If We Cut Salt, Will Processed Food Need Quality Ingredients?

Eric Burkett, writing in Grist about that campaign by New York City and other agencies and organizations to reduce salt in the American diet, ends his article with a tossed-out thought that is a provocative idea. Accomplishing what the salt-crusaders have in mind will be difficult, he writes, "particularly when so much of today’s food depends upon salt, instead of wholesome ingredients, for flavor."

Salt is a flavor-enhancer, so adding a lot of it is the perfect way to spruce up a flavorless dish. If food processors can't rely on salt to make their packaged goodies edible, they'll have to turn elsewhere.

And what is the easiest way to make food edible or even, god forbid, delicious? Why, use quality ingredients and let the food speak for itself. It helps, of course, for those quality foods to be fresh, but we're talking canned and frozen here, so you can only do so much.

I fear that these crafty companies will find some other chemically enhanced way to make their processed food's taste pass muster. But even so, Burkett's point still bears thought.

Our entire food system is one big chain of dysfunction, starting with the over-production of cheap corn, which sneaks into processed foods, which need salt to taste like anything other than cheap corn, which makes people unhealthy, which gets health groups and government agencies up in arms.

And when government agencies start investigating the relationship between health and flavor, who knows what might happen.

Photo credit: Clean Wal-Mart