Does Salt Regulation Equal Nanny State?

To salt or not to salt? It's a question in the tip of one's tongue lately, with New York City angling to reduce salt content in processed foods.

While the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene expects chain restaurants and producers of packaged foods to reduce sodium levels by 25 percent over the next five years and 50 percent within a decade voluntarily, he said he is not above taking legal action to gain widespread compliance with this recommendation.

First I wondered whether cutting out salt would reveal the crappiness of the food it "accented" (and by that I mean "flavored"), thereby forcing producers to create better-quality food.

Now another question springs to mind: Is the city government telling people how much salt they can put in food tantamount to setting up a look-over-your-shoulder, handcuff-my-liberty nanny state?

I mean, we should be able to eat as much salt as we want if it makes our food taste yummy, no? How does the state have any right to tell me what I can and can't have in my food?

In an online forum on the subject, a variation of this question was recently put to Marion Nestle, who came out with a rather enlightening answer that I wish all the nanny-state fear-mongers would listen to. She wrote:

I love nanny-state accusations. Whenever I hear them, I know either that food industry self-interest is involved or that the accuser really doesn’t understand that our food system already is government-regulated as can be. These kinds of actions are just tweaking of existing policy, in this case to promote better health.

Put another way: We already have a "nanny state," if regulation of our food is what you mean by "nanny," so get used to it and move on to thinking about how we are going to make that nanny more effective at promoting public health.

Anyway, if you are someone who thinks regulating the safety and health of a food system is reasonable and does not constitute peering-over-the shoulder meddling, then this whole question of "nannies" quickly becomes as silly as Mary Poppins flying around using only an umbrella.

As Nestle puts it, "Nobody is stopping anyone from salting food. You don’t think your food tastes salty enough? Get out the salt shaker."

Photo credit: TooFarNorth