Found Chinook Salmon by Portland Mike via Flickr. Are meals put together with food stamp money 'found art' too?

So evidently Salon.com ran an article about “Hipsters on Food Stamps“, subtitled “They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?”

Now, the whole reason I have this blog is that I write weekly mini-cookbooks that help people save money on groceries and have fun with their food.

When my wife got food stamps, we used them to supplement our food budget. She got $200, which was $60 more than I budgeted for myself when I was single, but still a totally reasonable amount – if you are planning your meals out carefully. We did, and we were able to keep buying organic, healthy ingredients and making exciting meals out of them. And while we have access to a lot of good food in the Bay Area, the cost of living is not exactly cheap.

It seems that meal planning is not exactly a well-known concept. The article’s tone was simply curious, despite the defensive subtitle, but responses fell into three basic categories: “Buying healthy food is good,” “Buying expensive stuff on food stamps is unwise,” and “[They should] die and clear the field for the rest of us.”

(Yes, that one was a direct quote.)

The usual negative response is less homicidal and more inclined to say that if you can afford to buy organic food with the same allotment that others use for bread or Mountain Dew, you don’t deserve food stamps. As a meal planner, a former recipient, and a firm advocate for both organic food and just plain loving what you eat, let me rant for a minute about why this is wrong.

By day, I work for the employment development dept – the folks who brought you unemployment insurance – and I can tell you for sure that if the government wanted to put in some rules about what you had to buy to deserve food stamps, they would.

Come to think of it, they do: food stamps are already set up so you can only buy food products and food plants with them. If you throw soap or diapers or chamomile plants in your cart too, the cashier gives them back and tells you you have to pay for them separately. Because the computer says so when you pay for them with the EBT card.

It would be no problem at all for them to make the card reject organic free-range salmon, or caviar, or twelve-packs of Mountain Dew. They could say, “Food stamps are strictly for basic pantry staples,” or “produce and protein,” or “farmer’s markets,” or “prepackaged crap that we get lobbyist kickbacks for encouraging you to buy,” or just about anything – but they don’t.

Why? Because like unemployment, that money is there for people in a certain financial situation. Where I am, those rules are mainly that you can only be making 135% of poverty or below, which is extremely low: 135% is around $14k a year for one person.

They don’t require that you be good at handling money, or using it as frugally as you would if it were cash. It’s more for a lot of people than they would spend on food if they had cash. That’s a good thing. Shame and frugality and fear tell us that if we’re poor we should live on beans and rice; it is GOOD that at some point the government steps in and says, “Look, at least have the OPPORTUNITY to have your nutritional needs met so you have the vitamins and fuel you need to function.” (As an amateur nutritionist, I will tell you straight out, beans and rice do not a balanced diet make no matter how many times you read Diet for A Small Planet.)

Salmon Nigiri by Adactio via Flickr

And yeah, for a lot of people, if they were able to handle money or work or the search for either one better, they would not be on unemployment or food stamps. This is not blame or shame. It is GOOD that people who were never taught that stuff growing up have a chance to learn it when they hit bottom instead of being tossed out as hopeless.

I have seen many, many people come in to our career center who send out all-lowercase resumes full of misspellings to jobs they don’t qualify for, or tell me flat-out that they’re not looking for work, or REEK of pot or booze. I’ve known many people on food stamps who had no idea how to handle money, whether that meant they were using their food stamps for food they didn’t need, or that wasn’t enough for them, or that they didn’t read the paperwork and do what they needed to do to stay on food stamps (unemployment too, all day long).

If buying organic food is a bad financial decision of the kind that can eventually land you on food stamps – which I don’t think it is – then it’s a good thing that people have a structured, limited amount of grocery money to learn that from in a very tight financial situation.

If it’s not, then criticism of it seems to me to come from the exact same puritannical, self-denying, fear-based shame-ridden crap that, I also know from much experience, is what lands people in these positions to begin with.

Steingarten rhapsodized about the purpose of salt in cooking. There’s a reason that “salt of the earth” is a compliment; salt “is indispensable to good food and good cooking. It sharpens and defines the inherent flavors of foods and magnifies their natural aromas. Salt unites the diverse tastes in a dish, marries the sauce with the meat, and turns the pallid sweetness of vegetables into something complex and savory. Salt also deepens the color of most fruits and vegetables and keeps cauliflower white. Salt controls the ripening of cheese and improves its texture, strengthens the gluten in bread, and can preserve meat and fish, while transforming its texture. Cooked without salt, most dishes taste dull, lifeless, and lacking in complexity; in some, flavors are unbalanced and sweetness predominates.”

Quite a ringing testimonial. He also quotes American Episcopal priest and author Robert Farrar Capon as saying that “to undersalt deliberately in the name of dietary chic is to omit from the music of cookery the indispensable bass line over which all tastes and smells form their harmonies.”

Dietary chic? Isn’t too much sodium bad for you? Doesn’t it raise your blood pressure and cause heart attacks?

