Salt police leave flavor fans shaken

My fellow salt lovers, stand guard. Big Brother is coming for our shakers.

Don't believe me? Recent history justifies my paranoia.

You might remember that the health gurus told us processed sugar was bad for us. It rotted our teeth, they said. It gave us diabetes, they said.

So they made fake sugars. Until those artificial sweeteners started to maybe possibly sort of give us cancer. Everyone scrambled for natural alternatives.

Then it was the fat in our foods. Experts said there was too much in what we eat. And they were right. So they made food with less processed fat in it. Then they made food with no fat in it. What happened? We got fatter. Oh, and the manufactured fat they substituted for real fat turned out to be bad for you, too.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took time out of his busy schedule to get trans fat banned in public restaurants to save diners from obesity and coronary disease.

Now, salt is on the hit list. The City That Never Sleeps is considering becoming The City That Doesn't Salt. Great Britain is doing the same.

'Good Eats' host calls it bad idea

The problem here: We need salt to live. It's a basic element.

I love salt for what it does to enhance the flavor of cooking, so I turned for consolation to a brother in salt, Alton Brown of Food Network. He's not pleased by the witch hunt, either. "Salt and sodium are not the same thing, and people need to realize that there are many sources of sodium in the diet and that sodium chloride is something different," Brown says.

Since his show "Good Eats" began a decade ago, Brown has been a kosher salt disciple. He likes the sticky shape of the crystals, which cling better to food and dissolve more easily.

This is a man who travels with a small vial of kosher salt to doctor airline food. He sprinkles it on peanut brittle. He puts it on ice cream. Salt kills bitterness better than sugar and curbs cravings for sweets.

No worse than a monkey wrench

When I spoke with him last week at his Atlanta home, a quick census revealed he had four three-pound boxes of Diamond Crystal kosher salt in his pantry. (Diamond keeps its company spokesman well-stocked.)

"I'm running a little low," he half-joked. "Those will last me a little while, as long as I don't need to cure a ham or do anything overwhelming like make a batch of pickles. I'll be OK at least until the end of the month."

Don't misunderstand; Brown believes in clear food labeling and good food education. Eating too much of anything is bad for you. But he's not a big fan of government wagging its finger over the shaker.

"I don't think that is the government's business telling me what to eat and not eat," he says. "We should be responsible eaters. We should be eating mostly at home, quite frankly, and not expecting government to tell restaurants what they can and can't do.

"Can salt be used as a tool that can be used for something bad?" he says. "Well, I can't think of any tool that doesn't apply to. I can do some pretty horrible things with a monkey wrench if you give me a few minutes to think about it."

I'm with Brown. As far as I'm concerned, you can have my salt when you pry it from my cold, dead, deliciously seasoned fingers.