But there is a cost, as you suggest, in terms of sodium intake (and sugar, since many brine recipes call for sweetness to balance the saltiness). So I dusted off my pencil for you to see how much salt (and therefore sodium) ends up getting into meat you brine. Yes, it’s word problem time, kids! I’m not the sharpest pencil in the bookbag, so if I can handle this math, so can you. So: A plane carrying a cup of table salt takes off heading west at 12 p.m. going 1,002 km/h…

Since Cook’s Illustrated is who turned me on to brining lo this many years ago, let’s go with its OG all-purpose brine recipe from the November/December 2001 issue:

(by weight; volumes are in parentheses):
32 ounces water (1 quart)
2.5 ounces salt (½ cup Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt; ¼ cup table salt)
3.4 ounces sugar (½ cup)

Add these up, divide, and you’ll find that salt is 6.6 percent of this solution, which is a little on the intense side of the 3 percent-6 percent salt in brines Harold McGee discusses in his classic of food science, “On Food and Cooking.” So an effective brine can be made with nearly half the salt and sugar cut from this recipe (though Cook’s doesn’t recommend it).

Properly brined meats can soak up about 10 percent of their weight in brine, which is to say that if you have 1 pound (16 ounces) of meat in our brine, it will absorb 1.6 ounces of the solution.

So, 1.6 ounces x 6.6 percent (the percentage of salt) = .11 ounces of salt, or 3.25 grams, which is how much salt you add to your pound meat by brining it according to this recipe. Depending on your perspective, of course, this might seem like a lot or not much at all. If just seasoning meat superficially, I might use a little more than half this amount of salt.

But let’s convert that salt to sodium and see where we stand. Remember that salt is not pure sodium, but rather, chemically, only 40 percent. So, accounting for that, 3.25g salt = 1300mg sodium, or just over half of the U.S. RDA of sodium, 2,400 milligrams. But that’s in a whole pound of meat, and if you’re regularly eating a whole pound of meat in a sitting, you might have bigger nutrition problems than what’s in the brine.

Cook’s Illustrated, the ever-lovable geeks that they are, went my homespun math a step further and just sent their samples off to a lab for sodium analysis. Their findings pretty much jibe with mine (pork = 1,161mg sodium per pound), but with an interesting twist. In their test, chicken absorbed significantly more brine, up to 1,673mg of sodium per pound. Which means that brining might be more effective (yum!) — and therefore more sodium-intense — for chicken than pork.

But more important, it highlights that there’s no real good way to answer Alan’s question, because there are always so many variables involved: even controlling for the brine recipe, one meat might absorb somewhat more or less than another; lean muscle might absorb differently than fatty tissue; bones might affect the way you weigh, etc., etc., etc.

Still, I hope this helps as a general guideline, or you may want to do the math for yourself according to your own cooking if you’re really diligent. But I have to say this: I’m not the brightest mathematician on the block and a worse chemist, but I am good enough of a lawyer to tell you that if you have health or diet issues, you should talk about them with your doctor or nutritionist. I mean, how can you believe anything important you read on the Internet?

If you have any food or cooking questions we can sleuth out for you, send them to food[at]salon[dot]com. 

I often come across recipes that say things like, “use a medium onion” or “a large leek.” But what do “medium” and “large” mean? The organic onions at my Whole Foods are enormous; the red onions are the size of soft balls. It’s a frustrating thing, especially when it comes to ingredients like onions, an overdose of which can really kill a dish. Do you have any advice on how to handle these ambiguous instructions?

— Beans&Greens

Dear Beans&Greens,

Recipes are a bit of a paradox. We want to think of them as the definitive word on a dish — if you have a great chef’s recipes, you can make a great chef’s food. But deep down inside, all recipe writers know that’s not really true: Reading a recipe doesn’t give you a great chef’s hands, eyes, nose and palate. True precision, fixed in print, just isn’t possible in a world full of variables. If the recipe writer’s stove is different from your stove, maybe that ends up being the difference between a good dish and a marry-me-now kind of dish.

