I share your opinion....
although a lot of "restaurant food" and I put that in quotes because it doesn't include places that make their food from scratch.
The pervasive flavor and saltiness of "soup base" permeates all gravy and soups.
There is one place near me where I have occasion to eat that the only thing worth ordering is a burger, steak or amazingly enough the nacho platter....perhaps because that is naturally supposed to be salty.
But don't legislate!! I can legislate by not eating there.

"My intention for this legislation was to prohibit the use of salt as an additive to meals. If salt is a functional component of the recipe, by all means, it should be included. But, when we have meals prepared by restaurants that pile unnecessary amounts of salt, we have a problem."

This is ridiculous. HOW in the world will this be enforced? Exactly WHO is going to make the judgment of what constitutes unnecessary amounts of salt?

If salt is a functional component of the recipe ...
Is Mr. Ortiz (the Brooklyn Assemblyman who introduced this bill) going to have restaurants submit their recipes to a government worker for inspection? Or when New Yorkers visit a restaurant, can they make a citizen's arrest if they feel the food is saltier than the recipe would call for? If the food is determined by someone to be too salty, but that's the amount the recipe calls for, will that get the chef off the hook?

The whole thing is so outrageous and silly... but it did accomplish ONE thing. It got Mr. Ortiz's name in the papers.

Here is a link that might be useful: daily news article

I agree, although strange things happen in New York and nothing close has been suggested here.

I also remember somewhere along the East Coast there was a move to ban soft eggs in restaurants because of the salmonella. No sunny side up or over easy, everything had to be cooked through. There was such an outcry that it quickly was dropped, I remember.

I figure if I want to kill myself eating too much salt or trans fats or whatever, it's my funeral. However, I do believe that restaurants should provide calorie/fat/sodium content to customers so they can make an informed choice, especially in the case of health issues. Heck, I don't know what is in most of the stuff at restaurants other than enormous amounts of salt and fat.

Makes me glad I seldom eat out....

A lot of people WANT the government to protect them, though, we're quickly abdicating our responsibility to watch out for ourselves and expect the government to do it, hence all the food rules that pertain not to restaurants where we don't know how food is handled or stored, but to our own kitchens.

Thankfully those are still only "guidelines" and not law, although many would be glad to see them enforced.

There, that ought to add fuel to the fire...

Annie

I don't understand why they don't just ban food.

Food makes people fat.

Therefore, food must be banned.

This should be just as effective as prohibition. Will we have to sneak around to speakeasies to have food with salt on it? Give me a break.

Good grief!! Why can't they just encourage standards? I agree about restaurant food being too salty--to the point that I'm amazed by the Top Chef judges (restaurant people all) who are so removed from the flavor of food that they're constantly dinging people for not using enough salt and pepper. Why would they think it's better to heavily season top quality food, rather than letting the delicacy of the flavors speak for themselves?

Ooooh! A rant! Sorry. Want another one? The trend is away from using "bitter" table salt--doesn't that mean we're in for an epidemic of goiter?

First they put the iodine in the salt to improve people's health, then they take away the salt?

Speaking of which, then there's the "Mediterranean secret". People go on an on about how great real Med home cooking is because of the bouillon cubes that people use as a matter of course. But isn't that just a way to sneak in MSG? That does go for the umami, but it's MSG!

Should the government legislate food? No! Is it useful when there is social pressure for them to be better? Absolutely. McDonald's got rid of the beef tallow (much to the regret of their french fry fans) because of social pressure, not legislation.

I'm visiting Nathan in New York next week... maybe I should bring my own throw down salt shaker!
{{gwi:1505055}}

How do these arrogant wackos get elected?

The ban says that patrons would be allowed to decide how salty their food would be instead of the chefs - I think that's a great idea. I'm extremely offended by chefs who over salt food, to the point where I can hardly taste anything else. I see this as similar to having a menu where you can order food as mild, spicy, or XXX hot. This is not a ban so much as allowing the consumer more choice - I'm all for it. Plus - you can always add salt but you can't take it out once it's in.

Lars

Annie - that ban on undercooked eggs was in New Jersey back in the 90's. I don't think is lasted more than a week or so- the then Governor was having breakfast at a different diner every morning just so he could order Sunnyside up Eggs in front of the press. It was quite the circus though!

When are the politicians going to allow people to take responsibility for themselves! Holy heck - there are too many laws protecting us from ourselves now!

A

Lars, I don't think they're talking about letting the waiter know how salty you want you're food-- I think they're saying chefs would be fined for using any salt whatsoever in the kitchen (and you can decide how salty you want your food by using the salt shaker at your table).

