> salt makes food taste better
My stepfather would say the same thing. Whenever I'd eat a salad, he'd look at it and say "I can't eat that shit," then he'd eat a steak that had been fried in 1" of fat, some eggs also fried in the same 1" of fat, some home made chips/fries, also fried in the same fat. French toast, to him, was bread fried in 1" of fat.
I wish I was making this up. As a teenager, my diet was horrific, usually undercooked mincemeat with chunks of bone still in it, but I did get some vegetables. Unfortunately, they were "flash boiled" - cauliflower and cabbage that were nearly raw, mashed potatoes that had uncooked and unmashed chunks in it. I used to heap pepper and sauce (ketchup) on everything, so I couldn't taste a thing.
In the event he did eat something that resembled a salad, it was a heavily curried coleslaw, with heavily curried grated carrot, and heavily curried eggs.
When his doctor ordered him on a low fat and low cholesterol diet, he realized that the suggested margarine had less of the bad stuff in it so he could put more on his white bread, usually as thick as a half dozen playing cards.
When he grabbed the salt shaker, you knew he was going to die from a heart attack or a stroke - and he did. Without a word of exaggeration, he would shake salt over his food for half a minute or more. He always had a bottle of Coke beside him, too. He'd drink a couple of 1.5 liter bottles a day in summer.
As an aside, it was almost a decade after I left home before I re-discovered the idea of meals for pleasure. I'd been trained to stuff terrible food in my mouth for so long that I never bothered to taste anything. These days, I'd rather have some fresh-sliced tomato, leek in a white sauce, side dish of tortellini with a drizzle of olive oil over it, and some steamed mixed vegetables (corn, peas, brocolli, cauliflower) than any of the crap he ate, or forced me to eat. Unfortunately, now I'm hungry.