So, in order to keep sane, most recipe writers accept a certain level of imprecision, a range of acceptable variation, and they’ll write their recipes with that range built in. What I’m saying is: Almost every one of the thousands (OK, eight) recipe writers I contacted for you — from Gourmet (RIP), Food & Wine, Saveur, Bon Appétit, and Cook’s Illustrated — had pretty much the same idea of what a small, medium and large onion means, but they all also said some variation of, “It kinda doesn’t matter too much.”

So knock yourself out! Be the master of your own kitchen! But in case you’d like a little guidance, here’s what the pros said anyway:

Small onion = 4 ounces by weight or about ½ cup chopped

Medium onion = 8 ounces, or about 1 cup chopped

Large onion = 12 ounces, or about 1½ cups chopped

Jumbo onion = 16 ounces, or about 2 cups chopped

Small and medium carrots = These are the size, generally, of the carrots that come in bags at the grocery store, unless the recipe specifically calls for baby carrots. (The precision-obsessed Cook’s Illustrated defines “medium carrot” as weighing six to a pound.)

Large carrots = Also called “horse” carrots, presumably because they’re the kind you might feed a massive animal, these are the kind usually sold in bulk — thick old boys sometimes with cracks down the side.

And if the quantity of these ingredients really matters to the final outcome, often the recipe will give, in addition to the descriptor, the specific weight or chopped volume to drive home the “pay attention!” point.

But even still, it’s impossible to get it perfectly right. As the ever-fabulous Maggie Ruggiero put it: “Obviously, as everyone chops differently. It’s like asking people to measure chopped mercury. At Gourmet we called for medium leeks and didn’t specify … I guess that’s why we closed. The jury remains out on whether size matters.”

If you have any food questions we can sleuth out for you, send them to food[at]salon[dot]com. Or just leave them in the comments while you make fun of us.

Given the revolutionary nature of the suggestion, it likely won’t be long before some Fox blowhard goes on a tear about the liberal war on our cherished American ballpark institutions. Can’t you picture Bill O’Reilly yelling about this tonight? What’s next? A fatwa on apple pie? And how will this affect the powerful bread lobby? Buns don’t kill people, dogs kill people! Next they’ll come for our marbles and coins because children might swallow them! OH THE HUMANITY.

But let’s consider what the AAP is actually saying. In addition to calling for more safely shaped foods, the report suggests the FDA also “recall food products that pose a significant and unacceptable choking hazard to the public” and to label foods that carry a high choking risk, like grapes and baby carrots. (Small toys and other risky items already have similar warnings.) It also includes a plea for “pediatricians, dentists, and other infant and child health care professionals” to “intensify choking-prevention counseling be taught to parents, teachers, child care providers, and others who care for children.” All pretty reasonable from a children’s safety perspective.

Unsurprisingly, the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council (yes, there is a National Hot Dog & Sausage Council) had its own swift response. Council president Janet Riley told Monday’s USA Today that, “As a mother who has fed toddlers cylindrical foods like grapes, bananas, hot dogs and carrots, I ‘redesigned’ them in my kitchen by cutting them with a paring knife until my children were old enough to manage on their own.” Riley also noted that many brands, like Oscar Meyer, already do voluntarily carry a choking warning.

Are we likely to see a burger-shaped dog on the grill this July 4? Unlikely. Do most kids make it out of childhood with only a few minor esophageal-scraping episodes? Of course. But every year in the United States, approximately 10,000 children are treated for choking, and close to 80 die. Considering that hot dogs make up 17 percent of those injuries, the AAP is helping raise the awareness of distracted parents everywhere to keep an eye on their kids who are still finessing the logistics of chew and swallow. And by pushing the product safety issue to the makers of hot dogs — and delicious tiny candies and crackers — the AAP just gave the processed food manufacturers an advantage that Mother Nature herself lacks. Until the Frankenfood industry figures out how to make a safe grape, fruits and vegetables can’t be so easily revamped. But the moment some brand comes out with a gently shaped, kid-friendly processed meat product in a clever package, it’s going to clean up among fussy eaters and fretful parents everywhere.