Did you read where the City of New York has decided to save its citizens from the horrors of table salt?
Well, all I can say is thank God someone has realized us saltheads need supervision at the dinner table!
Disclaimer: I don’t cook with salt (well…except for bread, which is pretty bland without it). When I feel something needs a little seasoning, I’ll salt it at the table.
The result is that most processed foods taste horribly oversalted to me. Even Swanson’s and Campbell’s canned chicken and beef broth: mouth-puckering! That’s one of the reasons I cook mostly from scratch, I rarely eat in restaurants, and I never eat fast food: it’s just too salty. Food should taste like food, not like salt.
However… I don’t make a religion out of that. It’s not a freaking moral precept!
And even if it were, IMHO governments have no more business regulating what seasoning will go into food than they do telling individuals what gender persuasion will qualify them as a marital partner or telling women what they can do with their own bodies.
Anyone who’s awake knows that processed foods are not very good for you, and that most of what restaurants serve is processed food. Anyone who’s even faintly conscious knows that fast food is, by definition, a blob of sodium wrapped in artificial flavors.
If you choose to eat in restaurants, if you choose to consume pretend-food from fast-food chains, then you presumably choose to take your chances. Besides, maybe some addicts like salt in their food.
Take French fries, for example. French fries, like pretzels, exist to carry salt to the tongue. Without this key ingredient, there’s exactly zero point to French fries. Or to pretzels. Or to popcorn, for that matter. It’s stuff that you eat because it’s bad for you. You know it’s bad for you, already. You choose to eat it because it’s bad for you.
We’re being protected from our own stupidity and our own fears quite enough, thank you, with adult-proof caps or (god help us!) individual bubble-wrap on every nostrum we swallow, with adult-proof caps on every bottle of household cleanser, with mandated prison bars around every swimming pool, with beepers nagging us every time we open the car door without taking the key out of the ignition, with idiot lights that come on to tell us to wrap the seatbelt around the bag of groceries we set on our car’s passenger seat, with X-rays of our genitalia every time we get on a commuter plane, with spy cameras on every corner, with G-mail filters that make you pass a math quiz to prove you’re rational before you send a message, with flicking password-protected PDF’s, two of which I received today.
You think I’m kidding about the G-mail thing don’t you? Go ahead. Click on that link. It’s real, I tell you, real!!!!
Feed me, Seymour! Feed me some French fries!
Image: Wikipedia Commons