Because it conditions your expectations of tasting salt everywhere, which is what industrial food provides. Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt
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.
> They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary.
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.
That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. 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 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.
We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum.
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].
2000 years ago in the regions where the Roman army operated, animal husbandry was already an established way of life for 5000 years or even (in some spots like Asia Minor) a lot longer than that, and the overwhelming majority of the mammalian biomass was in the form of domesticated animals, not wildlife. The land that was not under cultivation was either quite hilly or had something wrong with it that make it bad for supporting wildlife just like it was bad for supporting agriculture.
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.
Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march.
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.
In a previous comment, you wrote about Roman soldiers "hunting any game they came across". "Game" means wild animals.
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.
I did some more research. The Romans actually had dedicated hunting units attached to their armies, called venatores. They hunted wild game for food and also captured animals to return to the city for entertainment (venationes) and public executions (damnatio ad bestias).
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.
> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia.
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.
This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters.
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...
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.
An enormous amount of traditional food from around the world has a lot of salt in it. Salt is not a modern invention.
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.
High salt intake is only an issue on a high-carb diet or with inadequate hydration. Otherwise, consuming adequate salt/electrolytes can actually be a bit of a chore. Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
Salt pills were a thing for people working in hot climates. The military requires electrolyte augmentation in such conditions. These days we use fancier electrolyte blends but it is still largely salt. If you are on a multi-day fast it is the primary thing you need to replenish aside from water.
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.
The idea came from linking salt to heart failure, but last I checked the link was a confounding variable - e.g. bad diet leads to problems that themselves lead to high cholesterol. It was not the salt in the food but the quality of the nutrition itself.
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.
Yikes. It's so disappointing to see public health agencies pushing medical misinformation but that's nothing new for the NHS, I guess. In reality if you look at this from an evidence-based medicine perspective what really matters is not the quantity but rather the osmolality. And the optimal level depends on multiple factors including genetics and activity level.
Agreed. The idea that salt is merely a flavoring with negative side effects has always struck me as indicative of an unhealthy relationship with food. It aligns with a broader Calvinistic tendency to view pleasure and harm as inherently linked, which is fortunately at odds with reality.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World observes that even in relentlessly noncommercialized societies, robust markets existed in two commodities: iron and salt. They were traded on the market within villages that otherwise had little use for markets, and they would make their way by international trade routes to even the most isolated cultures.
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.)
> Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
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.
Natural olives contain a chemical called oleuropein[0] which has a strong nasty bitter taste that renders them inedible. Soaking olives in a strong brine removes the oleuropein from the olive, turning them into the edible olive people love.
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.
Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing?
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)
> It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
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.
> 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.
Nice strawman. I didn’t mention ultra-processed foods :)
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:
The best chefs in the world generally don’t make healthy food, they make food that tastes good. High end restaurants usually use a lot of salt and butter.
Ideally it should taste good. But elementary school lunch isn't exactly fine dining. Some shortcuts are taken and kids are often picky eaters. Salted vegetables are a step up from dinosaur shaped nuggets and pizza, so it's a better middle ground than unsalted food that goes straight to the trash.
It’s hard. Salt is kind of magical. My night time snack is some vegetable, air fried with some salt, olive oil and some lemon. It’s not too much salt but I would have a hard time eating it without the salt.
It takes something like a week to acclimate to lower salt intake. Not hard at all, it's like coming down on caffeine or weed. Salt is very important in pasta to keep the shape of the noodle. Whole wheat pasta alone is a giant step up in health outcomes, especially considering school kid's famous preference for McD's, which has a ton of sodium. I also want to link the John Stewart rant about Olive Garden not salting the pasta, but can't find 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.
