ultraprocessed foods with the effects of eating salt just because one often contains the other. What you're doing is complaining about the health effects of water, having observed that soda is mostly water.
If anyone else is reading this and wants to do their own reading about the effects of salt, I can point you to the WHO, the NHS, the FDA, one of many highly cited studies, and wikipedia:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sodium-redu...
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...
https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267338249_Global_so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_salt
Though, margalabargala, if you don’t believe in science then I can’t help you :)
Are you aware that you are being a condescending asshole with the way you wrote that comment?
Cheese already contains loads of salt.
For example, humans have been eating olives for tens of thousands of years. Olives contain and require prodigious amounts of salt to taste good, usually in the form of seawater.
I do some pretty serious backcountry trekking in the summer. You can feel when your electrolytes are low after several hours, the signs aren’t particularly subtle. Fortunately, you can slam a few grams of electrolytes and you’re back to normal in a matter of minutes.
Our bodies can handle it, humans largely developed in regions where electrolyte depletion was a risk. The amount of salt you have to consume to regulate your electrolytes in environments with high electrolyte loss dwarf what you are going to consume in typical food, processed or not. The idea that the average human is hyper-sensitive to consuming too much salt is preposterous. Even animals gravitate toward salt licks.
For iron, that trade would have mostly been in tools. For salt the only reason is that salt is a vital nutrient and if you can't get enough of it, you die. (Though I think it's worth observing that iron is a vital nutrient too.)
However blaming salt was quick and easy so that’s what the people with money did.
Historically speaking salt has been such a scarce and valuable resource. I have read accounts how in the balkans people would resort to selling kids to slavery just so the family could have enough salt to survive (sacrificing one kid to save the rest).
When I started reading about how salt was bad for you it never made any sense.
Source: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...
The history actually runs in the other direction - step one was that someone decided that salt was bad, and step two was that a bunch of dietary standards were created to express the revealed truth that salt was bad. The demonization is the beginning of the process and was done for its own sake.
Most people don't know this. It is a common prank to convince people that don't know better to eat the fruit off the tree. As the other poster said, don't do that.
I'm always kind of bemused by the "necessity is the mother of invention" aspect that gave us various food preps and conservation methods.
If you just sprinkle it on after it's cooked, it's so much spicier and takes so much less. Cake and eat it.
Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
- Good
- Low salt
- Cheap
Pick two.
(For the most part. There are exceptions, but not many, especially when it comes to school lunch food.)
Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland.
They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is life.
Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
It's also important to note that prior to the invention of refrigeration, salt was vital as a preservative for meats. Soldiers on the march were perfectly capable of hunting any game they came across but the meat would spoil if they had no salt to preserve it. Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...
The page you linked does not mention "hunt" except in 2 of the comments (and one comment is about hunting enemy soldiers). Do you claim that the other comment that mentions "hunt" supports your position?
If not, please quote the passage on the page that supports your position.
The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could have managed the slaughtering of livestock?
But besides that, there were plenty of forests around (which they used to gather firewood, as mentioned in the article). Those forests absolutely would have contained deer and other game they could hunt and preserve.
Of course they stole and ate any livestock they could get unless they were passing through the territory of an ally, in which case the commander probably has warned the men that any man caught pillaging would be executed, but in compensation, the commander had probably purchased livestock and other food from the ally to be distributed to the men.
So not only did they hunt, they made it a formal part of their military, not merely an opportunistic food source.
I have to say, I don't appreciate that you would take such an obstinate stance without doing any research of your own. It's intellectually lazy.
Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today.
> Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence.
Define "much".
> The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him.
> Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency
No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence.
Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature)
Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?
Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant):
Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other.
It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt...
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_histor...
It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt.
So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service.
But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do.
> his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.
All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme hilarity, and relaxation from toil, can find no word in our language to characterize them better than this. Even in the very honours, too, that are bestowed upon successful warfare, salt plays its part, and from it, our word "salarium" is derived. That salt was held in high esteem by the ancients, is evident from the Salarian Way, so named from the fact that, by agreement, the Sabini carried all their salt by that road. King Ancus Martius gave six hundred modii of salt as a largess to the people, and was the first to establish salt-works.
The rewards of successful warfare, including salt, bestowed on soldiers. That is payment! King Ancus Martius also used salt as payment.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...
"The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt."