Have you noticed? Fewer and fewer people are putting salt shakers on their dinner tables. Pepper shakers, yes. Salt shakers, absolutely not!
“Nobody uses salt anymore,” says a salt Hater, who is chief among the many residents of Lalaland.
There's an orchestrated movement against everyone who uses salt. The movement is composed of the Haters, the ones who think that bland, tasteless food will earn them points in the afterlife. They dread their lackluster meals, but they go through the motions of eating in hopes that everyone will notice how dutiful they are in their suffering.
Most Haters live in the North because they've never had a chance to taste food the way it was meant to be cooked, which is to say the way it's cooked in the South. They aren't happy unless their string beans are crunchy and their entrees don't look like anything we in the South would dare eat.
The Haters are slowly seizing our constitutional rights to not be hindered in our use of salt by clandestinely smearing the salt industry with slick ad campaigns where beautiful people display their beautiful lives allegedly due to their salt-free diets. Salt lovers are portrayed as overweight losers who sit on couches in their bunkers throughout the day and into the night watching Fox News.
If you use salt, any amount of salt, you're subject to a considerable scolding from the Haters.
“Young man (or old man, as the case may be), I was watching you and you didn't even taste your food before you added more salt,” says the Hater, whom you've never met before but who, out of his allegiance to the Haters' cause, feels completely comfortable spewing his unsolicited propaganda.
The more salt you use, the closer you get to making Homeland Security's suspected salt abuser list. Not only that, it's likely you'll be classified as a felon salter if you've purchased Spam, salt meat or Vienna sausages in the last few years
If you're enjoying your meal, the Haters want you to spit it out.
Unfortunately, the praise and adoration of salt – table salt, Kosher salt, Sel Gris, Gros Sel, flake salt, Fleur de Sel, Hawaiian sea salt, smoked salt, Himalayan salt, black salt, et al – has gradually relegated many of us to being strangers in their own land.
We're misfits, square pegs in a round hole, lone wolves.
If we are seen even holding a salt shaker, we're snarled at with an intensity equal to that of lighting up a cigar or cigarette in an elevator, dissing hip hop music, or refusing to check the box on the federal income tax form indicating that you want $3 of you federal tax to go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.
Some salt lovers have become so bothered by the Haters that they've taken to salting their food on the sly. Many even hide in closets with their food and their salt shakers. Others have replaced hiding their cigarettes under their car seats with hiding their salt shakers.
“You better not use that salt shaker!” the Haters warn. “Children are present.”
“So what? Tell 'em to come over here and I'll salt their ice cream and cupcakes!”
Aaahhhh! The good ol' days when we were encouraged to clean our plates, eat as many fried foods as we could hold, and we were praised if we “piled it on.” Those were the days when there was no shame in having multiple salt shakers on the table, all fat people were jolly, and all teenagers tied the laces on their tennis shoes.
As Younger Daughter and I met over lunch recently, she made a confession.
“Dad, I'm turning into you,” she said as we both fought for the salt shaker. Having overtaken her aging father, she liberally shook it over her lunch's offerings. It was a sight that could only be appreciated by a father who has long hoped she would follow in his footsteps.
Her words were laced with considerable humor as she said, “You've ruined me! Look at who I've become. A saltaholic, a ne'er do well, a person to be scorned by the Haters of the world.”
“Beautiful words,” I said to her amid tears from my joyful heart.
I kept my pride at bay, but I just wanted to stand up and shout right there in the restaurant in front of any Haters who happened to be present.
“Finally, all you Haters! I have received a just reward in spite of decades of increasing abuse from the you. I've fought the good fight, I've finished the race and I've remained faithful to my propagation of the benefits of salt.
“My offspring has seen the light!
“Hallelujah!”
