Day 234: Salt

I forgot to salt my eggplant before baking it today. It came out of the oven pretty bland. Why would you want to eat it? Not tasty at all.

Some salt, even at the end, transformed it into something delicious. Something that tasted as eggplant should. Not salty. Seasoned. Salt draws out flavour in food, helping it tasting of itself.

Salt, I think, is what allows all the traditional diets of the world to transform vegetables into something tasty.

One of the great horrors of the failed low fat era of the late 80s and early 90s was that not only was fat banned (the other magic key to taste) but also salt. So what were people meant to eat?

Steamed vegetables with no oil and no salt. Disgusting. No wonder people give up on it, or aren't satisfied, and keep eating, feeling as though they just need more, more of something.

Yes we eat too much salt. But I don't think it is possible to cook with too much salt. Processed food has too much salt. If you just have a bunch of chemical or low quality goo and want it to taste better load it up with salt and bad fat. And more chemicals. Great.

If you want to cut down salt, among other things, then cut out the processed crap. All of it.

But if you want to eat real food: onions, carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, spinach, cabbage and make food like soups, roast vegetables, stews or braises, you need salt and fat to transform that real food into tasty food. You can see this in almost all traditional food cultures, and certainly in the French, Italian and Greek food cultures.

In short, you need salt to make real food tasty. And if real food is tasty, then you are not eating crap food with all the problems associated with it.