oops, forgot my location.
Dallas, TX
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t avoid salt. I taste the food, and if it’s good, I don’t add salt.
It is. It’s missing the salt 
I don’t understand everyone referring to salt as a “glue” or a “flavor enhancer.” Can’t you taste it? It tastes, well, salty to me. I want my steak to taste like steak and my mashed potatoes to taste like mashed potatoes. I don’t want those to taste salty. When i want salt, I eat pretzels. Yum. Those are supposed to taste like salt.
Because that is indeed what it is, up to a point. Salt, as a mineral, seems to ratchet up our taste receptors, and makes food to which it’s been added “taste more like itself.” The specific means by which it does this is not well understood, but the effect is widely accepted. Now, if you put too much salt on something, then it starts to taste salty. But there is absolutely a right amount of salt that can be added and makes something taste ineffably “good” without making it taste “salty.”
There are also flavor effects that cannot be achieved by any other means: Lightly salt a steak before cooking; let it stand for half an hour; observe how the salt draws the moisture out of the meat and creates puddles and droplets on top; let it stand another hour; observe how the moisture is slowly reabsorbed into the meat; then cook it and note how the drawn liquid has mixed with the salt and carried the flavor back into the meat when it was reabsorbed, so the meat is extra yummy all the way through. This is a simple demonstration of the same principle at work when one “brines” poultry.
One of the marks of a skilled, experienced cook is that the salt is right on. Top-end restaurants don’t put salt shakers on the table; the presumption is that the chef knows what he (or she) is doing, and asking for salt before even tasting is either ignorant of the diner or insulting to the chef, or both.
I’ve been cooking for years and leaving out the salt is honestly one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. I mean, great if it works for you. But it really is bizarre.
Ketchup is from East Asia, so it has wormed its way to us.
Okay, tomato catsup then. 
That’s an interesting article. I’ll read more later. At home.
Thanks