COLUMN: Salt

Today, I inadvertently channel-flipped into Blink 182's "I Miss You" and almost rolled a tear. Sometimes all it takes is a good melody and some simple lyrics to capture the unrelenting pain of missing that which will forever sit close to your heart.

I'm talking, of course, about salt. I miss you, salt. It's been months since we ended our relationship, and I'm starting to regret the break-up.

Salt will forever sit close to my heart. This is mostly because it's embedded in my arteries and will likely never leave, no matter how much bland broccoli I force down my gullet. When my doctors told me I should go on a low sodium diet, I said, "No problem." Just lay off the French fries and stop sprinkling table salt on my dinner plate and I should be all good, I figured.

It's not that easy.

Salt, it turns out, is everywhere. It's in everything. It's in bread. It's in cereal. It's in fudgesicles. If air had one of those "nutritional information" charts, we'd probably learn that air is loaded with sodium and we should all stop breathing immediately for the sake of our hearts. 

A few days ago, I was excited to try out a new restaurant that opened up in town. Their menu has a lot of healthy-looking fare like chicken and rice and veggies, so I thought it would coalesce nicely with my new heart-healthy diet. Then I had to be stupid and look up their menu's nutritional information. If you've ever felt the urge to look up a restaurant's nutritional information, my best advice is... don't. Trust me, it's better not to know.

I'm supposed to aim for around 1500 milligrams of sodium per day. The "healthy" dish I was eyeing at that restaurant turned out to have 3900 milligrams of sodium per serving. That's more than twice what I'm supposed to have in a DAY, let alone a single meal. Had I not looked this up before-hand, I'd probably still be bragging about the smart dinner choice I almost made. 

Thankfully, there seem to be a lot of people in my boat, which is why they make an array of sodium-free spice blends you can use in lieu of table salt. I think I've tried all of them over the past few months -- and they all pretty much taste like grit. Sometimes it's slightly garlicky grit. Sometimes it's slightly lemony grit. But it's grit regardless, and does little to nothing to enhance the flavor of whatever vegetable I'm trying to choke down.

Someone told me that if you stop eating things that are salty and sweet, you'll eventually learn to appreciate the other tastes. I've now spent months trying to develop a fondness for sour, bitter, or umami flavors. No dice. I'm pretty sure sour and bitter taste buds evolved for one reason: to tell us when the salty and/or sweet things we're craving have gone bad. That leaves umami, which no one can even easily define, other than some vague explanation like "savory-ness." 

If umami means bland and boring fare like turkey and beans and salmon, then crown me the 2023 Umami King, because that's pretty much all I've been living on for months now. I've been trying recipes for heart-healthy dishes, but it hasn't exactly been a culinary triumph. Last week, I tried a recipe for "heart-healthy vegetable soup." You know what heart-healthy vegetable soup WITHOUT SALT is? It's green things floating in tomato water. And it tastes exactly how you'd suspect green things floating in tomato water to taste (spoiler: not good.) 

One recipe was for "delicious heart-healthy chili." I'm not sure what the thing I ended up eating was. It was, by no definition I could muster, chili. At best, it was bland Mexican soup. Maybe if the recipe had been called "bland Mexican soup," I might have been like, "Hey, this bland Mexican soup isn't half bad." But the recipe was called "chili," and I can't forgive that. 

So my search for enjoyable yet healthy food continues. The other day I went to a family restaurant with friends and wanted to eat healthy, so I ordered their most boring meal: a chicken breast with a side of broccoli. I took one bite and made a face I wasn't expecting. "What's wrong?" my friend asked. "This is SO salty," I replied in shock. In hindsight, I don't think it was especially salty. It's just that I haven't cooked with salt in months, so to get something with even a hint of salt on it tasted like a brine explosion.

I'd like to tell you I went "eww!", complained to the manager, and didn't rest until I had a salt-free delicious meal in front of me. But when I said, "This is SO salty...," I'm pretty sure I followed that a few seconds later with, "...and AMAZING!" And then inhaled every morsel and milligram of that deliciously salty plate. And then drank three diet sodas because I was so parched. I'll try to curb my addiction now before you find me on a street corner begging for sea salt. In the meantime, I'll be over there in the corner trying to will broccoli into tasting NOT like broccoli.