“Salt: the deadly white powder you already snort.” That was the tagline used by a health-advocacy group back in the seventies, the first time we were warned about the dangers of salt in our diets. The message Mayor Bloomberg sent last month wasn’t quite as histrionic. But to critics—chefs, restaurateurs, food manufacturers, gourmands, libertarians, and a few contrarian scientists, among others—it came pretty close. The mayor’s ambitiously named National Salt Reduction Initiative asks food-makers and restaurants to cut salt by 20 percent over the next five years. City officials say that such reductions would lower our blood pressure, lessen our likelihood of having a heart attack, and save tens of thousands of lives. The effort, which is voluntary, is aimed primarily at packaged-snack and fast-food purveyors (some chains, like Subway, have already agreed to meet the goals), but high-end restaurants are being urged to go easy on the sel de mer, too.

Bloomberg has taken an interest in our diet before, of course: banning trans fats, requiring posted calorie counts. But salt? Salt is oceanic! To mess with it is to reprogram our collective palate. Not that the medical case against eating too much of the stuff isn’t compelling. The current state of scientific thinking on the subject is neatly summarized in a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine just a week after the Bloomberg announcement. Researchers found that even a small reduction in salt intake—less than a teaspoon a day—could prevent up to 99,000 heart attacks, 66,000 strokes, and 92,000 deaths a year in the U.S. Instead of simply warning individuals about salt’s dangers, the study called for “regulatory intervention” of the kind already under way in Japan, Finland, and the U.K., where a voluntary effort like the mayor’s has cut salt consumption by 9 percent since 2000. The irony of the salt crackdown is that it comes during a golden age of haute salt. In restaurants all over town, we grind coarse grains, pinch pink crystals between our fingers, and pluck sushi off great hulking blocks of the stuff. We revere cured meats. We salt our caramel desserts! In the pages that follow, we take the full measure of our city’s salt obsession, from how much sodium is in some of our favorite foods to, well, why it’s so damn tasty regardless. —Susan Burton

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