There are a lot of things we miss out on. Such as salt. We try to balance our food as much as possible considering our wishes and what’s available in reasonably healthy foodstuff. Salt is not on our food list. As I explained earlier, most foods contain enough natural salts to get you through the day. Except when you’re a bricklayer and have to do hard strenuous labor that makes you sweat and swear a lot.
Sometimes we go out for lunch. We always ask our food to be prepared without salt. Sometimes that’s impossible because the food has been prepared in advance. This is usually the case with dressings of any kind or marinated foods. So we try to avoid these.
As I observed before, Spaniards have totally different attitudes towards salt. Yesterday we were in a restaurant and we enjoyed the food but had to wait a little bit longer between courses. So we had plenty of time to watch the customs of the other diners.
As soon as the big plates with lots of food were served, they grabbed for the salt shaker and shook, and shook, and shook … On the salad (?), on the fries (??) and on the fish (???). How does your food taste when you put that amount of salt on it? Exactly: salty. Remember Pavlov.
So when people after lunch got off the table, we tried to guess what heavy profession they executed to be able to assess what justified their abundant salt use. Let’s put it mildly, they all looked a bit big. And big in this case does not signify tall. You could put it this way, they looked short and stocky. They all resembled the bricklayer. The problem is, there were few differences between men and women. So laying bricks must be an emancipated business in Spain.
Whatever, without exception, they all enjoyed their lunch and their company. As did we.
^tvo
I once read a great anecdote about Edison. Whenever he thought a candidate would be right for a job, he would take him/her to a restaurant for a soup and a salad. Whoever put salt in their soup without tasting it beforehand didn’t get the job!