The great Laurie Colwin, on learning to cook and eat without salt:
After a few weeks I felt I had gotten the hang of my new regime. I had discovered saltless bread, smoked mozarella, green peppercorns and fresh sage. I felt I might venture out into the real world for a meal. I did, and I was shocked. How incredibly salty everything was! A bite of ham seemed almost inedible. A Chinese meal brought a buzz to my head and tears to my eyes.
She goes on to describe how cooking without salt made her more sensitive to the other flavors of food, much like a blind person who develops an especially acute sense of hearing after losing his or her sense of sight. Although I'm addicted to salt, and can't imagine cooking without it, there's evidence to suggest that the phenomenon Colwin describes is real.
As I note in the Escoffier chapter of my book, our sense of taste is extremely plastic. The best documented example of this "peripheral plasticity" concerns the chemical androstenone, a steroid that occurs in urine and sweat and has been proposed as a human pheromone. When it comes to smelling androstenone, humans fall into three separate categories. The first group simply can't smell it. Those who can smell androstenone are either: (1) very sensitive smellers, who can detect less than 10 parts per trillion and find the odor extremely unpleasant (it smells like urine); and (2) smellers who are not only less sensitive but perceive the odor in oddly pleasant ways, such as 'sweet', 'musky' or 'perfume-like'. What makes these differences in sensory experience even more interesting is that experience modulates sensitivity. Subjects repeatedly exposed to androstenone become more sensitive to it, thanks to feedback from the brain. This feedback causes the stem cells in our nasal passages to create more androstenone sensitive odor receptors. The new abundance of cells alters the sensory experience. What was once a perfume becomes piss.
Other studies have shown that the regeneration of taste receptors is highly dependent on dietary factors. When animals were put on sodium-restricted diets, they became much less sensitive to sodium, suggesting that fewer salty taste receptors were being created. (Of course, this means that you can develop more taste receptors for other kinds of gustatory stimuli, so you become more sensitive to all those non-salty flavors.) Interestingly, the sodium taste receptors that remained became supersensitive, which might explain why Colwin eventually found salty foods so unappetizing. The anatomy of her tongue had been altered by her diet: we really are what we eat.
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Really interesting! It makes me wonder what we're doing to ourselves with the large amount of high-sodium foods we eat, as well as high-sugar (or aspartame, whatever will give our sweet receptors a kick). Does this have anything to do with the way we appreciate (or don't) foods from other cultures, and the way the feel about ours?
Oooooh, i might have to try this. I don't actually own NaCl salt, but neither do i avoid bread or other prepared foods with salt among the ingredients. I wonder how much this strains the budget, however?
A sweet digression. Stop eating pastries and milk chocolate etc for a short while and most proffered desserts will taste too sweet and may be easily declined. This doesn't work for a tart, homemade lemon meringue pie, with its citric and salty effects, however.
It's almost local apple and therefore apple pie season here in NE: bake a pie with extra apples and a quarter the amount of sugar the recipe calls for and really enjoy the fruit. Retrain that palate without pain, with substitution rather than deprivation.
Stop eating oversweet foods and you will stop wanting them - it's the first piece of advice I give to frustrated dieters.
I haven't purchased actual salt in over 20 years. I don't bake much, but even when I do I just don't add the salt. I just can't imagine people actually putting salt on food.
Just to add to Luci's point:
I have experienced a reduced desire for sweet foods after reducing my consumption for a few weeks. I cut out both sugar and sugar substitutes.
After reading about several studies that show that consumption of high volumes of both regular and diet sodas is associated with higher rates of obesity, it occurs to me that soda drinkers may be keeping themselves highly addicted to "sweet" - which would account for the high obesity rates even among consumers of diet sodas.
thanks
thanks