Sand, Salt, Sugar

June 2010

I’ve always been convinced that walking barefoot is healthy and that walking barefoot in sand is the healthiest of all shoeless motive activities. The variety of textures only adds to the salutary effect: soft, often burning hot, sand to sink into; hard packed sand above the water line; imitation quicksand at the waterline; and slogging and splashing through the surf itself. I’m not sure of the actual measurable exercise effects but the pleasure is great. I’m also cognizant that the serious exercisers — runners mostly — seem to always wear shoes which I can’t abide on the beach.

I’m also convinced that bathing in salt water or yes even swimming in salt water is inherently healthy. I was prattling along about this to my daughter as we bounced in the surf, when she remarked that salt water really was not so good for the hair. She went on to say that she wasn’t surprised at my opinion since I prescribed salt water for everything. Stuffy nose, snort some saline; sore throat, gargle it as hot as you can stand it. I stop short of prescribing a drink of morning urine as some yogis do but I see where they are coming from.

I am also a user of salt in cooking — either the mineral flakes of Kosher salt or grainy sea salt or some exalted refined source like anchovies, capers, tamari etc. I know the latter are more complex than simple salt but plain old salt is good too. Tonight I salted some less than stellar tomato slices for vacation BLTs. After letting them stand for half an hour and then draining, they were fine. The flavor had intensified as much as possible for such a pinkish pithy fruit. I suppose a sprinkle of sugar along with the salt or by itself would also have worked. I remember the sugar “drawing out” the juices of the strawberries and blackberries my grandparents canned and froze.

Since I stopped drinking alcohol a year ago I have been using sugar in my black tea. I drink tea in a tall glass; loose tea quickly brewed in water off the boil. I put a teaspoon of sugar in the glass most times. I am partial to African cane sugar in rough lumps. Not easy to find sometimes but has a clear distinct flavor, far better than honey (except perhaps white honey) in black tea. A while ago I ran out of my preferred sugar and began using some white sugar that had been in the pantry forever. We don’t use much sugar at all. I’m the cook and what baking I do doesn’t involve white sugar.

In the late 60s and 70s when I was seriously learning how to cook white sugar was anathema. For years I almost never even ate anything sweet unless it was sweetened with honey, preferably local honey. So I find myself putting a teaspoonful of white death into my glass of tea a couple times a day, and feeling vaguely guilty. Not as if I’m poisoning myself — I’ve done that in much more creative ways over the years — but as though I was betraying something or some cause.

Admittedly Big Sugar is not a cause I can support and I also don’t support the endless intake of empty — though fortified calories — that make up the standard American diet. But buying a 5lb bag of cane sugar every couple years doesn’t keep Big Sugar in white-suited lobbyists and a couple of teaspoons of sugar a day hasn’t done me in yet.

Some of the guilt I was feeling comes from the inability many of us had in the 60s to separate the real issues from the chaff. If you are spending 14 hours a day registering voters in the Mississippi Delta and are drinking sweet tea (Dixie Crystal!) and eating your greens cooked with ham hocks, you are still on the side of the angels as far as I’m concerned.

Sometimes I think that all that is left of the 60s for some of us is nostalgia for the music, a nagging fear that our children might do some of the things we did, and perhaps a predilection for home-made hummus. All the important stuff about peace and love and equality just dissolved into a commercialized haze, co-opted like Martin Luther King Day with all his radical thought boiled down to a single speech, as the entire civil rights movement has been boiled down to a seat on a bus or a march across a bridge.

Perhaps if we had worried less about white sugar and more about how to actually maintain some of that creative energy for change as we began to move through the world as adults, at least some of the problems we identified and talked about would have been solved in the last few decades.