Author: Tony Dalmyn

Salt

Table of Contents

Open-ended

This post is dated 2018. It has been written to be updated.

Salt

Salt

Salt (sodium chloride) is a chemical agent used to cook or process food. Saltiness is regarded as one of 5 main tastes. (Scientists have not, as of 2018, identified a distinctive taste receptor for salt.)  Sodium is an essential nutrient, but consuming more sodium than the minimum has no health benefits.

Mark Kurlansky’s excellent book Salt: a World History (2002) tells of the uses of salt to brine or pickle soybeans and vegetables in China (>700 BCE), to cure hams by the Celts (Gauls and Germans) and Romans (>100 BCE),  the fermentation of fish to make Garum (Greek, Phoenician, Meditaranean, Roman fish sauce >900 BCE ) and oriental fish sauces ( China >2000 BCE ). The production of salt may have started about 8,000 years ago. Until the invention of canning and refrigeration, salt was used to preserve food.  Salt was and still is used to control or kill bacteria or yeast to preserve food (salting, cure, brine or pickle).  Some foods were to heavily salted they had to be soaked to make them palatable. Salt is use also to manage the activity of “good” yeast and bacteria.

Modern Food

Food processing includes:

  • harvesting, drying & milling raw plant products including grain, beans, vegetables and fruit;
  • raising, slaughtering and butchering animals;
  • processing agricultural products to commodies used to “make” food – e.g. flour, powder and syrop;
  • combining processed commodities to manufacture food product including products that can be served after adding water, or warming them with appliances;
  • packaging a product for transportation and sale
  • (pre)cooking food into heat and serve meals.

Sodium and Health

Sodium

Sodium is an essential nutrient but excessive sodium consumption is a health risk.

The upper limits for sodium intake, in milligrams, per day:

These numbers are not stated in ranges for body type, or weight.  The limits are stated as a single number for an “average” adult and a second, lower number for persons diagnosed with hypertension, or defined by age or other statistical risks. The 2,300 milligram figure is the sodium in 5,700 mg. (5.7 grams) of salt – about a teaspoon (the unit of volume). Exceeding the upper limit is risky and harmful.

Other sodium compounds added to processed food: sodium bicarbonate, sodium citrate, sodium phosphates, sodium pyrophosphate, monosodium glutamate.

Salt, Sugar, Fat

Processed foods used chemical additives – for instance as a binding agents – e.g. to make starch and water into a pudding. In Salt, Sugar, Fat (2013), investigative journalist Michael Moss looked at those ingredients as additives, and at aspects of the food industry:

  • financial and market constraints; investor and corporate governance
    • selling more product is the main goal;
    • input costs are already controlled; the costs of getting goods in front of customers is the main production cost,
  • marketing and social engineering:
    • the quasi-science of flavour,
    • consumer expectations: convenience, flavour, texture;
  • product development and financial engineering:
  • the politics of getting the food industry to state the contents of its products.

Michael Moss reported on his interviews with personnel at Cargill, a major supplier of salt to the food processing industry in his 2010 New York Times article “The Hard Sell on Salt” and in Salt, Sugar, Fat. Without salt:

  • The Cheez-It was not palatable. The colour faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was medicinal;
  • Corn Flakes tasted metallic;
  • Eggo waffles evoked stale straw;
  • The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no butter, disappeared;
  • Many products, including meat products, develop what food industry people called Warmed Over Flavour, described as cardboard or damp dog hair.

Salt, Sodium and Public Heath

Public health campaigns in the 1980’s concentrated on avoiding sprinking salt on prepared food by the (with a salt shaker/salt grinder).  Then public agencies set limits and compelled food processors to put salt on product labels.  Disclosure of sodium in product labels for processed foods is required by law in North America and Europe. Campaigns moved on to changed limits, better labels, more information, labels on menus, etc. 