There’s a bit of a link to health crises in there, but not from salt itself: from the highly processed, prepackaged foods that are such a large part of our diets in industrialized parts of the world. They have a lot of salt (as well as a ton of sugar and chemicals, and few nutrients) and so people whose health is affected by the low-nutrient diet with lots of these overprocessed foods are also eating a lot of salt.

But it’s a case of the logical fallacy “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”: “(X happened) after this, therefore it was because of this.” Even eliminating all preprocessed foods and refusing to salt foods leaves us eating two or three times the recommended daily allotment of sodium, because – as Steingarten pointed out – salt is integral in the making of bread and cheese as well as inherent in a lot of vegetables, which take it in as they grow. If salt caused hypertension and heart attacks, we should all be having them. Instead, an estimated 20% of Americans have hypertension – that is, blood pressure at or above 95% of the expected range for them.

Studies have been done around the world, for decades, trying to establish a link between salt intake and blood pressure. The closest they have come is to show that if rats eat a diet that is 8% salt, their blood pressure will rise. To get the human equivalent, eat two cups of salt a day. (Seems to me that if we ate two cups of salt a day, high blood pressure would be the least of our worries.)

There is one real link in the human world. 8% or so of the population has a sensitivity to salt; in these people, salt does lead directly to high blood pressure.

If you have high blood pressure – easily measured at most drugstores – you might be sensitive to salt. You can start testing yourself by measuring your blood pressure, cutting down on salt as much as possible for a week, and measuring it again. For salt-sensitive people, salt means not just high blood pressure but bloating, puffiness, and shortness of breath. On the bright side, it’s pretty awesome to be able to control such a large part of your health by simply avoiding salt.

So for a few of us, salt does cause dietary harm. But for the other 92% of the population, it really is “dietary chic” to avoid it – meaning that we tend to hear that something is bad for some people and assume that it is best avoided by all. It’s another logical fallacy – a “guilty by association” sort of argument. As Steingarten put it, “It’s like making everybody wear eyeglasses just because a few of us need them.”

Second only to knowing that you can use salt comes knowing how to use it. Here are some kitchen-sciency tips:

* Salt your cooking water. Pasta water, water for vegetables, even water for beans – the whole “salt makes beans split and harden” thing is a myth. (In “Heat”, Bill Bryson’s lengthy memoir of working in Mario Batali’s famous kitchens, he mentions that one of their “secret ingredients” is making cooking water ocean-salty. I made mashed potatoes this way last week and they were incredible – almost perfectly salted while cooking, without that slightly bitter aftertaste that you can get from plain salt.)

* Salt before cooking, except fried foods and salads. Okay, salads don’t generally “cook”. But french fries and fresh leafy greens have one big thing in common: they’ll get wilted and soggy if you salt them too early. A little salt tossed on either one before serving adds crunchy zest to the dish. (Chopped fresh herbs also make a great, surprising, and flavorful twist to either one.) Salting meat before you cook, on the other hand, helps the surface caramelize, developing great flavors.

* Salt more if a dish will be served cold. Weird but apparently true. This begs for experimentation. Maybe I’ll go eat a cold and a hot dish of mashed potatoes side by side to see if one of them begs for more seasoning.

* Add salt when food tastes flat. Add both before and after cooking, because it has different effects in each case. If you wait till after you cook to add the salt, you’ll get a bland dish with a salty punch instead of the flavorfully blended ingredients you deserve. When it comes to salting the finished dish, taste it before you salt, because people have wildly different standards for what is too salty.

* Acidify! If you’ve already added salt and your food still tastes like it needs a little something, add an acid. Citrus juice, balsamic vinegar, zest, or a little tomato or tabasco sauce all work.

* Beware over-salting. This most commonly happens at the table, for the reasons given above. If you over-salt at any point and end up with that bitter or just too salty taste, try adding a little starch like rice, potatoes, or pasta; a little cream or vinegar; or a bit of sugar. (The flipside of this is that when cooking a soup with pasta, for example, you have to really amp up the flavors because the pasta will suck a lot of the flavor out of the soup!)

Taste, taste, taste.

And its unspoken crucial counterpart: adjust, adjust, adjust! Like a lot of people, I have a habit of just making the food and hoping it turns out the way it’s supposed to. I even sling in spices by the handful without tasting and adjusting along the way.

But I finally got it. Tasting and changing the flavors as I go is the one step that practically guarantees that I’ll go from a good dish to a great one – or a flat, bland dish to one I want to eat over and over again.

It’s not enough to follow a recipe. Especially for me, because I rarely REALLY follow a recipe in the first place. I think I’m following it, but I don’t have parsley so I’m substituting cilantro, and I have all but one of the spices, and I decided I didn’t need walnuts either because I’m not that into them….

And I know I’m not alone, because whenever I hit up a recipe website that allows comments, I see that most of the commenters are doing the same thing. The standard positive comment on any recipe goes something like, “This is an amazing recipe! I just doubled the butter, used a little less cream, oh and I threw in some pork that I had to use up, and used stock instead of water, and served it on top of pasta, with some marinara on top. Incredible!”

Even if you follow a recipe exactly, your tastes may be different, your variety of spinach or rice different, your chicken larger or your pan smaller than those the author intended. The only solution is to taste as we go, using the recipe as a jumping-off point for our own delight.

