Too Much Salt

[Matthew 5v13]
"You are the salt of the earth..."

Lately, I've been sharing a meal with a friend of mine every morning in the early hours of the day. We wake up and do some sort of excuse for exercise and, before heading off to class and work, we feast.

On oatmeal and eggs.

Every single morning.


Now, I'd like to say that I'm a decent cook, though not quite a chef. Granted, I've only been cooking for around 2 years, but I've learned a lot and have put some good stuff on the table.

So eggs and oatmeal have began to come pretty easily. I've discovered some "secrets"* to them that, I'd like to think, sets them apart and, after making them every day for the past couple weeks, I seemed to have it down.

On this particular day, however, we were running a little late leaving no time to sit down at home and eat our gourmet breakfast so we packed it up and took it to class with us. We sit down right as the lecture is beginning, he with his bowl and I with my tupperware full of eggs and oatmeal mixed together [which actually has the potential to be quite good], and we take the first bite...

...and then we stop.

Because it was disgusting.

So I sat there, full of shame and humility that I screwed up the easiest of breakfasts, and then began to search for what went so wrong. And it all came back to an interesting situation.

The problem with the food is that it was too salty. Like ocean water salty. And it wasn't just the oatmeal or just the eggs, they were both like biting into a piece of rock salt. I began processing the steps I took in preparing the food that morning, trying to discover what was different and, on the surface, there was nothing. I did everything in the exact same rhythm that I had always done them.

Yet there was a minute detail that made the salty breakfast make sense.

I typically cook with kosher salt.** It has a larger grade, but a much thinner substance to it. Of all the learning I have done with food over the past couple of years, cooking with kosher salt has probably been the most formative tool I've ever stumbled upon. It absorbs into foods better, it is lighter and doesn't overwhelm whatever the main ingredients are, and, because of its size, it is easier to control while incorporating into a dish.

But the day before, we had run out of kosher salt.

Meaning I was left with baking salt.

Great for bread or pie (see above) or cookies, but not really useful for anything else.

So I have the oatmeal bubbling up in a small quart size pot on the back burner of my stove and, before I added the oatmeal, I shook some salt in the boiling water to allow the oatmeal to absorb it while it cooked. And then I have my eggs going on the front burner, using my particular technique that I think makes superior scramble eggs than the traditional method, and as they are finishing, I dust the fluffy yellow meal with salt and pepper and a bit of chives.

The problem is that I used the same amount of salt as I typically use when I have kosher salt. And as I was sitting in class I instantly realized the tremendous error I had just made. Because, remember, kosher salt is much thinner  -  one fourth thinner. The density of kosher salt is a quarter that of baking salt. Meaning that my oatmeal and eggs, because I used the same amount that I typically do, had four times as much salt as they should have.

There is this point in a teaching Jesus is giving where he is telling his disciples what it looks like to live in God's Kingdom, in this Way they were created to live, and he is telling them that to do so, they have to be like salt to the earth.

And salt was incredibly important to ancient cultures. It was their main source of seasoning. It preserved different foods. It was used medicinally and in housekeeping. It is a beautiful picture to see that when we follow Jesus we are being salt to the world  -  that we are adding flavor to the earth. And I am all for that. We need to keep resonating with this. But a lot of times I hear a sort of forceful charge, especially in terms of evangelization, that is a lot like using table salt when we ought to be using kosher salt and we pour it on the eggs and oatmeal and we end up with a dish that resembles the taste in your mouth after you accidentally swallow ocean water. We talk about this way of Jesus and its movement in the world, but sometimes, the way we push this story out to the ends of the earth is a bit like how I made those eggs and oatmeal and we need to be aware of that.

I think it is adamant that we need to be salt in the world. We need to season and preserve and give flavor to the earth.

But we also need to make sure that the food remains good food, that we don't ruin something by using too much.

Because it is possible to have too much salt.











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[Notes]

*I'd be happy to share my egg secrets with you


*Salt, one of the main ingredients used throughout the world, is a rock. This thing we consume every single day is a rock.


*There is a lot more to the conversation on salt and its differences, especially the role of iodized salt (typically found in table salt and baking salt), that is worthy of discussion, but just not here.
I've also seen the rise of a lot of "gourmet" salt that is just kind of bogus. Maybe this should be a whole other writing...