New York magazine’s Grub Street blog reports that state assemblyman Felix Ortiz has proposed a salt ban in restaurants. Not just a restriction, a BAN. On any use of salt in any form in the preparation of food in restaurants! Grub Street quite correctly calls the bill “insane.”

Grub Street is reacting so strongly, though, for the wrong reasons. It’s true, so much of a meal’s flavor derives from its being properly seasoned that a salt ban would turn the state’s restaurants into a bland mess of awful — and that thought sends the columnist (and me) into paroxysms of horror.

But that’s not the worst of it. The truly unpalatable problem is that New York’s lawmakers think it’s perfectly all right to trample on individual rights — the right to eat as much salt as one damn well pleases, and take the consequences for it. That is what Grub Street ought to be calling “insane.”

By the way…it was only a matter of time from when Bloomberg and his talk of “encouraging” “voluntary” salt restrictions in the city until someone in the nanny state tried to make it a law. Until and unless there is widespread opposition to these laws on moral grounds, we are just going to be having a debate on how much salt should be restricted, how much of a tax to put on sodas, and so on and so forth.

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