In case you were wondering about the reports about panic-shopping and salt hoarding being triggered in China by false rumours of salt being necessary or beneficial to protect against radiation poisoning: Our neighbourhood Walmart is indeed sold out, there is a small crowd in front of the shelves evaluating and dismissing the various types of sugar instead, and staff posted a message on the wall, presumably advising buyers against hoarding, but they did not let me take a picture of it.

Even if you fear that the amount of radiation that will spread to your area calls for medication (and we can still be reasonably confident hope that this does not even go as far as Tokyo), you'd have to eat three kilos of regular table salt in a single serving to get enough iodine from it. I am not a doctor (or a chef), but that sounds both difficult and not particularly healthy.

Fortunately for me, I cannot even read the text messages I get (working on it...). Incidentally, preventing this kind of behaviour is one of the reasons the Chinese government regularly puts forth to justify the need to block services like Twitter.