Tuesday begins the next phase of New York City’s totalitarian effort to turn one of the world’s great metropolises into a “mommy state” where no one is allowed to have any fun.
I support it!
As of this week, any restaurant with at least 15 locations nationwide will have to indicate (on their New York City menus) which dishes contain as much or more than the 2,300mg of salt that constitutes the daily maximum as recommended by the FDA. The city estimates some 10% of restaurant items will require the warning.
A white salt shaker superimposed on a black triangle will be used to indicate the excessive salt, though they could have used graphics from the original Salt Treaty talks through which the United States and the USSR agreed to limit their atomic weapons stockpile in the 1970s. A ready-to-launch nuclear warhead would get across the real danger here more effectively than a little salt shaker. But alas, I’m no graphic designer.
We all eat way too much salt. We know this. The average American eats 3,592mg a day; the average Brit, 3,200mg. Too much salt is damaging to our hearts and shortens our lives. This is not to deny the pleasure afforded by the delicious mineral. A good-sized slice of nice rare steak should be flavored by nothing – zero, nada, nilzo – other than two or three crystals of white, flaky sea salt. Yum! So what is it about the white stuff that makes it taste so damn good? Is there anything we can do to free ourselves from its deathly grip?
Salt works by negation, it turns out. Chemically, it blocks the receptors on our taste buds that receive bitter flavors. Lots of people don’t like bitter. (Probably because it reminds them of the first time they tried eating a clump of the wax they dug out of their ear when they were three years old. I’m sorry for typing that for you to read just now, but that is sort of the platonic form of “bitter”, isn’t it?) As salt blocks the bitter, it allows for sweet and sour flavors to shine through stronger. As the website Sciencefare explains:
Bitter compounds are detected via taste buds when they bind to G protein-coupled receptors. Human beings have at least 25 or so of these receptors and each bitterant can bind at different strengths to multiple receptors, which means people can taste a wide array of ‘bitterness’ – by some estimates, as many as 300 different types of bitterness. Salt, on the other hand, doesn’t bind to anything. The sodium ions simply pass through membrane channels that detect its presence – either salt is present, or it’s not. Think of salt and bitterness as the fast and slow lanes at a toll booth. Bitterants have to go through the slow lane and every car gets carefully inspected and assigned a unique toll. Salt simply passes under an RFID scanner that counts the number of cars and charges each the same amount of toll.
So salt is like cheating; taking the fast lane to familiar flavor. It’s like Don Henley in the 70s. “Lines on the mirror / Lines on her face / She pretended not to notice / She was caught up in the race.” (You didn’t know that song was actually about salt, did you?)
Health issues aside, our sense of taste has more subtlety at its disposal than we give it credit for. We should avail ourselves of this. Let’s use less salt and taste a wider variety of flavors – taste more nuance. And as far as the legal ramifications of the “mommy state” tactics: meh. I might balk at legally proscribed limits of what I’m allowed to put into my body, but more information is nothing but better.
We can still have fun. We can have even more fun, maybe, if we train ourselves to notice stuff that we used to not as readily notice.
Rating for salt warnings printed on NYC restaurant menus: 4 stars
Rating system
5 stars: A state where our best interests are more closely aligned with our desires
4 stars: The flawed world in which we live, and can try to make better
3 stars: Hedonism
2 stars: Superman
1 stars: Conversation with Don Henley
