How culinary school teaches you to weaponize table salt

Followed instructions so literally that the food sued for emotional damages — welcome to culinary school, act one.

The Reddit saga is short: a student complied with a chef’s directive until the mashed potatoes tasted like arithmetic. Comments do the heavy lifting: “I bet chef is still salty,” someone helpfully noted, and another asked, “In what universe is it difficult to add salt to mashed potatoes?” (Answer: the one where obedience is treated like a speedrun achievement.)

Inventory (postmortem): one unseasoned mash, one chef whose dignity now contains grains of sodium, one student who regarded a recipe as a contract. Another commenter trying to mediate: “I boil my potatoes without salt, as when I mix the butter into the mash there’s enough salt in that.” Which reads like a peace treaty between laziness and taste buds.

The real lesson isn’t about salt — it’s about the physics of instructions. Tell someone to do something exactly and you’ll learn, with surgical clarity, whether they care about flavor or about paperwork. The chef is salty; the student learned obedience; the potatoes? They remain apathetic.