It’s My Lot to be Salt-Obsessed
By Michael Antonoff
Please don’t take this with a grain of salt, but online nutrition labels have challenged my cultural identity. Cuisine always trumped religion in my house, but now I worry that a part of me has been ripped away, never to return. Let me explain.
Due to their high sodium content — and the fact that I’ve been forced onto a non-salt diet — lox, pickled herring or any smoked fish for that matter is suddenly off limits. My quest to find the perfect whitefish salad has ended prematurely. Bottled gefilte fish? Forget it. I’ve ceased getting takeout from the few Jewish delis left. I can no longer eat pastrami or any processed meat. Even kosher chicken is questionable.
I know this from reading nutrition labels.
Before they went online, such labels were easy to ignore. They hide on packaging. In the supermarket you must twirl a box five or six times to find them. Then, you need a magnifying glass to read them.
None of this would have mattered if I hadn’t suffered a stroke three months ago. It was my first stroke, and I wouldn’t have known that slurred speech and imbalance should be taken seriously. My wife and my physician insisted I go to the hospital, where neurologists determined “with 100 percent certainty” that I suffered a pontine stroke. Time to change my diet. That meant studying before swallowing.
In the past, if I’d read a nutritional label at all, it was to check out the fiber and sugar content. Maintaining a routine bowel movement and warding off diabetes were important goals. Salt wasn’t a concern. Can you believe there are 600 mg of sodium per 2 oz. (two thin slices) of lox? And I thought the problem was the fatty schmear.
But now, being forced to stay home because of the pandemic and my recovery, I find myself ordering groceries online. Before adding an item to the purchase list, I study its nutritional components on screen out of the way of shoppers reaching for something from a shelf I might be blocking.
The ease of digital browsing over in-store shelf slumping is enabled by increasingly popular grocery delivery services and their fancy websites. Nutrition information is always in the same place, and enlarging it takes one click on your computer or a quick spread of fingers on your phone’s screen.
You must understand that suddenly forbidden foods are ones I’ve loved all my life. They not only provided sustenance and comfort but were a subject of banter. I’d break the ice with: “Who has the best whitefish salad in Manhattan?” then go into a dissertation about relative flakiness, sweetness, and mayo makeup. Sunday mornings weren’t Sunday mornings without bagels and lox. It wasn’t possible to decouple Hanukah from latkes or St. Patrick’s Day from corned beef. Food before church or country.
So, you can see how adverse nutritional information on my handheld device claiming that all my favorite comfort foods would hasten my death just might cause a degree of cognitive dissonance. To eat or not to eat? These same hands that hold this phone also feed my face. How could I look at them in the mirror? Information can be so inconvenient.
Experts say that too much salt leads to high blood pressure and that can lead to a stroke. Why take a chance says everyone I know except the lady behind the counter at the smoked fish store.
Call me obsessive, but post-stroke my behavior has changed. I cannot stop myself from clicking on nutrition labels in a quest to cut salt from my diet. From all that reading, here’s what I’ve learned about nutrition labels and the manufacturers who create them:
· To counter a competitor splashing Low Sodium on its bottled marinara sauce, a manufacturer will cut a serving in half, hoping that customers won’t notice they’ve tilted the playing field. These lowlifes who manipulate the nutritional label don’t realize retirees like me are sitting at our computers, with nothing to do except compare their claims.
· Kosher Salt contains an astounding 590 mg of sodium in a quarter of a teaspoon. Are my own people trying to kill me? Then I noticed that the sodium content in non-Kosher salt is the same. What a relief!
· If the vegetable juice is extremely high in sodium, the same manufacturer will come out with another product labeled Low Sodium, even though at half the original content, one glass still gives you more sodium than you’d possibly need for the day.
· Just one slice of Levi’s Real Jewish Rye Bread contains 230 mg of sodium, meaning a 2-slice sandwich contains 460 mg — and that’s without the pastrami.
· One serving of Manischewitz Potato Pancake Mix contains 500 mg of sodium. If you eat all the pancakes made from the mix, they add up to an astonishing 3,500 mg. Luckily, we don’t put our latkes between two slices of rye bread.
· Empire Kosher Chicken Breasts contain seven times the salt as Katie’s Best Breasts. Is it the koshering that adds salt? Pre-stroke, I’d choose Empire. Now, I’m more willing to taste chicken from someone who likely thinks rabbinical supervision means tutoring a boy for his bar mitzvah rather than supervising the slaughter of poultry. (See comparative Nutrition Facts below.)
I’m indebted to my wife. She threw out all the canned goods in our pantry on account of too much sodium. Also, she knows I love gefilte fish, but just one piece from a jar can contain 255 mg of salt. Eat all six pieces — without the gel — and you’re looking at 66 percent of the recommended daily salt intake for an average adult consuming 2,000 calories. My wife now prepares home-made gefilte fish without salt, hand-sculpting these delicacies from branzini and tilapia ground by the local fishmonger.
I won’t say that online nutrition labels have saved my life. But I will say that they’ve made me a wiser shopper in helping put the kibosh on excess salt. Also, despite being born into a family who wore their lox on their sleeves, I’m finally accepting the fact that I cannot look back; moderation is the way to deal with all things salty.
