Nutrition

First, there’s the fact that diets too low in sodium are dangerous themselves; we need salt to keep our fluid balances in check. Have you heard of “over-hydration,” when marathon runners, say, collapse from drinking too much water? It’s because their constant sweat depletes their salt levels.

Then, frankly more important, there’s the flavor issue. In culinary school, there were two ways I could lose points before even touching any food: if I didn’t have a dish of salt near me, and if I didn’t have a pile of clean spoons, so I could taste, at every turn, if I’d seasoned my food enough. My chefs were maniacal about salt being one of the essential keys to deliciousness. Salt tastes good on its own, but its special power lies in the fact that, smartly used, it actually highlights the natural flavors of food. It turns your dinner from black-and-white to HD.

The key is to maximize the impact of the salt you do use. According to the Culinary Institute of America’s “Techniques of Healthy Cooking” textbook (which, hilariously, we all called THC in school), “Salt is far more effective when it is added in small doses throughout the cooking process rather than just at the end [or at the table]. When added early, foods are in contact with the salt longer, which allows for deeper penetration and better flavor extraction.”

So season in small doses, sprinkling a little on whenever a new ingredient goes in the pan, and taste it to see if you’ve added just enough to make the flavors pop. You don’t need more than that. Out of curiosity, I actually measured the amount of salt I used cooking dinner last night. The result: about a teaspoon for three people — right on target. (The recommended intake is about a teaspoon per person per day.) Also keep in mind that we taste salt more readily in cool or cold foods, so you can season even more lightly if the food is going to be served cold.

Salt also does magical things beyond flavor: According to Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking,” salt in boiling water for vegetables helps to soften them quicker, letting you cook them for a shorter period of time and preserving their nutrients; add enough salt — 2 tablespoons per quart — and you create an equilibrium so that the vegetables’ nutrients won’t leach to the water. (Two tablespoons might seem like a lot of sodium, but remember that most of it stays in the cooking water, not your food.) It tightens up the proteins in bread, giving it better rise; it helps vegetables ferment and pickle; it causes meat to soften and absorb moisture before cooking, making it tender and juicy.

 ”OK, OK,” you say. “So salt is pixie dust. But we’re still eating too much of it, so I’m going to throw out my salt dish.”

Well, if you actually have hypertension, fine. But for the rest of us, note that in the New York Times piece on Bloomberg’s sodium crusade, New York City’s health commissioner says, “Eighty percent of the salt we eat is in the food already when you buy it”.

Eighty percent! Eighty percent of our sodium intake comes from manufactured, processed food. Much of which is hidden sodium, inherent to the processing, but not to real food: sodium benzoate (preservative), sodium caseinate (thickener), sodium nitrate (meat cure), sodium phosphate (emulsifier), MSG.

I hate to throw you under the bus, dear Kraft — you make unparalleled grilled cheese, and I’ll admit that there’s no better slice for cheeseburgers — but let’s be honest here. A slice of Kraft American cheese, at 21 grams, has 340 mg of sodium, or about 14 percent the recommended daily allowance. A similar quantity of real cheddar cheese has about 131 mg of sodium, or 5.25 percent the RDA, well less than half the sodium. (I’ve adjusted the serving sizes from the links to show apples to apples, er, cheese to pasteurized processed cheese food product.)

Where does all that extra sodium come from? Well, McGee explains how processed cheese “began as a kind of resolidified, long-keeping fondue made from the trimmings of genuine cheeses that were unsaleable due to partial defects and damage … Today, manufacturers use a mixture of sodium citrate, sodium phosphates, and sodium polyphosphates” as the “melting salts,” which combine and homogenize all those trimmings into one recognizable, eminently meltable mass. Yay science!

I hate to get all Michael Pollan on you, but at the end of the day, the sodium question is still about eating real food, and eating in moderation. These single-boogeyman approaches to being healthy are insane. We constantly compartmentalize and forget the bigger picture: that our bodies are complex machines that need all kinds of nutrient combinations, and, short of cyanide and low-fat mayonnaise, most anything we can eat has a place in the mix. So eat your delicious dinner. Just make sure you know who made it. 

The report goes on to catalog other shrinkages: cans of tuna going from 6 ounces to 5; buckets of ice cream going from 2 liters to 1 ½; orange juice from 64 ounces to 59, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

An immediate and obvious reaction is that this is an outrage — a problem that really puts the screws on people who already have trouble affording enough food to feed their families. Hunger — and the threat of hunger that policy wonks call “food insecurity” — is no joke. (Even if we’re not entirely clear on how many people are truly hungry, and what food insecurity really means.) My point is not to minimize the difficulty this kind of price inflation will create for people truly struggling to eat.

But there is something else that struck me when reading the report. It was the ice cream. And then the Reese’s mini peanut butter cups. These, and presumably many other processed and junk foods, are among the items “shrunken” this way.

Is that really so awful?

First, Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than anyone, ever. In 2008, during the economic crash, we spent an average of 5.6 percent of our income to feed our families, the lowest since 1929. At this point, overeating affects many more Americans than chronic hunger, by far. (Perversely, obesity and diet-related diseases like Type 2 diabetes are actually much more common in lower-income communities, which speaks to a prevalence of junk food that confuses the line between “hunger” and “malnutrition.”) And if current trends continue, over 40 percent of Americans will be obese within the decade.

So how do we deal with this? Anyone who tells you they have a clear answer is selling you snake oil. But a big part of it has to be eating more smartly, and yes, eating less. It’s weird to say this, but maybe food should cost more. Not because we should be poorer, certainly not because we need to be protecting the profits of corporations, but because we have real trouble valuing what’s cheap.

Food, for most of us, is blessedly and cursedly cheap. It’s plentiful. And so we plow through huge dinners nightly. And so we mow down whole containers of ice cream. It’s in our nature to want to eat more. Our bodies and brains have descended from animals that have struggled, really struggled, to get enough food to survive forever. We want to pack as many calories into ourselves as humanly possible, for when the lean times inevitably come. Only we’ve engineered and marketed away most of the lean times, and yet we keep gorging.

So there may be something significant and strangely hopeful about how this food inflation is manifesting. It’s not that prices are rising per se, but that portion sizes are shrinking. That means that if you could afford a box of pasta or a bag of chips before, you can still afford one now; no one is taking all your chips away from you. But the limiting of portion size might do us some good.

Studies by Dr. Brian Wansink at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab regularly show that people keep eating not until they feel “full,” but rather until there is some external signal to tell them to stop. In one notable experiment, Wansink’s team rigged a bowl of soup to secretly keep refilling itself. Without realizing it, diners eating from that bowl ate 50 percent more soup on average, and some ate three times the amount of soup they might have otherwise. We eat mindlessly, as a function of habit and instinct, and so with a surplus of food, we are constantly overeating. Knowing that, maybe we don’t have to begrudge that extra couple of ounces of food companies are saving for the next bag.