Remember When...

What did we do without microwaves? To tell the truth, I was four when we got our first one so I don't know. My mother cooked for me up to that point, at least until the day I could reach the stove knobs on my tippie-toes. I believe I was six. Our nuclear box was not an Amana "Radar Range", it was a Magic Chef. It had all the bell and whistle. A large rotary dial that had so many numbers in various colors and fonts crammed into such a small area that you could be cooking something for 30 seconds or 4 hours. It required you stay in the room with it to monitor the food you were cooking, but admonished you to do so only while wearing a lead apron.

I recall it did have a feature allowing you to select the output level. the dial seemed connected to little other than the light bulb. 100% was bright, 50% half as bright. The food itself remained a tasty mix of solidly frozen and numbingly hot. If you averaged it out, it was perfect.

My mother was very excited about the microwave. She will admit cooking was never her favorite thing. She even bought microwave cooking cookbooks. These were all the rave. Betty Crocker jumped on the bandwagon so fast her apron flew into the air exposing all he naughty bits. It was amazing how quickly they abandoned the whole idea of good food to make a buck.
Mom wasn't bad at cooking, but that whole idea of the secret ingredient being love was lost on her. Her secret ingredient was salt.

Or, "No-Salt" for that matter. Those of you old enough to remember the heady early days of the faux sugar movement and the mass hysteria those products caused (Mmmmmm, Tab), may also remember the faux salt (faux-diom?) sensation that swept the nation for five minutes in 1983.

Even then, Americans were fat and lazy people pumped so full of white bread and beef tallow that we had massive high blood pressure and obesity. This was way before Arnold Schwarzenneger became the President's Fitness Czar. Fake food was going to help us claw our way out of our slump. Fake food was the only "real" solution.

Enter fake salt. Even as the purveyors of boxed food-like products were jacking up the salt levels in our foods, we were being encouraged to eat fake salt. Well, o.k., not fake salt, but a salt that did not have sodium. It was a salt to be sure, like lithium is a salt, but its edibility quickly came into question.

Just as today's advanced sugar substitutes are lethally sweet in quantities similar to that which we would use the natural product, pseudo salt was saltier than the tears of a French clown. Saltier than the language of a th0usand sailors.

It burned. It ruined your food. But it was "good" for you. So we used it. We bought one cylindrical drum of "No-Salt". The 'O' in 'No' even had the little line through the circle like a No Smoking sign, which interestingly enough had not yet been invented. A house Frau could stand in the grocery aisle, pondering the nutritional panel on a drum of fake salt while chugging on a Vantage, Pall Mall or Viceroy. The grocery carts had two features... a seat for your child, and a butt can. To the point, we bought exactly one drum of this product. Never a second drum. No one in the country ever bought a second one. To have it in the house was enough.

We put it in a special salt shaker on the table that got touched about as much as a syphilitic nun. It may as well have had a red 'X' on it. When guests came, we would dive for their hands if they went for the faker-shaker. "No, no... you don't want that. It's 'No Salt'", and they would reel back in horror, so thankful you saved their lives.

What a marvelous age it was. Of course, though it survived (thrived, even), the microwave also ruined your food. The device that my mother thought would be her deliverance turned out to be a killer of all foods. Chicken turned rubber. Pizza became something that resembled the La Brea tar pits. I used to make eggs in the microwave. Terrible. All I could taste is the burning of the roof of my mouth.

They must have optimized food for the microwave. Hot Pockets come to mind. How do they get that crust so crispy crunchy tender flaky? I don't know, but it is probably the same thing that makes them delicious and diarrhea-inducing.

I guess it is likely advances in the packaging more so than the food itself. I was always told never to put metal in a microwave. Now microwaves have metal racks and nukeable foods have metal-like reflective coatings. This of course has not solved the issue of the issue of alternating hot and cold. Mostly your Hot Pockets are nucleonically hot on the ends and arctically frozen in the middle. No matter what. It's God's law.

Boxed food companies still pour too much salt and preservatives in your food. Microwaves still do not make a good quiche and synthesized foods and additives continue unabated. At least most of us have gotten on that no smoking bandwagon.