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Friday, March 12, 2010

Taking the State Assembly with a Grain of Salt

It's nice to know that amid all the foolishness going on in Albany (which has now made a majority of us embarrassed to be New Yorkers), at least some of our elected officials are hard at work. Like Brooklyn Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, who's introduced a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants to use salt in their food. At all.
According to Mr. Ortiz, the salt ban would save lives. I suppose he's right. Traffic deaths would certainly go down, because a lot fewer people would be going out to eat.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I hope that even the folks in the state capitol will recognize just how ridiculous this proposal is, and let it die a swift and early death. I can't even imagine what salt-free pizza would be like, nor do I want to find out.
Given the lack of consensus about whether salt is actually bad for you, perhaps a better public health measure would be to test the water in Albany to see what they're drinking in that town. It can't be good.

3 comments:

  1. Sadly, the best thing to happen might be for this idiotic proposition to pass.

    A salt ban means you can't add salt to dough to try to control fermentation rates. The dough becomes airy and it tastes bland. New York style pizza would no longer exist as we know it!

    Once the folks downstate - including those in Brooklyn - realize what their elected official has done, they'll vote him and his crazy ideas out of office. And maybe start to vote others out as well. And once that potential ban is overturned - a pizza renaissance.

    The downside: no good pizza for a while. The upside: fewer political crackpots wasting their time banning good cooking chemistry instead of finding ways to get the 9% of its eligible workforce back into the workplace.

    I'll get off my soapbox now. :-)

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  2. Maybe it would be like Prohibition and we'd have pizza speakeasies, where you could still get the real thing. Might be kind of fun actually.
    I wonder if this nut job has any idea how salt is actually used in cooking - particularly in baking - and how just letting the consumer sprinkle salt on the finished product cannot make up for the absence of salt during the cooking process. Well, clearly he doesn't.

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  3. The notion of banning salt by the stark raving normal 'riff raff' that occupy and run the asylum in Albany, marks the final defeat for the already depleted ranks of reason and common sense.

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