The food industry wants to identify whatever it produces and sells as safe, nutritious, and authentic or wholesome. The food industry considers labelling and public health information represents the foot of government on the throat of free enterprise. In part it promotes scepticism about the science that says excess salt is bad. Michael Moss looked resistance from food manufacturers and processors in the Salt section of his book Salt, Sugar, Fat. Marion Nestle has provided commentary on the Food Politics web site.  (Search Salt in the search bar or search for posts tagged Salt).  Scientific American published one article in July 2011 “It’s Time to End the War on Salt” discussing the inconclusiveness of clinical trials.  A week later, Scientific American published an inteview with Marion Nestle who said:

But if you do a clinical trial where you try to put large amounts of people on a low-salt diet, you just don’t see much difference between the people who say they eat a lot of salt and the people who say they don’t eat a lot of salt. In clinical trials the relationship doesn’t show up. Two reasons: One that it’s impossible to put a population of people on a low-salt diet. Roughly 80 percent of the salt in the American food supply is in foods before people eat them—either in processed food or in restaurant food. Because so much salt is added to the food supply and because so many people eat out, it’s impossible to find a population of people who are eating a low-salt diet. They basically don’t exist.

… There’s a proportion of people in the population who are sensitive to salt—if you lower their intake of salt, then their blood pressure goes down. There’s another (probably larger) percentage of the population who doesn’t respond. They are people who can eat as much salt as they want and still their blood pressure is low.  So you have this curious anomaly where whenever you do a clinical trial you get these complicated, difficult-to-interpret results that don’t show much of an effect. But everybody who works with patients who have hypertension think they do better [on a low-salt diet].

Scientific American, July 14, 2011, The Salt Wars Rage On: A Chat with Nutrition Professor Marion Nestle

The food industry has created some products that are made without adding salt and other sodium compounds.  It’s a niche – another diet option. “Healthy” (whole grain, high fiber, low-fat, and organic)  products often are as salty as anything else, or more (e.g. low-fat mayonnaise in a product line may have 150-200% the sodium of the regular mayonnaise). Reduced” or “low” sodium statements by manufacturers are generally mere puffery. “No added sodium” generally means no sodium, but not always.

Living without salt means learning to taste differently.  It does not mean that everything is going to be bland.  People get habituated to the amount of salt they normally consume:

A group of young adult subjects was placed on self-maintained, low sodium diets for 5 months. Taste responses to salt in solutions, soups, and crackers were determined both during the 2 months preceding diet initiation and during a 5-month period when subjects lowered their sodium intake. Taste responses were also determined in a control group with ad libitum salt consumption throughout the same period. Perceived intensity of salt in crackers increased. The salt concentrations of maximum pleasantness in soup and crackers fell in the experimental subjects but not in the control subjects. These results demonstrate that the preferred level of salt in food is dependent on the level of salt consumed and that this preferred level can be lowered after a reduction in sodium intake. The implications of these findings for the maintenance of low sodium diets are discussed.

Bertino, Beauchamp & Engelman The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 36, Issue 6, 1 December 1982, Pages 1134–1144

Also “Effect of dietary sodium restriction on taste responses to sodium chloride: a longitudinal study”, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 44, Issue 2, 1 August 1986, Pages 232–243

High Sodium Foods

Food products high in sodium:

  • Bread;
  • Sandwich spreads, condiments and salad dressings;
  • Processed meat, cold cuts, charcuterie;
  • Cheese;
  • crackers,
  • pickles, olives,.
  • Processed (flaked/puffed or shaped and toasted) breakfast cereal;
  • Tomato juice, vegetable juice and tomato-clam (some very high);
  • Processed spaghetti sauces and tomato sauces (very high);
  • Pizza – bread topped with tomato sauce, cheese, and whatever else (most very high);
  • Canned soups (monstrously high);
  • Soy sauce, hoisin sauce and fish sauce; miso paste (monstrously high).

Email 2018

I used Outlook 2010 and Outlook  2013 as my desktop email client because they were nearly free. Employees of my employer got the Office Suites for a nominal charge. (my employer rolled back to Word 2010, and Outlook 2010 connected to its MS Exchange server for a time). The programs did what I needed. I had a server account at my ISP. Outlook connected with the server using POP3, a version of Post Office Protocol.  I began to consider letting go of my ISP after giving up the cable box and cable TV. This may mean I give up email account and address when I give up the Cable ISP service, and go with a new service. This meant thinking about a new email address on a webmail service, and a new email client.

