Cheez-its that taste medicinal. Metallic cornflakes. Eggo waffles that remind you of “stale straw”.  Meat that calls to mind cardboard or damp dog hair.

If the recent government effort to reduce salt in processed foods is successful, this is what we will have to eat.  Or so says the food industry according to an astonishing front page article in yesterday’s New York Times (free subscr reqd).

Compared to reducing fat and sugar, for which substitute ingredients have been found, eliminating salt and sodium is turning out to be a major challenge for these companies.  Why is that?  It turns out that without salt – lots and lots of salt – we eaters might discover that the stuff that is being sold to us as delicious, tantalizing and even healthy “food” is really nothing of the sort.

It’s a marketing problem.  Without salt to hide the true nature of these products, we might not buy them.   Why not?  It turns out they don’t taste very good:

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

“Salt really changes the way that your tongue will taste the product,” Mr. Kepplinger said. “You make one little change and something that was a complementary flavor now starts to stand out and become objectionable.”

Let me be clear:  I cook, and I use salt in my cooking.  Salt is about as natural a substance as you can find.  There is nothing wrong with salt – in reasonable amounts.  It is a useful seasoning.  It’s an important preservative, going back to Bible times.  Salt was so common that it makes an appearance in Jesus parables and his followers are even told that we are “the salt of the earth“.  Salt is one of the things that you must have for your body to function normally.

On the other hand, we also know that too much salt causes all kinds of problems, most significantly, hypertension or high blood pressure.  Again from the Times article:

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the question here is not “to salt or not to salt”.  It is somewhat simpler than that: We now know from the food companies themselves that without salt their food is not really very good.  This is not a diatribe from a health nut.  The industry itself is pleading with the government:  “Our food is so bad that if we aren’t allowed to load it up with salt, people won’t eat it.  You have to let us keep the salt.  How else can we sell the stuff?”

The question is this:  If the companies themselves think the product is this bad, why are we still buying it?

Instead, get yourself out to that Farmer’s Market this week.  Then come home and cook some real food!

To explore this topic further, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s short book, “In Defense of Food” – available here from Amazon or at your library.

Maybe not the best way to start off a conversation with your seat partner on a plane.  But I could hardly help myself.  (If you have been following my musings for a while you will know that I tend to get into some interesting conversational situations on planes!)

I was on my way back from a week of meetings in Plainview, Texas.  Now, I realize that bringing an environmental seminar to the high plains of east Texas is not the normal thing to do.  People there are warm, friendly – but pretty convinced that “environment” means “liberal” and “government” and that sort of thing, and they’re not interested.  But things are changing.  For one thing, these folks are running out of water, and they know it.  The roadside is marked by abandoned pivot-wells.   Fields have been converted to dry-land farmi ng or back to grassland.

Plainview can claim a couple of points of distinction: It’s the home of Wayland Baptist University, my host for the week (and a very welcoming host, I should add!), and one of the largest Baptist educational institution in the country.  It is also the county seat for Hale County, which I was told is this year ranked #1 among all United States counties in agricultural production – this would include cotton, of course, but also milo (sorghum), corn and cattle.  Industrial food giant Cargill runs a number of feedlots and at least one meat-packing plant in the county.  [They used to be a source of peanut butter, too - until the salmonella scandal of last spring closed down the plant there.]

I admit it – having had the opportunity to hear Michael Pollan speak at the University of Wisconsin just before this trip, I was kind of preoccupied with the topic of industrial agriculture and industrial food anyway.  So when my seat partner told me that he works with a manufacturing company in Lodi, Wisconsin, that produces industrial food processing and food packaging machines, I really couldn’t help myself.  “I’m trying to put you out of business.”

That kind of intrigued him, I think.  “What do you mean?  What do you do?”  So I started to tell him about Care of Creation, my concern for local, healthy food and so on.

About this point in the conversation we were joined by a third guy who sat in the seat in between us.  “What takes you to Madison?”  “I work with Tyson Foods.”

So I had another victim, and the conversation continued -

And then the surprising punchline.  Both of my partners said the same thing: “Farmer’s market?  Buying local?  But that’s how we eat!”

So I guess I have good news:  The industrial food system is collapsing from within!

When even its sales force, those who should believe in it most – are abandoning their own products in favor of healthy, nutritious food grown and sold in their own communities – there is hope.

[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term 'neem hakeem' - means a doctor who isn't quite up to par.  Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area:  A 'neem hakeem' is a danger to your life...]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend.  People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe?  Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation?  No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.

There’s more than one lesson here:

First, the obvious:  If we want to live, turn down the volume!  Although Beethoven is not the worst thing to be listening to when your time comes (so an ad campaign in San Francisco on this topic) one doesn’t really want Beethoven to be hastening one’s time.

No, there’s a more important, deeper lesson here, and it comes from the humble Twinkie, that iconic symbol of junk food.  Few would argue that Twinkies and the like are bad for your health.  But how are they bad?  Two ways:

First, the stuff that they are made of – preservatives that allow them to “last” for months and years – isn’t very good for you.  In fact, it’s probably terrible for you.  Put it this way, the ingredients that kill the bugs that would ‘spoil’ the product and shorten its shelf-life do so because they are poisons for the bugs:  Are they going to do anything to extend your own life.

But there’s a more insidious effect of Twinkies:  They represent ‘empty calories’.  Your body thinks they are food, and makes you feel full.  Every poison-filled – excuse me, ‘preservative laden’ Twinkie that you eat means there is a nutritious, healthy, life-extending piece of food that you are not eating.  There’s a lot of research available that suggests that many of our modern health issues (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure) are due to this substitution of empty calories in place of nutritious food.  [A good source of an overview of this situation is Michael Pollen - 'Omnivore's Dilemma' and 'In Defense of Food'.]

So what’s this got to do with headphones?

The obvious danger is in the NPR story – not paying attention can get you killed.  Just like the preservatives in the Twinkie can do unknown damage to your body.

The less obvious danger is the equivalent of those empty calories.  If I spend my entire day listening to my own soundtrack, think of all the things I’m not listening to (besides the buses and trains trying to run me down):  Birds, wind in the trees, other people walking beside me.  We need to be in touch with God’s creation – its part of what makes us human.

So listen to the Neem Hakeem:  Turn off the music for a while and listen to the music of God’s world.  You’ll be just amazed… !