This ban would be terrible for the restaurant industry. Poor/average cooks eat out largely because restaurant cooking tastes better than their cooking (because of fat and salt!) so restaurants would lose those customers. Anyone who knows anything about food is not going to settle for bland food with a layer of salt on top, so those customers are gone too. Add to that that no decent chef would stand for this nonsense; I imagine a lot of them would relocate if at all possible, and you've got a trifecta of horrible.

This arrogant fool obviously doesn't know his way around a kitchen. Hopefully his jackassery will be limited by the fact that, economically, it's a terrible idea.

Lars - I see your point but I guess there aren't enough of us out there that object to way oversalted food to make a dent in restaurants' profits.

I'm against the ban, of course, but what I'd be very much for is mandatory nutritional information at all food establishments. I don't see why requirements can't be made for reporting within tolerances reasonable enough that even a daily special at a mom 'n' pop diner can be in compliance.

With news reports of sandwiches pushing 2000 calories, 1.5x the RDA of sodium and God knows how much fat - all under the guise of something like "chicken sandwich" I think the consumer should be made aware. And once everyone's aware, THAT'S what should drive change - not legislation.

I don't want any bans either. It won't work anyway.

I would like to see nutritional information. With all of the brining & pre-salting that chefs are doing sodium levels at even higher end restaurants are going higher. If I saw that an entree had been pre-salted I, for one, would not order that meal. If I'm going to over indulge in salt...I want bacon! :)

Americans are so accustomed to oversalted food many don't even recognize that a dish is too salty. FoodTV chefs routinely preach to salt each "layer" as you cook. By the time that meal hits the table there's too much salt for a single meal if one is trying to stay under 2,000 mg/day. Providing consumers nutritional information would allow us to take more control of our diets. I'm all for that!

I cut sodium, except naturally occuring, almost all from our diets back in the 80s when we were both bodybuilding. Our taste buds adjusted & most all restaurant food is too salty for us. I don't salt baked goods for instance. Why do cookies need salt? They don't. People are just so used to having that salt they believe food is "bland" without the salt.

This is no joke...I watched a re-run of Paula Deen's Home Cooking just this morning. Pat & Gina Neeley were guests. Gina made collard greens. She used 3 ham hocks, 4 bunches of greens, 1 full cup of sugar, and are you ready...an entire 1/2 cup of salt! Wow. Even Paula raised an eyebrow. At least nobody pretended those greens were healthy.

Because of the pork chop thread & the mention of pork being pumped full of a brining solution...I phoned my local grocery store yesterday. Their pork has been "flavor enhanced". Then, I called Whole Foods. Except for their fully-cooked hams none of their pork has been brined or injected with anything. I knew about turkeys but did not know about the pork. So, we'll be buying WF pork going forward. I use pork in highly spiced Mexican food & we had not noticed it was salted. I don't even remember the last time we just ate a pork chop or a plain pork roast.

The legislation won't pass but if it starts conversation about the way Americans are overdosing on sodium - it's accomplished something useful, IMO.

/tricia

If this ridiculous action does nothing more than raise awareness then it has done what it was intended to do. All you great cooks on this forum know that properly seasoning before, during and after cooking makes all the difference. If you try to get a meal to taste the same by seasoning only after you have cooked it, you will realize how flat the taste is. Not salt the Pasta water before adding the Pasta? Bland. Not salt the Steak before your sear it? Flat and flavorless. And adding salt after it's cooked only makes it salty, does nothing for the flavor. This is what the Restaurant people are upset about. They are talented highly trained food professionals who know their product and their craft. The politicians are not food people, they are politicians. This whole thing came about in the heady afterglow of the ban on transfats. Somebody got the wild idea that the next should be salt, and then caffeine and tobacco and on and on.

What really needs to be addressed is the added salt / sodium in prepared foods. That is where politicians can harrass manufacturers to lower those levels. Do you realize how much added sodium there is in bread and breakfast cereal alone? Read the labels, you might be surprised.

Most of us on this forum are prety aware of what goes into the food we prepare, but it is the people eating prepared and prepackaged foods that need the wake up call. Leave the restaurants to do what they do best.

Steve

I think we need a proposal to ban government officials!!

So much of this stems from the lawsuits that some people are using against the chain fast food restuarants "claiming" their health was compromised - and our glorious courts letting them get away with it. Sorta like the people suing the cigarette companies for causing their cancer... What a joke, but our Supreme Court has turned into a joke these days.

And no, the politicians won't go after the manufacturers because the manufacturers have big bucks to fight it AND line the pockets of the politicians.

Can you tell, I'm just plain tired of our government and the people who keep getting elected.

Beth

Psst.......

Hey! C'mere.........I've got salt.....!!

Utterly ridiculous! Yet again.
But what's really cool is that WE'RE paying them to do it!

