A new bill in the state Assembly would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them.
In a deeply misguided gesture that is also an abuse of the legislative process, a New York City Assemblyman is pushing a nanny-state bill that would ban the use of all forms of salt in the preparation and cooking of all restaurant food.
If passed, the measure, introduced Friday by Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, would result in fines of up to $1,000 for each individual addition of salt by restaurant staff, whether before, during or after cooking. Customers would have the option of adding salt when the food is served.
Ortiz admits that prior to introducing the bill he did not research salt’s role in food chemistry, its effect on flavor or his bill’s ramifications for the restaurant industry. He tells me he was prompted to introduce the bill because his father used salt excessively for many years, developed high blood pressure and had a heart attack.
“I think salt should be banned in restaurants. I ask if a dish has salt in it, and if I does, I get something else that doesn’t have salt,” Ortiz tells me, before going on to say that he has eaten, and expects he will continue to eat, among other things, ham, cheese and bread in restaurants, all of which contain salt.
The language of the bill reads:
No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises.
Ortiz
The justification for the proposed law, given in the bill’s introduction, reads:
This legislation will give customers the option to add salt after the meal has been prepared for them. In this way, consumers have more control over the amount of sodium they intake, and are given the option to exercise healthier diets and healthier lifestyles.
Regardless of its intent, and accepting its sponsor’s claim that it is part of his campaign to improve the public’s health, the bill exhibits profound ignorance not only of matters of taste — literally — but also of the chemistry of cooking.
“It’s a preposterous notion,” says baker extraordinaire Michael London, whose Mrs. London’s Bakery has been a Saratoga Springs institution for three decades. “Not using salt would make breads insipid and anemic,” London says. Besides lacking flavor, saltless bread would also have different texture, density and other characteristics as a resulted of its altered chemistry, London tells me.
In food scientist Shirley O. Corriher’s “CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking,” she writes that even the very small amount of salt used in baking — as little as one-third of a teaspoon per cup of flour — plays four crucial roles in the development of dough: It enhances flavor, controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens by tightening gluten.
“The small amounts we are dealing with … are not enough to add significantly to dietary salt intake,” Corriher writes.
Harold McGee, another food scientist, is author of “On Food & Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen,” which since its publication in 1984 has been the bible of professional chefs and bakers for the clear way it translates food science into practical cooking tips. (It was McGee who first widely debunked the notion that searing meat “seals in” its juices.)
McGee writes:
[Salt] fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It’s an important component of taste in our foods, so if it’s missing in a given dish, the dish will taste less complete or balanced. Salt also increase the volatility of some aromatic substances in food, and it enhances our perception of some aromas, so it can make the overall flavor of a food seem more intense.
Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese and is essential to the development of a cheese’s structure and, as a result of its effect on enzymes, of ripening and flavor, McGee writes.
The bill doesn’t address significant matters, such as: Would salt be banned in processed foods or cured meats? Could a restaurant chef get around the ban on using added salt in a soup by, say, throwing in a sodium-laden ham hock? Ortiz didn’t have an answer for those question, saying repeatedly, “This all needs to be debated.”
“That [bill is] insane,” says Christopher Allen Tanner, a culinary professor at Schenectady County Community College in Schenectady. “You can’t make hams without salt, you can’t make bacon without salt,” he tells me. “There would be no pickles, no relishes, no … no just about everything.”
In response to Ortiz’s bill, the Center for Consumer Freedom in Washington put out a statement that said, in part:
Assemblyman Ortiz must not cook for himself because his bill shows his ignorance of how food is made. Forcing a restaurant to stop using salt is the equivalent of telling a carpenter to stop using nails or a barber to not use scissors.
Amen. How about Ortiz try to fix New York’s nausea-inducing fiscal problem instead of literally causing us to lose our appetites?
Final points:
- Our bodies need salt to function properly.
- Our bodies don’t need excessive salt — any more than they need too much fiber, vitamin C, fat or water.
- In fact, you can die if you overdrink water. Why? Because your sodium level has dropped too low.