w/r/t iodised salt - I don’t think I’d ever notice the difference with full-flavoured food when using it for table salt, but with some cooked or preserved things I definitely can, and it ain’t pleasant. I did a batch of olives once using iodised salt and the very salt-heavy “dry” curing method, and they were wierdly metallic.

Apparently it is possible to have insufficient salt in your diet - something that was news to me until the Doc read me the riot act after I started getting massive cramps during karate tournaments. Interestingly I never had the problem in Japan, because their diet, although healthy, is quite high in salt.

A few enterprising Australian farmers have begun to import Mongolian Yaks for the purpose of dung farming, but from all reports chefs at the two-hat and three-hat restaurants in The Age Good Food Guide are unanimous that the farmed substitute, while chemically identical, lacks the terroir of the real thing…

Meanwhile, Dimitri Mendeleev rotates slowly in his grave…

From http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/184_12_190606/kam10115_fm.html
In the 1980s, the Adelaide psychiatrist Peter Yellowlees, and others, rekindled the fortification debate by pointing out that alcohol-related brain damage was a major Australian public health problem requiring a national policy for thiamine fortification of flour, bread and alcoholic beverages. Yellowlees was not aware of the previous studies in Bourke. They might have warned him of the controversy that can arise from apparently simple dietary interventions. And that history was repeated. In 1987, the National Health and Medical Research Council recommended the addition of thiamine to beer and flagon wine, but this was opposed by both brewers and anti-alcohol groups.

The brewers’ argued that thiamine changed the flavour of the beer. In fact, the taste of thiamine can merge with the flavour of beer, but not with that of table wine. The brewers also argued that adding thiamine to alcoholic beverages would affect their export trade because such beverages would not be acceptable in other countries. They asserted that if Australian beers had to have added thiamine, so should beers that were imported into Australia. Yellowlees challenged these objectors to provide information about the number of alcoholics who developed brain damage through drinking expensive German beer and commented that their “stance was essentially the same maladaptive psychological defence mechanism as that of many alcoholics — denial”

Temperance groups and nutritionists stated that it was philosophically unsound to add good food to a bad product and that making alcohol into a super food was likely to encourage greater consumption. The compromise solution was to add thiamine only to bread, and this became mandatory in 1991.

See!? See?! High blood pressure. Probably caused by too much salt, What did I tell you!

My understanding is that the dairy industry has not entirely abandoned the use of iodine as a sterilizer - this is happening progressively, so the problem will get worse unless something is done.

I don’t know whether there was sufficient consumer demand for it to still be available.

If only it were as easy to ditch judgmental types.

Our grandparents threw iodised salt all over their home cooked meals. These days people eat a lot more pre-prepared/packaged/cafe/restaurant food, which generally isn’t iodised at the poor people’s take away end or the yuppie cafe end of the spectrum.

Then of course there’s Uter’s Joy Joys (”Jetzt mit iodine!”).