Salt and Bread

I recently finished reading a book of Best-Loved Folktales from Around the World, selected by Joanna Cole. Given all my thinking about food these days, I couldn’t help noticing how much it factors into many of the tales. Everything from Snow White eating a poisoned apple, to magic spoons and bowls that provide endless amounts of food, to princesses emerging from oranges, to giants threatening to make meals out of people.

Two stories, though, particularly caught my attention. The first was called “Salt and Bread”. It is a tale from Sweden and features a king with three daughters. The youngest was his favorite until the two older ones tried to turn him against her out of jealousy. So when the king asked how much his daughters loved him, and the youngest replied, “I value you… as salt and bread” (p. 381), he was so offended that he banished her. Only when he later sat down to a feast without salt or bread did he realize how valuable those were, and he reconciled with his daughter.

The other story was simply called “Salt” and came from Russia. It related how a young, foolish man set out to redeem himself and make his fortune. He succeeded in this by finding a huge mountain of fine salt and selling it to a king who had never before seen salt and was overwhelmed by how it transformed his food.

What struck me about these stories was how they venerated such humble foods, while our own society has almost vilified them.

Salt has been given the cold shoulder for a long time, with doctors and health processionals warning about sodium. Many studies have shown that too much can lead to increased risk of heart disease and high blood pressure, which in turn can lead to kidney damage. After all, too much of anything can often be dangerous, and salt is no exception.

For a time, though, and even now, people can run the risk of too little. That can also be dangerous, leading to electrolyte imbalance and negatively impacting the blood pressure as well as nerve and muscle function. Besides which, while it’s true the processed and packaged foods are over-salted, try to imagine eating only home-made food without ever having salt. You might sympathize with the protagonist of “Salt”, who “nearly turned sick at the thought of the tastelessness of all that food.” (p. 431)

Bread has only semi-recently been seen as the enemy. It started with the Atkins diet and other low-carb diets, when suddenly people turned pale and became horrified at the thought of a whole sandwich with two pieces of bread (even if it was whole wheat). All those carbohydrates! Now the difficulty is more with the wheat, with so many people having celiac or gluten sensitivity.

And it’s a shame, because bread, like salt, truly is precious. Its history alone makes it valuable, and all the metaphors associated with it. Jesus fed the masses not with fishes and rice, or potatoes, or quinoa, or beans, but loaves. We talk of breaking bread together, and offering bread to a stranger has historically been a sign of hospitality.

Reading these stories made me long for simpler times, when our food did not suffer such scrutiny, nor did it have to. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to the implicit trust these people had in their food, that it didn’t contain strange chemicals or too much of any one thing, but I hope that we can get at least partway there. In the meantime, I am grateful anew that I can eat fresh, wheat-based bread, warm from the oven, spread with melting salted butter – truly a precious gift.

Dessert Is On the House

On a recent work trip, I went out to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant called Scarpetta at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. The menu was just three small pages – one each for starters, pasta, and entrees – and with no specials, it wasn’t hard to make our decisions. Then we waited for our entrees, And waited.

“Just a couple more minutes,” the waiter assured us, at least four times.

“Do you think they’re catching the fish first?” we joked. “Or maybe chasing down the duck?”

As time passed and hunger rumbled, I sampled each of the four types of bread from the basket in front of me. I didn’t want to fill up on it, but we only had so many options, and my appetizer (four bites of tuna wrapped sushi-style around marinated vegetables), while excellent, did not do much to tide me over.

Finally, two hours after sitting down, our food arrived, and we fell to ravenously, polishing it off in short order. By the time we finished, it was about 8 p.m. I was full, and sleepy (I was still on East coast time), and I didn’t need anything more than sleep.

Except – “We apologize very much for the delay on dinner, so dessert is on the house,” the waiter said as he handed out menus.

Suddenly that changed everything. I found myself contemplating dessert after all. But then I wondered – why? After all, my company was paying for the meal (a good thing since mine was already around $42, and I hadn’t even had any drinks) so it was already free as far as I was concerned. I had been prepared to skip it without feeling deprived, and I had not miraculously discovered a second stomach. What was different? Why was it abruptly difficult to turn down?

I realized it was the reason why dessert was free. Before, this had been just another work dinner, one of many, nothing particular to distinguish it. Now, though, it had emotion attached. It was a peace offering, an apology, and it would be churlish to refuse it.

I could sense that feeling ripple through the nine others at the table. Even the two women who were going to a show and didn’t have much time didn’t hesitate to look at the menu and make their choice.

I checked in with myself again. It was true I didn’t need any more food, and I am generally suspicious of other reasons for eating, knowing what a slippery slope that is. But – the desserts looked wonderful. I also wasn’t so full that eating more would make me feel uncomfortable or sick. I made the conscious decision to indulge, after which I didn’t worry about it.