Doing nothing publicly doesn't make it "something". That's all this is IMHO. A stab at "doing something" about Americans health issues. Phhhhhttt........

The taxes will kill me before the salt will, try doing something about THAT!

OK...........back to your regularly scheduled programming....

Deanna

Most restaurants which cook to order are happy to comply with requests for low salt just as many restaurants feature heart healthy selections and other diet oriented items.

Customers who are concerned about heathy eating have more influence than they may think. As concern about excess salt spreads, it will influence restaurant cooking. Years ago I went to a famous jazz club in NYC. This was after the non-smoking trend had begun but before smoking in restaurants was made illegal. I was surprised at how few people were smoking, given the popular image of such places. It was also surprising how many patrons were drinking bottled water in lieu of cocktails. None of this was the result of legislation.

The idea of providing nutritional information is good except that the government can be terribly heavy-handed in such things, resulting in unintended consequences such as hardships on small, family run restaurants, as FOAS recognizes.

Anyway, to get back to ridiculous aspect of this story, it has been reported that Mayor Bloomberg, a prime advocate of this sort of nonsense, is a salt addict. Apparently he sprinkles everything he eats with salt, from pizza to saltines. Can you say hypocrite?

Jim

:::giggle::: Jim, the jazz patrons were probably visiting from California. :)

Seriously, a bigger problem with nutrition info is that it really only works with highly standardized food like packaged goods and fast food. For economic and consistency reasons they work very very hard at making exact portions and reproducing them ad nauseum. Smaller companies usually just use a standardized formula for their ingredients, rather than sending their products to labs to have them tested. These are wildly innacurate. Even the ones that are lab tested aren't entirely accurate.

It wouldn't be too outlandish to have a program available on a website that the restaurants could enter their ingredients into and be able to print basic nutrition info for the daily special, but there's no way that portions are gong to be sized exactly, that an extra spoon of cream or pinch of cheese isn't going to get in, etc. It's much better to become an educated eater rather than relying on such highly inaccurate labels.

BTW, there are functional reasons for using salt in baking. It's part of the whole chemical reaction. It's not much salt. The salt in the soup base, mentioned above, is a much bigger issue.

I was taught to use vegetables only to season stock. There is salt in celery and onions, and other veg. But no added salt or other seasoning. Otherwise the food turns out too salty.

I wonder if Mayor B. has some kind of illness that makes him crave salt, or if he's made himself physically dependent. I also wonder if all these chefs cooking with so much salt are subtasters (have less tastebuds than average), or smoke a lot and just can't taste well.

What chemical reaction are you referring to? To my knowledge, salt slows down yeast fermentation and has little or no effect on baking soda/powder.

I seldom eat out yet banning salt still sounds a bit strange to me. Is salt really more evil than unhealthy fats and white sugar? What are they going to do with those?

Al

Two things you can't legistlate are self-discipline and common sense. They keep trying, though.

Al,

NYC banned trans fats in restaurant foods in 2006. Other cities have followed suit.

There are current discussions about taxing sugar sweetened soft drinks to reduce consumption of them.

The jokers are serious about this stuff.

Jim

Oh, dear. I'm so bad at remembering the science. Doesn't slowing down the fermentation stabilize it? And salt stabilizes the gluten? Makes the air bubbles stronger or something? I can never keep these things in my head, but I can bake a cake without a recipe but not without a little salt.

I just know that if an old recipe calls for 1 tsp. of salt I can make it with a scant tsp. (maybe 3/4) but it won't work without it. Newer recipes call for less salt and don't like the reduction.

Great! The economy is spinning down to a diet of bread & water & soon we won't be allowed to put salt in the bread. No doubt, there will be an appointed Salt Czar!

There's a world of difference between banning salt and other things such as trans fats. Salt is an integral part of cooking - trans fats are not. It won't be worth eating in a restaurant that doesn't use salt! Adding it at the end is NOT the same thing either. It's fundamental to the cooking process.

"As government expands, liberty contracts." -President Ronald Regan

Meant to say people suing cigarette companies for their cancer, saying they didn't know it caused cancer.

Sorry, even though I love my cokes, I agree about the colas being terrible. Articles are plenty on how bad they are for you. Sugar is one major root cause to a number of diseases.

But, I don't think the government should put higher taxes on it. Just make the public aware - something they don't do a very good job of. Right this minute, the FDA is allowing manufacturers to put in additives that are not required on the list of ingredients, that are harmful or not tested completely. Oh, I could go on and on...

Jessica and Plllog - In baking, salt gives the yeast bread flavor. Although yeast bread can be made without salt, it is also added to inhibit yeast growth, otherwise the yeast will continue to multiply and produce too much carbon dioxide and possibly collapse. No salt would result in a sticky, difficult to handle dough, but too much salt inhibitys yeast activity. In addition, salt produces a firmer dough, improves texture and evenness of cell structure and prolongs shelf life. Flavor, though, is the main reason I add salt.

