A little salt in the wound

I love to cook, one reason why I started blogging recipes on Eats@Home.

And I love to watch cooking shows on the Food network. Two of my favorites are Bobby Flay and Guy Fieri, and I occasionally like to catch Emeril and Rachel Ray.

I also love my daughter Elizabeth and respect her opinions very much.

Thus the problem when it comes to salt: Flay, Fieri and other chefs have recipes that call for salt because of its properties during cooking enhance the flavor of food; Elizabeth abhors salt, doesn't cook with it, doesn't want to see her Dad cook with it because of potential health consequences such as high blood pressure.

Well, it seems the food industry more and more is coming down on Elizabeth's side.

On the one side are the chefs who use salt to enhance the cooking process because of the way it can draw flavor out of food. So when I watch the cooking shows I see Flay and Fieri and Emeril and Ray add salt to their recipes at several steps along the way. And I'm surprised sometimes to see just how much salt they are literally tossing into their recipes.

On the other side is Elizabeth, a doctor of physical therapy who is passionate about good health, especially as it applies to food and its affect on the body. She has learned about salt and what it can to the body in terms of high blood pressure and contributing to being overweight, and how a lousy diet can lead to obesity and diabetes. She's seen the effects in her work as a physical therapist and she's loath to see it happen to her family, especially to her Dad who would rather dive head first into the joys of cooking and eating rather than worry about the perils of cooking and eating.

A recent USA Today article says that the focus in food has been on trans fats, but that the new focus is likely to be salt.

Some of the biggest food makers in the country, including Campbell and ConAgra, are introducing foods with lower and lower amounts of sodium.

According to the article, about 660 products claiming "reduced sodium" were introduced in 2007 versus 449 in 2006. Through the first nine months of this year, 402 were introduced.
"High sodium content is the single greatest problem in the American diet," Michael Jacobson, executive director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told USA Today. "It's welcome that some companies are lowering sodium, but what's really needed is a government initiative."

According to a National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute study cited by the newspaper, about 150,000 lives could be saved annually if Americans cut sodium intake in half. The average daily sodium intake now is 4,000 milligrams — roughly twice the government's recommended amount for most people.

With policy makers and health officials going after food with too much trans fat and too many calories, it seems that salt may be next on the public policy hit list.

If you assume 2,000 calories is recommended, then consider a frozen DiGiorno For One Garlic Bread Crust Supreme Pizza has 1,450 milligrams of salt.

Elizabeth's point -- as evidenced by the DiGiorno example -- is not to add anymore salt into a diet that gets plenty of salt already from the packaged food we eat. Don't add salt to the potential wound of ill health.

But I come at it from the view that I eat not to just to fuel the body but because I also enjoy everything about food -- shopping for it, preparing it and eating it.

Eating is an emotional pleasure, not just a physical necessity. So on occasion I will enhance the pleasure with some extra salt.Certainly not as much as Bobby, Guy, Emeril and Rachel, but not as little as Elizabeth. Everything in moderation.

Just don't call me late for dinner

There's some chat in the blogosphere about what to call Baby Boomers as we get up there in age.

We were the Hippies, and while I guess there are some of them leftover today from the 1960s I wouldn't continue to ascribe the term to those of us who replaced our tie dyes and Nehru jackets for department store ties and suit jackets.

We were the Yuppies -- the young, upwardly-mobile professionals -- of the early 1980s as we got jobs, had children and became consumers at an unprecedented rate of material consumption.

And as we are graduating to becoming Empty Nesters, as our Yuppie-bred children are leaving the house for college and jobs, and Retired, as some of leave long-term careers for that great unknown known as retirement.

But what will we become?

Tweens are tweens, teens are teens, young adults are young adults, middle age adults are middle age adults. But will older Baby Boomers accept themselves as “seniors”? How about "geezers"?

Not likely, except in the pejorative.

Even AARP wasn't comfortable being saddled with its image. It turned 50 this year. And after being known as the American Association of Retired Persons for a long time it is now known as AARP. Just AARP, an acronym that doesn't mean anything.

Rita Robison, a consumer specialist blogger in Seattle, posed the question in a recent post: "Baby boomers? Older people? Senior citizens? Elders? What would you like to be called in your middle and later years?"

Journalists are thinking about it. Having been one -- and still being one to some extent -- I can say that reporters look for language shortcuts to describe something. The current economic crisis, which is vast in its underlying causes, is simplified as being caused by "toxic home loans." So they -- we -- need a shorthand term to describe this vast generation of Baby Boomers.

I've used Boomers in my writing, though it isn't all that elegant.

According to Robison, the Journalists Exchange on Aging developed a survey on the question of what to call Baby Boomers. The results:

• Top choice – older;
• Second choice – senior, but not for people younger than 65;
• Boomers O.K. – but not baby boomers;
• Mid-life and middle aged – to describe the younger people in the age group;
• Those over 50 and people 65 and up – to describe certain age groups;
• Avoid the word "still" as in still driving, still walking, still alive;
• Avoid elderly, senior moment, geezers, and oldsters.

My vote is for elder. I can see it now: Paul the Elder.