Outlook was and it a message user agent (client) for Microsoft Exchange Server using proprietary MAPI protocols. In the enterprize enviroment a client connects to the enterprize email server which stores messages and connects to the Internet.  Outlook has the capability to manage local copies of messages in a PST file (a dedicated database), which lets it function as a standalone internet email client. Contrary to MS Outlook 2013 Support articles and publicity about Hotmail Connector and Exchange Active Sync,Outlook 2013 did not easily support connecting to an Outlook.com account. After MS “improved” Outlook, creating a lock-in effect for its Hotmail/Outlook.com services and more of a walled garden or closed platform approach to services.

Outlook 2013 does not easily support IMAP. The capability may be there. For instance, there are resources that explain making an IMAP connection in Outlook, which may work or may have been outdated by changes in Windows and the Office Suite. Searching for ways to adapt Outlook 2013 is frustrating and time consuming. This makes using Outlook with webmail platforms other than Hotmail/Outlook difficult. Outlook 2013 has already started  its spiral into obsolesence.  Newer versions have been web/cloud based (software as a service), which leaves MS with a stream of income as long as consumers will stay with MS as rentier. Staying with Outlook as client means subscribing, which will not be cheap, and being locked in.

There are desktop email clients that support IMAP, and downloading and local storage of messages.  IMAP is a robust standard, even if Microsoft deprecates it. It works with webmail, although it is a conceptual leap from POP, and requires some management. Time to move on.

American Nations

Some writers – e.g. in a post in the Marginal Revolutions blog in 2017, the economist Tyler Cowen – mention American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America as a partial explanation for support for the candidacy of Donald Trump among American working class and middle class voters in the midwest in the 2016 American elections. I found a copy in the Oak Bay Branch of Greater Victoria Public Library.  It was catalogued as children’s nonfiction.  The children in Oak Bay must be precocious.  As Garrison Keilor said in his NPR broadcasts and books. “Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”.

Colin Woodard is a journalist and writer of explanatory nonfiction. American Nations presents a condensed introduction to a theory of American history: tracking regional culture back to the European settlement of different parts of North America by distinctive groups. Woodard accepts that the modern view of modern American historians that cultures of different parts of America evolved from the cultures of the first European settlers. The idea is that America was a political movement to create a state, as that term was understood in political theory and international law, before there was an American nation. This idea resembles some early modern political theories, and can be seen as a revival of theories of blood and race, but is less interested in the origins and traditions of particular settler groups

For instance Alan Taylor in American Colonies and other works. Consider this review and summary (Scott Alexander) of Albion’s Seed by David Fischer. Woodard summarized American Nations in a 2013 article in Tufts Magazine. (Map in the Tufts Magazine piece). Several of the “nations”:

  • Yankeedom – New England was settled by English religious dissenters, who framed their activities as creating a new moral world in the wilderness.   Fischer used the term “Puritans”;
  • Tidewater- Virginia and Maryland were settled by English gentry, who emulated the culture of the lower aristocracy and the rising English mercantile classes.  Fischer refers to the migration of the Cavaliers to Virginia after the triumph of the Roundheads and the rise of the Lord Protector. Fischer also refers to class differences between the Cavaliers and their indentured servants;
  • Deep South – settled by agricultural entrepreneurs who moved to the Carolinas, bringing the plantation system, slavery, and self-serving attachment to the supposed traditions of the English aristocracy – descended from the Norman barons who conquered England in 1066;
  • New Netherland – New York state surrounds New York City and Delaware. A trading centre – commercial and cosmopolitan;
  • Midland – Pennylvania started as a land grant to a utopian religious dissident;
  • Greater Appalachia, parts of the deep South, parts of the midwest Midland, and parts of the “Far West”(the prairies and Rocky Mountains). Northern English and lowland Scots came to America as indentured servants and immigrants and occupied the frontiers. After centuries of clan warfare in Europe, these belligerant borderlanders trusted their own kin and no others, and do what was necessary to secure the survival and advantage of the clan.  Woodard implies the Appalachians were the Americans that most readily adopted Manifest Destiny as an excuse to dispossess other nations. Fischer refers to Borderers, from both sides of Hadrian’s Wall as distinct entity, and as part of the migration of lower class people to America as indentured labourers.