I am happy to say that dessert arrived promptly, and it was excellent. My neighbor and I shared ours, so we each got to try two; an amaretto chocolate cake with salted caramel gelato, very decadent and rich and moist; and a sort of apple pie in a box-shaped shell that was wonderfully crunchy and filled with perfectly baked apples, accompanied by blackberry compote. Around the table everyone exclaimed with delight. Any hard feelings about the earlier slow service melted away like the gelato on our tongues. We left with that memory of sweetness, and even though I didn’t need it to fill hunger, I had no regret.

Mirror, Mirror On the Wall

Unlike Snow White’s step-mother, I have never felt the need to ask a mirror, “Who is the fairest of them all?” I’ve never suffered under the delusion of even being in the running. Now, had it been the opposite question, “Who is the least fairest of them all?”, when I was younger I would have believed I’d have a shot at that. I hated seeing myself, and I avoided mirrors as much as possible for that very reason. They never showed me anything I wanted to see, after all. For example, I recall with utmost clarity when I was sixteen and unthinkingly really looked at my face in the mirror – it was the moment I realized I had a double chin. A small one, but still, it was there. It filled me with horror and disgust and shame.

Which is why, when I recently stayed at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, I thought almost immediately, “I would hate it here if I was still heavy.”



The mirrors hit me the minute I walked into the lobby. The entire ceiling is a mirror. Between that and the highly polished, reflective floor, the room felt much larger than it was, and also somewhat surrealistic as I tried to figure out where it began and ended. All the columns were metal and glass, unpitying as they reflected the weariness of thirteen hours of travel on my face, as well as highlighting how out of place I was. Me in my jeans, sneakers, shirt, and backpack (all courtesy of L.L. Bean), compared to the elegant and immaculate attire of the staff and stylish outfits of other guests. I retreated to my room as soon as I could, hoping to escape.

But no, more mirrors. One extended the length of the bathroom’s double-sink, one covered the entire bathroom door, another floor-length one was next to the TV, and three others hung on the walls. I couldn’t escape seeing myself.



It reminded me of how long it took me to own my reflection. For years, if forced to look in a mirror, I focused only on specifics, patting down a bit of hair, perhaps, or adjusting my necklace. I never wanted to look at my whole image because I didn’t want to accept that it was me. And the idea of seeing myself emerging from the shower was the stuff of nightmares.

Even after losing weight, it took me a long time to be comfortable looking in a mirror. I remember a few times unexpectedly glimpsing myself and thinking, “She’s pretty.” It took a concerted effort to change “she” to “I”. What a strange, novel concept – I, pretty? The mirror seemed to think so, even if I still wasn’t in the “fairest of them all” category, and eventually I came to believe it.

Even so, my history with mirrors means that our relationship is an uneasy one at best. I never seek out mirrors, nor do I linger the times that I stand before them. And I can’t imagine I’m the only one with such conflicted feelings. Why, then, so many mirrors in the hotel? Perhaps because Vegas is all about glitz and glamour and image, and nothing deeper. Perhaps the designers assumed that only pretty people would stay in their pretty hotel. Whatever the reason, despite the other amenities in the room, I was not sorry to leave its reflections behind.

The Morals of - Candy?

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I expect to find stores brimming with candy in crimson, particularly various forms of chocolate. I was a little startled, though, to have a piece of red-wrapped candy given to me on the street, and even more so because it had moral strings attached.

I was out for a walk during lunch when a man handed me a slip of paper with a piece of candy stapled to it. I accepted it reflexively and automatically said, “Thank you.”

I got a little suspicious when he replied, “God bless,” so I paused a few steps later to read the note on the paper.

“Pure Love Pledge Candy: True love is the purpose of our lives. By eating this candy I pledge to honor purity in myself and others, to refrain from sexual relations before marriage, and to practice absolute fidelity in marriage.”


I got annoyed. All that pressure and expectation put on a coin-sized piece of candy! To say nothing of the judgment. If I didn’t eat it, did that mean I was a bad, immoral person who condoned adultery? How much worse if I ate it and was still accepting of pre-marital sex? If I was okay with pre-marital sex but not adultery, should I only eat half? What if I didn’t support either of those but just didn’t like hard candy? If I separated the candy from the paper and gave it to someone else, would those judgments go with it?

The questions may seem a bit silly, but the sad truth is that attaching moral values to food is commonplace, even if this particular version was new to me. It’s ever-present, lurking behind every bite. Diets define foods as good and bad, and we are therefore good or bad based on what we eat. A lot of people (myself included) have lately focused on eating local foods; if I’m not careful, it’s easy to look unfavorably on those who eat other types of food. Processed versus unprocessed, vegetarian or omnivore, good or bad types of cholesterol or fat – the list goes on. Is it any wonder that so many of us have conflicted relationships with food?

Meanwhile, the candy and its message remain on my desk. I may eat it, I may not; I’m not sure. What I do know is that I will only eat if and when I am hungry for it, with no moral strings attached.