— Sharon Hall

So this is actually, um, a, a common question when people are talking about whole food plant-based diets is salt. So you can use salt. It's just a lot of cooks overuse salt. In fact, in culinary school it's pretty, um, you know, a lot of people add way, way too much salt for what most whole food plant-based, um, eaters are used to. Uh, now salt is okay to be able to have, but you don't definitely won't want to go overboard on it. So, um, when I'm cooking, I typically don't even cook with it. And my kind of saying, uh, you know, when I was at a restaurant, once there's a salt shaker on every table in America, people wanna add salt to it. Um, they definitely can. The palate actually completely switches over in about seven days. So if you go without salt for seven days, you'll see at the beginning of that, you'd have a much higher tolerance for salt. But after seven days of eating no salt, it'd completely go away. So my clientele at the restaurants that I was cooking at typically were on the very low end. So I just typically didn't use salt at all. Now to get around that, to be able to add more flavor, I would use the freshest ingredients possible. Now that being said, um, I would have to buy them in season and prepare them fairly quickly after being bought or cultivated as well. Um, it's really, if you kind of look at that in season kind of a thing, so like tomatoes are probably the best example of that. If you, um, eat a tomato in the middle of say January in the Midwest of the United States, it's not gonna really taste too much like a tomato because it has been grown very far away. It has been picked when it was still green and then basically modified to be able to make it so it's red and right by the time it gets to the grocery store, that can take quite a, a long time to get to the store. So that whole time it's decomposing, it's losing its flavor as well. Now, right now we're starting to see, um, in the Midwest tomatoes right off the vine from farmers and they're amazing and have great flavor. Now that is a great example of using things that are in season to be able to get big flavor. So the more you can do that, the bigger flavor you're going to get. Now if it's out of season, some other things that I actually recommend are using fresh herbs, um, and fresh herbs if possible. So going things towards basil, um, fresh cilantro, parsley, those kinds of things. Dill, all things that can actually be grown in an indoor garden fairly easily or uh, a lot of farmers can continue to do those and cultivate those in the middle of the winter on an indoor growing garden or something like that. Now those are great things to be able to add big flavor to dishes without using salt is using fresh herbs and then also using ingredients when they're in season as much as possible.