Some People Just Aren't Worth Their Salt

Do you know where my title phrase comes from?

Of course you do…don’t you?

Salt (sodium chloride) hasn’t always cost less than a dollar for 26 ounces like it does today. I recently bought two containers of generic iodized salt for a buck and a half. If you want the name brand container bearing the little girl with the umbrella on the label (Morton Salt,) the same quantity will cost you a little over a dollar.

Americans take salt for granted today, but it used to be a rare commodity. At one time salt was actually used for money in some cultures.

The ancient Greeks traded salt for Slaves, thus the term “not worth your salt.”

Roman Soldiers were given a special salt ration called “salarium argentums” which is the predecessor to the English word “salary.”

The average human body contains about a cup of salt. My massive girth probably contains about a cup and one-half. I love salt, although I do routinely utilize pepper and a variety of other spices in my cooking and have recently discovered how to limit the amount of salt in many of my dishes.

A few years ago I started cooking with semi-sweet unsalted butter in order to control the amount of salt in my home cooked food. I also use coarse flake Kosher salt in many of my dishes during preparation because, in spite of not containing any Iodine, it tastes better. I’ll just take my chances on getting an enlarged thyroid.

Eating out is another matter. I find that, on a general basis, the crappier the food content, the more salt it contains. Fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Burger King cover the inherent lack of things like FLAVOR in their food by tossing in a pant load of salt into everything they sell.

As a result of the crappy flavor and high salt content, I rarely eat fast food. The only exception is when I am making an all day road trip, I find that it is easy to hit the drive through window and eat a couple of plain McDonald’s cheeseburgers held in the wrapper while propelling myself down the interstate highway at 70 MPH. Of course, when I get to where I am going, I have the urge to drink a couple thousand gallons of water to offset the couple thousand dollars (Roman Empire dollars) worth of salt that I consumed.

The thing about salt is that you know it is in whatever you eat because you can taste it the minute you put it in your mouth. You can even read the label before you put the genuine imitation manufactured polyunsaturated food product into your mouth if you want to know how much salt it contains. Just look under the category—sodium.

With this in mind, I thought that you would like to know that there are a bunch of doctors and busy-body do-gooder nannies out there that believe that you and I are too stupid to read a label or taste and spit out anything that we might try to eat that contains too much salt.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has filed a lawsuit against the federal government last month, “saying that salt is killing tens of thousands of Americans and that regulators have done too little to control salt in food.”

“Despite advisories to take it easy on sodium, Americans are now consuming about 4,000 milligrams a day -- nearly double the recommended limit to keep blood pressure under control, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said.

So the CSPI renewed a lawsuit first filed in 1983 to ask federal courts to force the Food and Drug Administration to declare sodium a food additive instead of categorizing it as "generally recognized as safe." This would give the agency the authority to set limits for salt in foods.

"There is no way the FDA can look at the science and say with a straight face that salt is 'generally recognized as safe,"' CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson said in a statement.

"In fact, salt is generally recognized as unsafe, because it is a major cause of heart attacks and stroke. The federal government should require food manufacturers to gradually lower their sodium levels." ”

Sorry Dr. Jacobsen, but doing my standard check of the US Constitution, I do not find any words indicating that I have a right to “life, liberty, and a safe, nutritionally balanced, government regulated diet.” So what the hell are you up to here?

“The CSPI issued a report saying that processed foods and restaurant fare contribute almost 80 percent of sodium to the U.S. diet. Frozen dinners are especially high in salt, the report finds.

Depending on the brand, some salad dressings contain nearly a quarter of the day's allowance of sodium while others are low in sodium, the report finds.

One chain restaurant's breakfast contains two days' worth of sodium -- 4,460 mg -- the CSPI report said.

Chinese restaurant meals can be especially, high too. "A typical order of General Tso's chicken with rice has 3,150 mg," the group said.

Dr. Claude Lenfant, president of the World Hypertension League and a former head of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute supported the report.

"If we could reduce the sodium in processed and restaurant foods by half, we could save about 150,000 lives per year," he said.”

BUT what if I WANT to eat salty General Tso’s Chicken for three meals a day until my butt swells to the size of the Hindenburg and my heart explodes out of my chest? What if I want to eat Hardee’s Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuits each day for a mid-morning snack with a gallon of regular Coke and shaker of salt on the side?

This whole idea of people being too stupid to make their own decisions is getting on my last good nerve. Of course people are stupid. We raise them by the truck load here in this country.

One thing that we absolutely have here in the United States is the right to “life, liberty, and to be STUPID AS HELL” and there is nothing that the government should be able to do to stop it. I will defend your right to be stupid till the death. I will also demand that you be given the right to educate yourself and rise above your innate stupidity if you want to.

Unfortunately, common sense is a lost commodity these days and the government and the legal system are the culprits.

Here’s an example: You’re a young testosterone laden man making big bucks in your new job as assistant manager at McDonalds. Go out and buy a crappy, cheep “sport utility” vehicle, don’t wear your seatbelt, drink a six pack of beer, make sharp turns at 80 MPH, get ejected from the vehicle in the ensuing rollover accident, and suffer brain damage. What do you do? You hire a lawyer and sue the vehicle manufacturer and the jury will probably award you a zillion dollars to support your drooling stupid self and your extended family in luxury for the rest of your life. Isn’t America great?

Here’s another example: You’re a young estrogen laden vixen sporting your new fake boobs. Drop out of high school, have four or five illegitimate children by two or three different looser assistant managers at the McDonalds you work at. What do you do? You hire a lawyer, sue all the ex-boyfriends for child support, apply for welfare, apply for WIC, and move into the new public housing townhouses they just built down the street that just happen to be on the bus route. What a great country we live in.

And now the rocket scientists over at The Center for Science in the Public Interest wants the government to attempt to control MY salt intake. If they do force McDonalds into reducing the salt content in their kitchen, what is to prevent me from putting fifty of those little paper packages of salt on my burger. People are free to salt their own food, aren’t they? Are they going to take the salt shakers and paper salt packages out of the restaurants also?

In the future, what is going to prevent the government from coming to my house and taking away my three pounds of salt? How the hell can anyone justify the Government meddling in our lives in this way?

THINGS LIKE THIS MAKE MY BLOOD PRESSURE GO UP MORE THAN EATING A TON OF SALT. AAAAAAHHHHHH!

Now…where’s my salt shaker, I need some salty comfort food.