Lessons In Salt

So the other night I was making myself dinner, a simple, cheap dish:  cook ground beef, add brown gravy to the cooked beef, make rice, make peas, dish out rice, dish out peas on rice, dish out brown gravy beef over peas and rice.  Eat.  All tolled, about $5 to make the whole thing, which gives me three (generous) servings.  Sometimes I just can't shake the starving bachelor I used to be.
   But... as I took the first bite I realized that I had forgotten to put salt in the ground beef.  Since there's no salt in rice or peas, and very little in the brown gravy mix, the meat has to carry the entire seasoning palate.  I put in pepper and onion powder and garlic, but no salt. Forgot completely. The entire thing was just bland.  Objectionably so, I almost threw it all out.
   Now, I used to be a cook - as in I got a check every two weeks for cooking in a restaurant - and I know better.  Almost everything needs just a tiny bit of salt.  Not too much, because a little bit of salt works like MSG, it enhances the flavor of things.  Of everything.  For me to forget the salt was not only embarrassing, it was unforgivable.  I tried to repair things by adding salt afterwards but that never works.  And to top it all off, I undercooked the rice.  Not my best night at the stove.
   But it got me thinking.  There's a metaphor in there somewhere.  A little salt makes things better.  You can apply this to, say, our current political discourse.  There seems to be a huge emphasis placed on toeing the line, on staying 'on message,' where that message is determined by polls and deep-pocket, often creepy donors.  A candidate can't think independently, they can't take a position either to the right or to the left of the carefully-crafted 'official' position.  They're locked in, unable to add their own spice to the mix.  Bland.
   I think we need salt again.  We need candidates and politicians who will think about things, negotiate, talk things over, be willing to abandon the official party line when the see they can get something done.  Or when they're wrong, which they often are.  We need people with spice.