Woodard’s ideas about the formation and persistence of political culture have some power to explain history. I don’t agree that this theory can account for current events.  The apportionment of values and tendencies to “nations” within the modern American polity has weaknesses. While the opponents of President Trump characterize his appeal as an appeal to local pockets of white grievance, e.g. in Appalalachia, Appalachians are not measureably more belligerent and grasping than other Americans – or for that matter anyone. Perhaps Richard Slotkin‘s cultural histories of the American willingness to use violence to acquire and hold property on a hostile frontier such as Gunfighter Nation have more traction in explaining American populism.

Camping Gear 2016

Last year, I had noticed that the adhesive seam tape used by the manufacturerto seal the seams of my tent’s fly was degrading and flaking off. I resealed the seams with a product that smells like plastic model cement and sticks to skin like crazy glue.

I have used a Therm-a-Rest “Original” or Classic mattress since the 1980’s. For front country camping I have also used it with a second mattress a closed cell pad – an old blue Airolite by “World Famous” sold by United Army Surplus in Winnipeg.  Like a yoga mat but thicker. This kind of mattress is still on market.  I tried a Therm-a-Rest RidgeRest (the model that MEC was carrying last year), and found it to be thin and uncomfortable – an slippery to that I was sliding downhill when my tent was pitched on uneven ground.

The inflatable air mattress is back with products including Therm-a-Rest’s BaseCampAF and NeoAir Camper and others, Eureka, Big Agnes and house brands.  An electric pump that runs off automobile current is good for front country camping (a battery powered electric is an option for backcountry but that gadget may not be worth its weight requirements). Inflating a mattress to the point that it is bouncy is not necessary.  A mattress should be firm enough to keep objects under the tent from being noticeable, but soft enough to settle in. So, a new mattress was in order.

I have a Primus Omnifuel, a pressurize burner stove that burns white gas (“coleman” fuel) and special mixed gases  in pressure cans.  It is light, but needs to be managed carefully.  The Wikipedia on portable stoves goes into the history of the gadget.  The original Primus was a burner attached to fuel source.  In the US, Coleman made stove like that too. The military version was the G.I. Pocket Stove.  It was a standard design, before MSR and others introduced pressured burner stoves with the fuel bottle separate from the burner. There are modern pressurized cartridge stoves made up of a burner that screws directly on the pressurized cannister.

The standard camp stove for front country camping was the two burner Coleman that used white gas.  There are still several white gas lanterns and stoves on the market.  The 1 pound stubby Coleman propane cylinder has become common as a power source for lanterns and stoves by Coleman and others.  The cylinders are two heavy for back packing but can be used if there is space and a way of transporting them – such as a car for front country camping.  The small cylinders are not refillable and should not thrown into garbage or left laying around. I find that they are not stable.  I had a Coleman product made up of base ring to held a propane cylinder, and a burner that screwed directly on the propane cylinder.    The gas cylinders have a dimpled metal base and plastic rings glued to the dimples.  Shoving that into the stove base does not create a safe connection.  The cylinder would not line up, or the glue bond would fail. Putting a pot or kettle on a heavy metal burner on top of the cylinder puts the center of mass high.  And the burner had no wind screen. I decided to get a two burner – flat, stable, with a lid that tips up and create a wind screen.

The Holy or the Broken

Episode 7 in Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast in July 27, 2016 was about his ideas about creativity, contrasting artists who revise and refine with artists who appear to produce their work whole. He illustrated with references to the development of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah by:

  • Cohen,
  • John Cale,
  • Jeff Buckley

before it became a pop standard and a secular hymn. Gladwell cites his sources on the Episode Web page, usually including books available from one of his sponsors. One of his sources was Alan Light’s 2012 The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah”, which is also the a principal source for the Wikipedia entry (below). As the title implies, Light explores the tension between the religious exclamation and the biblical allusions, and the vivid, graphic memories of love experienced in sex acts.  Light comes close to saying that Cohen followed the Quebecois pattern of using the name of sacred objects as obscenities.

