Dan Propp
By Dan Propp
Back in the 1950’s, we would listen to Doris Day sing, “Sugar in the mornin’, sugar in the evenin’.. Then in the 1960’s, it was Jackie Gleason and, “How sweet it is!” How can we survive without sugar? It’s a slice man, I mean take a piece of white bread and even it turns into sugar, extending our bellies.
We could never have digested such concepts back in the dinosaur age when three jawbreakers were a penny and the only lottery in life was playing the illegal Irish Sweepstakes. Could we ever have conceived the possibility that someday government would depend upon lottery revenues? Sugar is an excellent preservative in cereals and most other yummy goodies. It is an ingredient that increasingly provides more ‘zing’ for today’s rapidly moving lifestyle and extends the shelf life of a product. Human ‘shelf life’, however, is another cup of tea.
Do you remember as a kid going shopping with your mom and drooling at all those cereal boxes with pictures of cowboy stars and all the great stuff that snapped, crackled and popped? Today we have stepped down from our high horses and are hopping along the happy trails to the pharmacies due to high levels of sugar and salt.
Salt is the other big preservative equally ‘in–salting’, A fun and delicious experiment is to visit many a mall’s food court and popular restaurants and Inquire about salt content in their popular food items. I did. Wow, this was a revelation! I couldn’t find even a cup of soup that did not have a lot of salt. For someone on high blood pressure pills (seniors are popping them like lifesavers), it struck a minor chord for this old accordion player. I’m thinking about working on a song called the ‘Sodium And Sugar Blues’. I am not sure about whether the music industry would swallow that pill. How about a non-profit blog called ‘In–salt.’ Who knows, maybe both could be noteworthy and at least preserve a bit of laughter.
Visit www.danpropp.com for recorded song, radio interview and Arthur Propp’s memoir’s of Kristallnacht