Mike shakes head on no-salt bid By DAVID SEIFMAN Last Updated: 6:47 AM, March 13, 2010 Posted: 3:07 AM, March 13, 2010
As health conscious as he is, even Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's nutty that a state assemblyman is proposing to ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.
"I think it's ridiculous," the mayor said yesterday morning, referring to Brooklyn Assemblyman Felix Ortiz's bill that would prevent chefs from adding a single grain of salt to a meal.
Bloomberg is pushing his own campaign against salt -- but it involves a voluntary reduction by food manufacturers over five years, not an outright ban.
"You have to have salt when you cook," observed the mayor on his weekly WOR radio show. "I do. I use too much salt already myself. But also it makes a lot of foods, the way you cook them and bake them -- salt is a real ingredient. So I don't think that's the right thing to do."
Ortiz said yesterday: "My intention for this legislation was to prohibit the use of salt as an additive to meals. If salt is a functional component of the recipe, by all means, it should be included. But, when we have meals prepared by restaurants that pile unnecessary amounts of salt, we have a problem."
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