Saving Gotham by Tom Farley

Author:Tom Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

13

“Would you like us to say, ‘That’s not our responsibility’?”

In April 2010 we were finally ready to announce the names of companies that had promised to cut the amount of salt they put in food. It had been three years since Mary Bassett, Lynn Silver, and Sonia Angell had first presented the idea to Tom Frieden, and eighteen months since the Salt Summit at Gracie Mansion. During that time, their team had built momentum with health organizations. What we now called the National Salt Reduction Initiative (NSRI) stretched across the country, boasting six city health departments, fifteen state health departments, and seventeen national organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, and Consumers Union.

The nation’s food companies weren’t so enthusiastic. In the months since the Salt Summit, Angell and Christine Curtis had held more than one hundred meetings with the food giants. The companies complained that the targets were too stringent, the deadlines too near, the technical problems too overwhelming, and the customers too wedded to the salty taste. Technical experts at some companies told our staff privately that the targets were not hard to hit, even as other representatives were complaining how tough they were. But so far it had all been vague talk. Until the commitments came in, we had no idea whether most of the U.S. food industry would sign on or ignore us.

We had released the targets three months earlier. They applied to sixty-one packaged-food categories, including “French toast, pancakes, and waffles,” “Frozen and refrigerated meat substitutes,” processed cheese, “Salsa, dips, and dipping sauce,” “Frozen and refrigerated pizza,” canned soup, and crackers. After haggling, ketchup was now embedded in “Barbecue sauce, ketchup, marinades, and steak sauce.” The restaurants had targets for twenty-five categories, including hamburgers, cheeseburgers, sandwiches, burritos, and French fries. Each category had an easier target for 2012 and a stricter one for 2014. The 2014 targets would cut salt by an average of 25 percent, but the cuts in the different food categories ranged from 10 to 35 percent.

Once we circulated those targets, the press had a chance to size up the initiative. Despite the fears of Bloomberg’s press officer Stu Loeser, the papers liked the plan. The Daily News featured a medical assistant from Brooklyn whose diet of bacon-and-egg sandwiches, ham sandwiches, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets fed her more than three times the recommendations. The Times put the story on the front page, calling salt a “health scourge.” But the “campaign is in some ways more ambitious and less certain of success than the ones it waged against smoking and obesity. . . . For one thing, the changes it prescribes require cooperation on a national scale.” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Decreasing salt is one of the thorniest challenges in food science,” and quoted a food scientist saying that salt replacements were “never cheaper than sodium chloride, unfortunately.”

When reporters asked Bloomberg if taking on salt was overreaching, he snapped, “We’re not controlling how much salt [people eat]. . . .

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