None of my best friends are vegetarians

I was going to title this starting with "some," but then I realized that it wasn't true. I certainly know and like people who are vegetarians, but none of them would remotely qualify for best friend status.

I bring this up because my quest to eat without salt has helped me understand why vegetarians are so annoying. Really, there are two reasons. First, many people become vegetarians for moral reasons, and whenever you do something for moral reasons you run the risk of becoming sanctimonious about it. The distance from "I don't eat meat because I think it's wrong" to "Eating meat is wrong" is not as great as one would hope. Fortunately, vegetarianism has become mainstream enough (it was decidedly not so when I was growing up) that few feel the need. Not even all Vegans are superior about it, maybe because Vegans realize how difficult it is to be a Vegan.

Clearly my cutting out salt is for my own personal benefit and not because I'm taking any kind of moral stand, but this brings me to my second point. To eat for a day in America and not consume 2,000 mg of sodium is very difficult. I've been doing it for a week now, and I can tell you that it is constant work. You pretty much cannot eat anything that any other human being has prepared without your oversight, and anything from a package requires scrutiny. For example, I had some soup for lunch that I'd made in the crock pot yesterday, and I wanted something with it. I was so gladdened to find that Trader Joe's Oyster Crackers have on 80 mg of sodium in a handful I practically wept with joy. Well, not really, but I did very much enjoy eating them.

Where the vegetarianism parallel comes in is that everything I eat and therefore much of what I do revolves around counting how much salt there is in any given food. Vegetarians are in a constant state of counting protein. Grams of protein, complementary proteins, protein in unexpected places (you think vegetarians eat lentils because they really like them? Seriously? No, they have a lot of protein. Not to diss lentils. I like them fine, but none of my favorite foods are lentil-based). This kind of thinking has a way of taking over your life and therefore your thought processes, and once that happens, you start wanting to talk about it all the time. All the time. And in an obsessive way, not a pleasant or interesting way.

Did you know that low sodium say sauce has 600 mg of sodium in a teaspoon? Cheddar cheese 200 mg in an ounce while swiss cheese has only 60? Do you care? Why in the world would you care? But when you're the one doing it, it's not very hard to get all caught up in this, and if you know vegetarians you know that they talk about their latest ingenious protein complements (especially when there's more than one vegetarian in the room). Here's the scoop though; nobody else wants to hear it. Nobody cares what amino acids you've managed to combine and nobody cares that I managed to make decent tasting marinara sauce with no salt, and they really don't want to hear how I accomplished it.

So if you hear me bragging about my cooking inventiveness or opining on the overabundance of salt in every processed food there is, do me a favor and slap me.