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Great read! I sent this story to my girlfriend who works as a lunch lady in a small West Texas town for the last 10 years. She said they are still able to prov

• Auracle 11mo ago
  I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
  • speed_spread 11mo ago
    Because it conditions your expectations of tasting salt everywhere, which is what industrial food provides. Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
    • poink 11mo ago
      It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
      • sevg 11mo ago
        > the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt Chefs use lots of salt to optimize for taste rather than health. (And restaurants don’t have to declare how much salt was in your meal.) That’s why it’s a bad idea to eat out and/or get take-away every day. Your salt intake would be extremely high.
        • userbinator 11mo ago
          Look at the graph of life expectancy vs. average sodium intake by country, and you may be surprised.
          • sevg 11mo ago
            Read this and you may be surprised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
            • userbinator 11mo ago
              That's exactly what I'm implying.
          • bitdivision 11mo ago
            https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351135/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351135/ Correlated with life expectancy
            • userbinator 11mo ago
              Thank you, that's a newer study but the same conclusions.
        • poink 11mo ago
          Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing? It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
          • sevg 11mo ago
            > It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt Your first comment that kicked off this sub-thread missed the context. We’re talking about school food kids eat every day, not occasional restaurant meals. So the appeal to authority of “best chefs in the world” doesn’t make sense here. My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
      • dyauspitr 11mo ago
        The best chefs in the world generally don’t make healthy food, they make food that tastes good. High end restaurants usually use a lot of salt and butter.
    • jandrewrogers 11mo ago
      An enormous amount of traditional food from around the world has a lot of salt in it. Salt is not a modern invention. For example, humans have been eating olives for tens of thousands of years. Olives contain and require prodigious amounts of salt to taste good, usually in the form of seawater.
      • buu700 11mo ago
        High salt intake is only an issue on a high-carb diet or with inadequate hydration. Otherwise, consuming adequate salt/electrolytes can actually be a bit of a chore. Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
        • jandrewrogers 11mo ago
          Salt pills were a thing for people working in hot climates. The military requires electrolyte augmentation in such conditions. These days we use fancier electrolyte blends but it is still largely salt. If you are on a multi-day fast it is the primary thing you need to replenish aside from water. I do some pretty serious backcountry trekking in the summer. You can feel when your electrolytes are low after several hours, the signs aren’t particularly subtle. Fortunately, you can slam a few grams of electrolytes and you’re back to normal in a matter of minutes. Our bodies can handle it, humans largely developed in regions where electrolyte depletion was a risk. The amount of salt you have to consume to regulate your electrolytes in environments with high electrolyte loss dwarf what you are going to consume in typical food, processed or not. The idea that the average human is hyper-sensitive to consuming too much salt is preposterous. Even animals gravitate toward salt licks.
          • buu700 11mo ago
            Agreed. The idea that salt is merely a flavoring with negative side effects has always struck me as indicative of an unhealthy relationship with food. It aligns with a broader Calvinistic tendency to view pleasure and harm as inherently linked, which is fortunately at odds with reality.
    • almosthere 11mo ago
      What most people don't get is that if you're salting food during the cooking phase it requires a crap ton. If you just sprinkle it on after it's cooked, it's so much spicier and takes so much less. Cake and eat it.
    • khannn 11mo ago
      It takes something like a week to acclimate to lower salt intake. Not hard at all, it's like coming down on caffeine or weed. Salt is very important in pasta to keep the shape of the noodle. Whole wheat pasta alone is a giant step up in health outcomes, especially considering school kid's famous preference for McD's, which has a ton of sodium. I also want to link the John Stewart rant about Olive Garden not salting the pasta, but can't find it. Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
    • dyauspitr 11mo ago
      It’s hard. Salt is kind of magical. My night time snack is some vegetable, air fried with some salt, olive oil and some lemon. It’s not too much salt but I would have a hard time eating it without the salt.
    • forgotoldacc 11mo ago
      Ideally it should taste good. But elementary school lunch isn't exactly fine dining. Some shortcuts are taken and kids are often picky eaters. Salted vegetables are a step up from dinosaur shaped nuggets and pizza, so it's a better middle ground than unsalted food that goes straight to the trash.
    • jader201 11mo ago
      > Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt. - Good - Low salt - Cheap Pick two. (For the most part. There are exceptions, but not many, especially when it comes to school lunch food.)
    • chongli 11mo ago
      Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland. They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is life.
      • thaumasiotes 11mo ago
        > They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
        • chongli 11mo ago
          That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's also important to note that prior to the invention of refrigeration, salt was vital as a preservative for meats. Soldiers on the march were perfectly capable of hunting any game they came across but the meat would spoil if they had no salt to preserve it. Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
          • deleted 11mo ago
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          • hollerith 11mo ago
            You are not making much of a case. For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
  • hexbin010 11mo ago
    I'd have eaten way more salad as a kid if my mum didn't treat salt as if it were the devil itself. There is nothing enticing about raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate. A pinch of salt and pepper, small amount of olive oil, oregano and lemon? Now we're talking.
    • tenthirtyam 11mo ago
      > raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to. We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
      • hexbin010 11mo ago
        What made you go without salt? Have you seen any major health benefits? We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off. Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
  • mschuster91 11mo ago
    > It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues. "Low salt" was a fad in the 2010's, it cropped up everywhere. It's not particularly her fault for going with the mainstream of the time.
    • Auracle 11mo ago
      Yes, but it's not like we didn't know who the people were that should (maybe) avoid salt and that it didn't matter to anyone else. If she didn't bother to consult with at least one doctor or dietician that's absolutely her fault. Gluten-free was also a fad there for a while (for people that didn't actually have celiac disease), should she have done that too?
  • trollbridge 11mo ago
    Low-salt was a fad for a while in defining what “healthy food” is, much like low fat, low saturated fat, and high-carb were for quite a while, and “plant based” still largely is.
  • deleted 11mo ago
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  • m463 11mo ago
    low-salt was a sign of poverty in roman times... "The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt
  • xhkkffbf 11mo ago
    If people develop a taste for it as kids, they have trouble dialing it back later when they do have hypertensive issues.
• bell-cot 11mo ago
  > It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in ... True. OTOH, - You could expand that "Nutrition plays such a huge role..." logic into saying that schools should also provide broad medical coverage for the students, and clothing, and de facto parenting, and ... In practice - meals are a limited remit, it's relatively obvious if it's being done poorly, kids eating together is socialization (obviously part of a school's job), and "hungry children" pushes enough emotional buttons that subsidized school lunches are relatively well accepted. Though I've seen quite a few stories about modern-day public school teachers being quietly expected to serve (suffer) as "whatever it takes" unpaid social workers / therapists / family counselors for their students - basically because "somebody needs to", and teachers are convenient victims for social pressures and non-classroom problems. - There is far too little connection between "money goes to schools" and "schools are competently managed". Modern education attracts way too many well-intended ignorant ideologues (Mrs. Obama was merely one of an endless host), "consultants", "experts", grifters, and worse. Vs. interest in competent oversight of schools seems nearly non-existent. When was the last time you saw detailed local press coverage of how well a school board was managing the students-and-teachers basics of education?