The Wikipedia entry Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen song) agrees
Hallelujah was an obscure song from 1984 until 2001, when it became popular in recordings and performances:

  • the Buckley cover on MTV and in television,
  • the Cale cover in the movie Shrek,
  • the Rufus Wainright cover (for the Shrek soundtrack recording),
  • the k.d. Lang cover and her 2010 Winter Olympic Concert, and
  • television performances in singing contest shows The Voice and X Factor. 

Addenda:

2016 – if you can get through the paywall, David Remnick’s October 2016 biographical article in the New Yorker on Cohen at 82 is worthwhile. The Cohen tribute concert in Montreal (filmed and curated) was good;

2023 – some streaming services started to broadcast the 2022 movie Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song;

2024 – Stephen Metcalf, writing in the October 2024 issue of the Atlantic (paywalled) in The Anti-Rock Star:

  • suggested in passing that Hallelujah became iconic within the music industries in 2008 as the engagement of Cohen’s fans with the song became evident at Cohen’s live performances during this 2008 tour;
  • reviewed the new biography of Cohen, Christophe Lebold’s Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall;
  • summarized other biographies;
  • summarized other biographical interpretations of Cohen’s work;
  • noted other reviews of Cohen albums such as Leonard Cohen Never Left Earth a review of the posthumous album Thanks for the Dance by Spencer Korbhaber in the Atlantic in September 2019.

Islands Folk Festival, 2016

I camped at the 2016 Islands Folk Festival in Duncan BC. It was my first visit to this festival.

The festival is held at Providence Farm, a former convent of the Sisters of St. Ann, once a boarding school, now an organic farm. It accomodates a crowd of a about 2,000 (vaguely stated as a few thousand) comfortably. Site Map. There is trailer camping in the “Upper Field”, and tent camping on a treed hill – no parking spots or access roads.  There are a few wheelbarrows available for tent campers to move gear from the vehicle-accessible areas into the camp.  The tent area has shade and some shelter from the wind.

The main stage concert on Friday July 22 was opened by Matthew and Jill Barber, who performed songs from their new album.  They have a few original songs, but the album’s theme is songs that they have known and admired.  They did a cover of Ian Tyson’s Summer Wages, introduced with a story about summer jobs planting trees.  They shifted the emphasis to the reflective passages:

“… The dreams of the seasons are all spilled down on the floor”

“So I’ll work on them towboats in my slippery city shoes
Which I swore I would never do again
Through the grey fogbound straits where the cedars stand waiting
I’ll be far off and gone like summer wages”

Their cover (video on YouTube), like the cover by Tom Russell and Nanci Griffith on the Nanci Griffith 1998 album Other Voices Too (audio on YouTube), tours scenes of a working person’s life on the West Coast.

They covered The Song of the French Partisan, citing Leonard Cohen as their main influence, joining Cohen, Buffy St. Marie and other artists.  Joan Baez, then already an apostle of non-violent resistance, covered this song of armed resistance in her 1972 album Come From the Shadows. They also cover Neil Young’s Comes a Time, referring to the time their parents lived in Winnipeg.

Oysterband played a double slot – nearly two hours.  They performed, as they do in other concert performances, songs from a repertoire, written and polished in a 40 year career.  I don’t miss a chance to see them when they come to BC. They have changes their performing company.  John Jones, Alan Prosser and Ian Telfer are still performing.  Veterans Lee Partis and Ray Cooper (Chopper) left in 2007 and 2012 respectively.

I was impressed by the arrangements and ensemble work of Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project, at their concert in the daytime Spirit Stage venue. The busy and versatile Moira Smiley was with Jayme Stone and the project for this festival.

2015 Rides

My rides in 2015 were on my Giant Yukon until I bought a Trek FX 4 hybrid in July. After I had shifted some gear and installed a Bontrager cycling computer it became my main bike.

My logged cycling distance was 885.5 Km.

I had a few walks on the trails around Elk and Beaver lakes.

I travelled to Vancouver for the festival in July and to Salmon Arm for the roots and blues festival in August.