So how do you take a recipe from ehh to excellent? You need a good balance of low, middle, and high notes. Another way of looking at this is to think of them as earthy (meat, mushrooms, soy sauce), subtle (vegetables, starches), pungent (spices, garlic, citrus), and amplifying (salt, cream, sugar) flavors. In Thai food, dishes are supposed to balance the five flavors of salty, sweet, spicy, sour, and bitter.

A Maui restaurant called Curry in a Hurry writes about the effects of these flavors on our bodies: “The voluptuous sweetness of vanilla custard is diametrically opposed to the bitter bite of lemon peel; one is soothing, the other is a shock. Your whole body reacts to the difference, which begins on your tongue but continues throughout your body.”

My mental shorthand is that a dish isn’t done until my mouth wants to taste it again and again. It has to generate that “mmm!” response.

You don’t necessarily have to include every kind of flavor in a dish to get that response, but I notice that I most often generate it by making sure a dish is properly salted, and sprinkling in some balsamic vinegar or citrus to brighten the flavors. Bitter, savory, and creamy flavors are often in my main ingredients already; if not (or if I need more) there’s always cream, olive oil, soy sauce, Bragg’s amino acids, chili flakes, olives, preserved lemons, and garlic – just for starters.

Apartment Therapy has a lot of good posts about adjusting seasoning, and some good suggestions about playing with taste:

* “Try each raw vegetable before throwing it in the pot so you see how the flavor and texture changes.
* “If you’re making a salad dressing, try it by itself first and then with a few ingredients from your salad.
* “If you’re adding spices to a soup or sauce, taste the sauce after you add each spice to see how it changes.
* “Taste everything at the beginning, middle, and end of cooking to see how things change.”

Now you too can laugh smugly when Tom Colicchio sternly demands, “Did you taste this before you sent it out?” and yet another cheftestant hangs their head and mumbles “No….”

Coming up in the next couple of weeks: a more in-depth look at salting food just right, and how to extract the maximum flavors from food.

The way I see it is that first of all, healthcare in my country – where many of you readers live – sucks. It’s expensive, it’s hard for many people to get, and even if you do have it, Western medicine tends to suck. Some folks have awesome, excellent, supportive doctors who are aware of powerful alternative treatments that most patients don’t get offered as an option. Yay for some folks!

But if you’re like me, your doctor takes an “It’s probably not a problem” approach to any health questions you might have, reluctant to order expensive tests, to encourage self-diagnosis, to look at problems that there are no easy answers for or that they personally don’t know anything about, or to do anything about anything if you seem to be more or less okay in general.

Then there are the fatphobic doctors. I’ve had one myself; she gave me medication that we both knew would cause my weight to redistribute around the middle – because she said so! – and then, ages and ages into it, poked my belly, professed to be concerned that it was convex instead of concave, and tried to back herself up by pointing at my weight on the BMI chart – at a spot for people much much shorter than I – and pointing out that it was labeled there as something like “borderline obese”. Isn’t doctoring supposed to involve critical thinking?

More troubling, to me, is the fact that many of us are so used to our everyday aches and pains, tiredness, digestive problems, headaches, or brain fog, that we don’t even think there is anything to be done about them. They become our standard for normal health – and sap our energy for making any changes.

I have my own story about that, but I’ll share that as we go along. The nutshell here is that the quiz has a ton of statements, you click the box next to each one that is true for you, and then you put in your email address and hit submit. And then I review it and (within about 48 hours) let you know if it suggests you have any problems – which are mostly nutritional – like brain chemistry imbalances, hypoglycemia, yeast overgrowth, adrenal exhaustion, thyroid problems – and, most importantly, what simple steps you can take to regain balance, joy, and energy.

I had a blast with it. Some of the things it turned up were obvious to me, like that my stressful day job – at the unemployment department! – is messing up my adrenals again. It also revealed what I had hoped, which was that my brain chemistry (amino acids) were out of balance – which I very much wanted to hear, because I felt like I was going a little crazy at work and I wanted there to be something simple I could do to smooth that out. I already do tons of personal work in 12-step programs, and yet suddenly things seemed to be going downhill. To me, that means that there’s something biological in the works.

What surprised me a little was both how out of balance I was, and that I had low thyroid function. That was something I had looked at a little bit in the past, and sort of toyed with doing something about – and then dropped it when the first thing I half-heartedly tried didn’t work. And yet it seemed so obvious this time. The first follow-up test for it is to take your temperature three days in a row and see if it is low – but my body temperature is ALWAYS lower than normal. Oho!

I’ve been taking l-tyrosine for it, plus now an over-the-counter thyroid support pill, and it is helping me have much more energy at work. That’s just in the past couple of days; I can’t wait to see what the long-term benefits are like. I’m adding in GABA (another amino acid) as a stress preventative or stress support. I think it prevents me from going into that adrenalized place where I start judging and getting huffy and buying into negative thoughts and enter a downward spiral of tension. But I will tell you all more as it develops! In the meantime… check out that quiz!