Ignore the food police and pass the salt!

OH how I miss a fish supper wrapped in newspaper. Hot, vinegary, ever-so-slightly soggy, was there ever a more comforting, stolidly British treat?

I’m not entirely sure why fish suppers stopped being wrapped in newspapers but if I were to make a wild stab in the dark I’d say it was for the same reason those big handled pint glasses were phased out – ’elf and safety.

These days of course, ’elf and safety stretches far beyond what we eat and drink our food in, to what it is we’re actually consuming in the first place. Sugar. Fizzy drinks. The dreaded Turkey Twizzlers.

This week, it was the turn of the fish and chip shops to get it in the neck with a little wooden fork. At a Holyrood health committee, one public health expert declared that she would like to regulate the amount of salt a fish and chip shop can put on your supper.

‘I would be wanting to promote a healthy diet, not by telling people repeatedly what to eat and what not to eat, for education isn’t working, but by public health protective policy,’ said Dr Helene Irvine.

‘I would even regulate the amount of salt that is allowed to come out of the salt shaker in your chippie.’

Not the salt! They’ll be banning pickled eggs next! Look, I understand that the obesity crisis is a running sore in this country, and that public health officials are at their wits’ end in trying to deal with it. But there is regulating junk food (see Turkey Twizzlers, eventually shelved after Jamie Oliver led a chorus of disapproval on the matter), and there is limiting personal freedom.

I like salt. I know it’s not particularly good for me, which is why I buy either the low sodium version or the expensive stuff you have to grind like pepper, but for a Scottish girl like me it is also the spice of life – a naughty, salty treat without which a fish supper isn’t worth the paper it’s eaten on. As my other half once pointed out when I was extolling the virtues of a trendy Chinese takeaway where you could order steamed rice and veg with boiled dumplings, ‘a healthy Chinese takeaway? What’s the point in that?’

Critics, of course, point to the NHS. Why must the already creaking NHS be overburdened by obese patients and their myriad illnesses?

There is some truth in this, but at the same time we must not use the NHS as a stick to beat society with until every last one of us is miserably subsisting on curly kale and sprouted grain bread.

I’ve had one fish supper this year – at the famous Anstruther Fish Bar, eaten in the car on our laps as the rain lashed down outside – and one fish and chips pub lunch, scoffed last weekend on the banks of Loch Lomond. Both times I had lashings of salt and vinegar. There may even have been a dod of tomato ketchup involved. And amazingly (touch wood) my blood pressure is just fine.

They might have taken away our newspaper wrappings, our big pint glasses and those Turkey Twizzlers, but for goodness sake, please leave us the salt shaker.