In foods other than baked goods, salt is used as a flavor enhancer, perservative, binder (smoked meats), texture enhancer, color aid and control agent for fermentation (cheeses, pickles, etc).

Regulating salt use is unreasonable. Disclosing amount of salt used is essential. Education and disclosure *should* result in self-regulation.

AM

Oh yeah, does this mean that movie theatres will have to stop serving salt on the popcorn? How about the salt that is used to make meat Kosher -- will Kosher meat be banned? How about something like corned beef - which is by definition cured with salt? Etc.

Again, the whole thing is ridiculous and unrealistic. It's sure getting a lot of attention though!

IMO, the real problem is in processed foods and over-processed foods like the enhanced beef, chicken, turkey & pork that contain up to 15% water, sodium & other mystery chemicals.

I just want meat, plain unadulterated meat. And I'm fast running out of sources for it. Will not buy Hormel 'Always Tender' pork products, the only pork product in the nearest grocery (Roundy's chain), or most of the meat in the case at Wal-Mart. And, the 'All Natural' labels are pretty much meaningless unless you take 15% sodium solution enhancement to be a 'natural' state for a chicken.

But just think about how many new jobs will be created by instituting food police! :)
I have seen the enemy and it is us.

I'd like to think that extreme measures of this sort, even if erring on the side of over-regulation, will wake up more chefs, food mfgs and restaurant chains to the incredible saltiness of American food. My DH and I have been on a low-sodium diet for decades, and even in some very fine restaurants, have been given food that just has WAY TOO MUCH salt in it. I use salt at home, but there are too many times we've gotten food, even here in the health-conscious, high-spending San Francisco Bay Area, that could have easily reduced the sodium by 30% without harming the finished dish.

One problem is that people who drink, no matter if it's wine, beer, or hard liquor, have much less sensitivity to salt. Also, salt is accumulative, so a stock that seems fine will be way too salty once reduced for a sauce, or combined with a starch that has also been salted already. Sorry, but you can always add salt, but you can't take it out when there's too much of it to begin with.

Jkom, thanks for saying it clearly. I don't use a lot of salt in cooking, but I don't always remember why. I was taught to never salt stock. That the salt in celery and onions was sufficient, and one should add salt to the final product if necessary, but never to stock. Now I know why!

jkom51 and plllog, It's clear that you are concerned about what you think is the excessive use of salt and would like less salt to be used. Would you favor government intervention in the use of salt?

Jim

Ok, here's my 2 cents....

First off, for myself, I salt everything ( after I taste it )... Well if I don't put salt on it I add sugar.... lol So I do like salty... But there are a number of restaurants I've been in that REALLY over salt their foods... One of them being Motor City Casino... Ok, technically not a restaurant but at $21. a head you'd think you'd be able to eat the food... Most of it was so over salted that it actually burned my taste buds... Ok, that rant is over...

I personally think restaurants should use the minimum amount of salt in everything they cook... But I REALLY think the government should keep their noses out of my personal business... Their responsibility ends as soon as they let me know something is bad for me.

If I go to a restaurant where the food is too salty I tell someone who's in charge... If I go again and the food still has too much salt I just stop going there.

Rita O'Tay

Jim,

I posted about that way up topic! I absolutely do not want the government to police salt in cooking!! But I do agree that an awful lot of cooks, especially restaurant chefs, use salt instead of finesse and should learn to appreciate their ingredients more than salting the heck out of everything.

I had a "doggie bag" that I rewarmed for dinner. First of all, I can report that the rewarm setting on the Gagg combi-steam is worth the price of admission. But, being in the unusual position of eating restaurant mashed potatoes at home (a first!), I was thinking about why they tasted funky, having been perfectly warmed. It was the salt, out of context. At least the steamed broccoli wasn't salty! I expect it in restaurants, where I'm likely to also be drinking a salty beverage (mineral water or soda). In fact, I try to keep a certain level of salt more than otherwise in my diet so that I can eat out without puffing up.

So, no on the regulation. Yes on teaching food pros that there are other flavors besides salt.

I'm sorry, plllog. I lost track of who said what.

I should have remembered your posts because they were very clearly stated.

Jim

No worries! I've been so whipped I don't know what I'm doing half the time, and I unmeaningly come across harsh. I only meant that even if I was wandering off topic with the rest of the discussion, I did answer on point. :) This week I've been eating way too much restaurant food and have puffed up like the proverbial balloon! Maybe the posters here are right and the threat of silly government interference will encourage restaurants to cut down on the salt!