ADD SOME SALT TO SWEETEN LIFE
I was doing some baking this week and wondered why all the sweet, sugary
concoctions that I was making included salt as one of the ingredients. I remembered, too, how my grandmother usually added a little salt to the coffee grounds before she brewed a pot. The salt, she once told me, was to remove the bitter taste from the coffee.
But salt is …well, salty. Not sweet. So why doesn’t it ruin the flavor of the coffee or the pancake? And why is a chocolate-covered salty pretzel so irresistible? What is it about those chocolate-covered caramels with sea salt that makes them so tasty?
There’s something counter-intuitive about using salt to enhance the sweetness of some sweet confection. After all, we use metaphors like “rubbing salt in the wound” to describe making a painful experience worse. As in “Losing the game was bad enough, but watching his opponent receive praise along with the trophy was like rubbing salt in the wound.”
So how can salt make something sweeter? It turns out that our tongues have receptors for different flavors: sweet, bitter, sour, savory, salty or umami. Salt, because of its particular chemical composition, actually suppresses the bitterness receptors. It’s not that a chocolate-covered salty pretzel is necessarily sweeter than another piece of candy; it’s simply that the salt in the pretzel suppresses our tongues’ bitterness receptors so that something already somewhat sweet tastes still sweeter because of a pinch of salt added to it. Thus, when we eliminate or mask the bitter flavors, a dessert’s sweetness is enhanced.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invites his disciples to be salt and light. (Matthew 5:13). I’d always thought that this metaphor was about salt’s function as a purifying and preserving agent. We put salt on certain foods to preserve them. Salt pork, for example. Or pickles. (If you are watching your sodium intake as Jan and I do, don’t ever look at the nutritional information on a pickle jar). To be like salt, then, is to be a purifying and preserving presence in the world. Salt can also be used for healing. “Gargle some salt for that sore throat,” my mother used to say to me when a cold was making my throat itchy and painful. Phrases like these suggest that to be the salt of the world means that Christians work for healing and wholeness in our battered world.
I had never thought about salt as enhancing life’ sweetness, however. Perhaps Jesus is suggesting that his followers are called to remove some of life’s bitterness so that people may savor the sweetness and joy that God intends for the world and our lives. Our world certainly suffers from a surplus of bitterness. Just listen to the bitter sarcasm that passes for humor in our media. Or the bitterness and anger that underlies so much of our political rhetoric. Or the bitterness that many people express because they feel that life has not treated them justly or kindly
Bad things happen. Life isn’t fair. But, just as salt can suppress the bitterness in a cup of coffee, so God calls us to live in ways that help the underlying sweetness and goodness of life shine through even when we or others around us suffer the bitter aftertaste of pain, anger or frustration. So, the next time your coffee sits too long in the pot and tastes bitter, try adding a pinch of salt. Who knows? Maybe it will actually improve its flavor?
And whenever you add a little salt to that dessert recipe, remember that God calls us to go out of the saltshaker into the world as people who are working to counter the world’s bitterness and venom so that God’s sweet grace can shine through.
On the journey with you,
Pastor Thomas