Salt of the earth.

I am on a low-sodium kick. My ever-expanding middle section is a sign that I am now a human sponge and retaining far more fluid than I really should be.

Salt is the culprit. At home, my nutritionist (yes, I have one of those in my stable of specialists) was concerned that my intake was too low. That was before I came to America.

Everything here is laden with salt – even the sweet stuff. Remarkably, I had to read an article about the amount of salt in the American diet before I realised just how much my intake had increased.

I have subscribed to Meatless Monday’s Eater’s Digest for many, many years now. I never get around to reading all the articles, but there are some that I do (and I always check out the recipes!). Anyway, there was one about the amount of sodium in the food here. Wow. The light bulb really went on.

So, today in the supermarket I checked out the levels of said substance in the foods I was thinking of purchasing. Gulp.

In Oz, the nutrition panel on packaging will give you the volumetrics of a particular ingredient. They tell you that there is a certain amount of something in a food. So there might be X grams of saturated fat, for example.

They do that here too, but they also give you the proportion of the food that is made up of that component. The saturated fat may comprise 10% of the item, say.

Today, I would pick up an item, look at the panel, gasp in shock and put it back down again.

Not one item I picked up, in the first instance, had less than 20% sodium.

I kid you not.

These were of course processed foods, like bread and cheese, tinned tomatoes, breakfast cereals, chocolate, ice cream and so on and so forth. Things that probably have exactly the same amount of sodium as their Australian equivalents.

And they were at the cheaper end of the spectrum too, (I am trying to live on AUD in a USD economy) which usually means a greater salt content as a matter of course. It was just the bluntness of the figures.

It is such a good way of setting out the information that I might have to get in a few politicians’ ears when I return…

In the meantime, just to reassure anyone who may still be reading, I made sure not to leave the store with anything that contained more than 10% sodium. I make no claims for the fresh vegetables – they had no panels on them!

ttfn,

S.

A return to the usual programming.

Okay, I’m going to have a fire free day.

No looking at the news, no reading the newspapers on-line and NO reading my book on bushfire safety.

I was beginning to get overwhelmed by it all. Could you tell?

So, I am doing delightfully prosaic things like … laundry and ironing, grocery shopping, paying bills (gotta love on-line banking), and making macaroni and cheese in my mini-crock pot.

Now Mac and Cheese is not something that would normally feature in my diet. I’m not a big cheese eater at the best of times, unless it’s Brie and then all bets are off. However, it does seem to be an American staple and I’m succumbing to the sway of advertising.

Or does making it from scratch not qualify as ’succumbing’? I’m not sure.

Anyway, I must admit that I am still not used to shopping in American supermarkets. My local HEB (Howard E. Butt, for the curious amongst us) store has things on its shelves that I would never have imagined.

They have little jars of pickled pigs’ feet. I’m not kidding. There are cans of yams in syrup – pronounced surrup – and milk cartons full of pre-scrambled eggs.

It’s all very foreign.

The mince, er, ground meat is all packaged in sausage-like plastic thingies, not trays and cling wrap like ‘back home’ and the bacon is either raw or cooked. I hadn’t realised that Australian bacon is sold cooked-ish until I bought some bacon here and discovered that it was really, truly, definitively raw. It’s the selling of thoroughly cooked bacon that blows my mind.

There also seems to be a wholegrain alternative to everything, including corn chips, but the wholegrain corn chips are made out of wheat.

Let me know if I’m going too fast, okay?

The evaporated milk that I bought for my mac and fromage has added Vitamin D. I don’t know why. Have surveys found that most users of this product are also Vitamin D deficient? The cheese is … odd. A lot of it is orange.

This is just wrong. At first I thought it had something to do with cows grazing near nuclear power plants or something, but my good friend Alton Brown from Good Eats, tells me that some time ago dairies found that if they added beta-carotene to cheese people bought more of it, so it stuck.

Americans think this is normal.

I bought a ‘Mexican style’ four cheese mix for my macaroni, purely because none of it was orange and therefore I had no extra-added carrots. The package tells me that it is made with 2% milk (!!!!!!) and has added calcium. Um. Oh dear. How can you make cheese from just 2% of milk?

If it was made out of all milk it wouldn’t need added calcium. Or would it?

Argh!

I have also purchased a package of baby cut carrots. I have since discovered that these are not cut, baby carrots, but full grown carrots that have been cut in such a way as to resemble baby carrots.

My head hurts.

ttfn,

S.