An elder is valued for his/her wisdom and, in many cultures, holds a position of reverence and responsibility within the community.

I'm very happy with being called Dad and, when the time comes, whatever term my grandchildren apply to me as their grandfather. I know the term sonofabitch will also be applied to me on occasion in the future as it has been in the past, and that's fine too.

You see, when you're an elder, you don't get bothered by that stuff anymore.

The rhythm I need

I need a certain rhythm to my life.

I like it that life has a beat to it. The beat of music helps me when I run. There is a cadence to the world around me that I find comforting, and it's brought on lately by this currently dreary transition from autumn to winter.

It couldn't be more dreary out there on this particular day. A front with low gray clouds and rain is moving into the region. The trees are long, long past their peak of colors; what leaves are left shudder on the branches with each puff of wind. My lawn needs raking, my gutters need cleaning and the patio furniture needs to be put away. All in all, not the prettiest scene outside my window.

Yet, as I drove on my errands this morning I was comforted by the otherwise glum surroundings. I was glad we are where we are in the seasonal transition. It means there will be snow and cold. There will be Thanksgiving and Christmas. There will be spring and Easter. There will be summer and the promise of hot days and the opportunity to surf again. And we'll loop around again to fall and the first taste of Oktoberfest beer from Sam Adams and the colors and the days just like today.

I have a stepdaughter doing an internship in Los Angeles, where there is no cadence to the seasons or even the weather, really. It's pretty much the same every day, she says. Born and bred in New Hampshire, she misses the color change of fall, even misses the fact that her campus in New York State has already had a little snow. I'm like her. I need the change to look forward to.

I find the rhythm by what I load and unload into the trunk of the car, depending on the season. The golf clubs and golf gear stay in the longest as I start to play as early as I can in the spring then through the summer and as late into the fall as possible. Then the golf stuff comes out, a portable snow shovel, fleece blanket and portable ski rack go in.

I find rhythm by figuring out who is where and who is with whom for the holidays. Between current spouses, ex-spouses, children, step-children, mom, mother-in-law, brothers and sisters and various in-laws and out-laws, there are a lot of travel plans to review.

I find rhythm in the rites that define us as families: The birthdays of the people I love, the college graduation in May of my son David and stepdaughter Eileen, Mother's Day and Father's Day, and the family celebrations we pull together if for no other reason than we're all in the same place at the same time.

The snow will fall soon and will need plowing and shoveling. It will get bitterly cold and I'll listen to the furnace burn through the propane. The spring rains will come and potentially flood the basement if the sump pumps can't keep up.

But so will the school vacation ski week in February and the college hockey tournaments in March and the first swing of the golf club in April and the first cut of the grass.

I look forward to it all.

It's all over

Here's what makes me the most happy about Tuesday's election: It's over. Finally.

I reached my saturation point for campaign politics about six weeks ago, maybe even longer ago. It all became such a blur after a while. And it wasn't just the politics of the presidential campaign. It went right on down the line to U.S. senator, U.S. representative, every one of them. Heck, if there had been a race for hall monitor at the local elementary school I would have had my fill of that one too.

Students of history will tell you that divisive and derisive campaigns are just part of our democratic process. I think the difference this time around is how "viral" it became through blogs and web sites and emails.

It was the politics of half truths and lies run amok. Innuendo was accepted as fact. A lie was accepted as truth. And the viral virility of the innuendos and lies was played out on both sides of the aisles, by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, antis and pros. As a former boss used to say, "No one's skirts are clean in this one." That Barack Obama was a Muslim. That John McCain was a raging unstable maniac.

We listened to too many absolutes -- that an issue like taxes or privatizing Social Security -- was seen in black and white, when it fact in politics every issue is colored in shades of gray.

It all started to become white noise. It was like what Charlie Brown and the Peanuts characters on television heard when a parent talked: "Wah, wha ... wha-wha-wha."

I saw and heard more ads that told me why I shouldn't vote for someone than I saw ads telling me why I should vote for someone.

No candidate is ever as bad as the opponent describes. Nor is any candidate as good as they describe themselves.

We are imperfect as a people; we are imperfect as candidates.

But campaigns tend to stretch imperfections so far that they become wholly distorted. Take the case of Republican U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole campaigning for reelection in North Carolina against Democrat Kay Hagan.

Dole's campaign aired 30-second advertisement showing clips of members of an atheist advocacy group. It shows shadowy footage of someone, supposedly Hagan, at a fundraiser at the home of a man who serves as an adviser to the group and the voice of a woman, Hagan's we are led to believe, who declares, "There is no God!"

Hagan is a Presbyterian church elder who teaches Sunday school. Dole lost the election.

Here is a woman, wife of former Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole, with a wonderful political resume who lost her way. Her moral compass went awry, she went beyond the pale, and we see it time and time again in campaigns.

What to do about it?

Part of the problem was the fact that it was the longest campaign ever, starting back in early 2007. But it's unlikely we'll ever mandate that an election season be limited to -- say -- six months.

For now, take a deep breath. Relax. Go to your happy place. Four years will roll around again soon enough.