The Salt Shaker and Our Body

Christiana, you are quickly becoming one of my very favorite writers on Medium!

Our eating habits begin with our parents. My mother was a penny-pincher extraordinaire. She had done the math and she figured that she could feed the family of six for only a tiny fraction of what it cost to eat out. So we NEVER ate out. (Okay, we ate out maybe once every 3 to 4 years.)

My father grew up eating only what his mother put on the table. Then he joined the army and ate only what was served in the mess hall. Then he got married and ate only what his wife (our mother) served him. I don’t think he ever ate a meal that he cooked himself in his ENTIRE LIFE!

I’m not sure he even knew how to make toast. Every single meal he ever ate was served to him by his wife and every sack lunch he ever took to work was packed by her. He couldn’t even make his morning coffee by himself.

When our mother set the dinner table she would put the salt shaker right next to our father’s plate. No one was allowed to use the salt shaker until our father was done using it. Our father put salt on EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY THING HE PUT INTO HIS BODY!

With his dinner plate set before him by our mother, he would commence to very heavily douse everything on his plate with copious amounts of salt. He poured salt on everything he ate. He poured salt over his food, into his coffee, into his beer and even on his ice cream. He never ate anything without first pouring heavy doses of salt over it. I watched this and noticed it intently.

When I was a junior in high school my father had a massive heart attack (while in his fifties) from which he barely survived. He was immediately put on a diet that involved cutting out ALL salt. The doctors said that his massive consumption of salt had utterly corroded his circulatory system.

My mother was beside herself because she had to change her entire cooking regimen. The salt shaker no longer appeared next to our father’s plate; in fact it no longer appeared on the table at all. It was hidden away in the back of some kitchen cabinet.

Watching all of this, my teenager logic kicked in and said, “Why are we put on a salt-free diet only AFTER we have a heart attack? Wouldn’t it make sense to go on a salt-free diet BEFORE we have a heart attack and then maybe we won’t have a heart attack? Why does no one see this?”

So right then and there, as a dumb, stupid teenager, I made a pledge to God to give up salt. To this day, many decades later, I have never had salt in my kitchen. I am now older than my dad was when he had his heart attack. I am about to be older than he was when he died. And I am so much healthier than he was back then.

When I left home, still a stupid, young teenager, I vowed to be different than my parents when it came to food and health. I did not want to be utterly dependent, like my dad, on someone else cooking my food. I wanted to cook my own damn food!

Luckily while fresh out of high school I took a job in the restaurant industry and I learned some basics about cooking. I wanted to cook my food in addition to eating it. I wanted to take an active role in the process of feeding my body.

I also wanted to impress girls.

I ended up marrying a woman who, like my father, didn’t even know how to make toast. I don’t think she even knew how to boil water. For twenty years I cooked for her — and not just for her but also for our daughter who came to join us.

I (joyously) took on the role that my mother had once played, except I was intent on doing a much, much better job than she ever did. (For twenty years we never, ever had a salt shaker in our home.) My mother never bought anything unless it was on sale at deeply discounted prices. I never bought anything unless it was organic and in the later years non-GMO. I read and researched and experimented with the express purpose of feeding my little family only the very healthiest of foods.

I was a radical little Miss Healthy Mom. My kitchen apron seemed to hide the fact that I had a penis.

And then one day, after 20 years of marriage, my wife suddenly, out of the blue, left me one day to go move in with her boyfriend. One of my initial thoughts was, “Oh my God! Who is going to cook for her? How will she eat? Will she starve to death?”

To my relief, I soon learned that this boyfriend who seemed to appear out of nowhere was a professional chef. I was happy to realize that she would not starve to death — but that was about the only thing I was happy about.

(By the way, since then he and I have shared some kitchen banter and some recipes but that is besides the point.)

Then there is the matter of my (our) daughter. For 17 years I was her personal chef. I cooked most of the meals that she ever ate, from the time she was weaned from her mother’s breasts to the time she was a junior in high school. When she was hungry she always turned to me. Over those many years I must have come up with about 800 different ways to serve broccoli. I was always looking for ways to sneak healthy food into her meals. I was a health ninja mom. I cooked her meals with intense love and an intense desire for her to be healthy.

Soon after her mother left home to go live with her boyfriend, my daughter also left home to go live with her boyfriend. Sadly, her boyfriend (the same age as her) had never made so much as a piece of toast in his short life. It wasn’t long before this boyfriend became my son-in-law. My daughter became the mother who did all the cooking — just like me and just like my mother.

Now my daughter is 30 years old and has two daughters of her own. I’ve been in her home and I’ve been in her kitchen and to my utter dismay she is more like my mother than me. She somehow became an expert at cooking junk food. She has become an expert at feeding a family of four at ridiculously low prices without any concern for health and nutrition.

I am an utter failure! For 17 years I cooked for my daughter but not once did I take her under my wing and teach her how to cook in a healthy way. I never showed her how to cook eggs or make toast or anything! How could I have neglected that motherly parental duty? How could I have been so negligent?

Somehow she managed to learn how to cook all on her own. The last time I had dinner at my daughter’s house I watched her reach into a kitchen cabinet and pull out a salt shaker and place it next to her husband’s plate.

I wanted to die! I was a failure. I have spent my life breaking out of the mold into which I born only to see my progeny climb right back into that mold.

In the twelve years that I have now been cooking only for myself I have become an even healthier cook. Why? Because now I only have my own body to listen to. I’m not trying to mold anyone or make anyone healthy or happy. It is only my own body that I am now serving. I have learned that one cannot understand healthy eating without experiencing and understanding healthy cooking. The understanding becomes even more complete when you grow what you cook and eat. The process is a full circle and very few of us ever partake of more than a tiny fraction of that circle. We can try to teach that circle to others but the knowledge will never fully come until we listen to our bodies. Our bodies can show us the way to the wholeness of that circle. Being alone with my body has been an exquisite gift.

Do I eat in a perfectly healthy way? Hell no. But one thing I know is….

…. how I like my eggs.

(Follow me at my publication: Writer On Foot Getting Bread)