This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 13, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

According to some recent complaints, the Brit's popular HP sauce doesn't taste as good as it used to that change can be traced to a government

effort to crack down on salt in food and it may be on its way to the United States

the FDA is now looking at regulating the amount of salt

in food. Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, comments. The

government on both sides of the Atlantic has been getting interested in making decisions for us that we used to make ourselves

about our diet. We see this with fatty food, we see it with salt, and the Food and Drug Administration recently opened a comment period.

It runs through nearly the end of November to gather material and suggestions for what

it should do about the tendency of Americans to eat too much

salt in their diet.

And it wants science as ammunition and it wants suggestions on how it can cut our salt intake without necessarily asking us

whether we want to cut our salt intake.

The regulation is not yet proposed.

They are again building the docket as they call it to both support scientifically what

they want to do and to find out from people in the food industry and elsewhere

what they can get away with doing as far as what kinds of mandatory salt reductions are feasible in the view of the people who make and sell the food.

Okay, so the regulation has not been created.

This is a notice of proposed regulation then.

Kind of, and it's an important comment period because to the extent that people

have libertarian scruples or practical scruples.

Wait a minute, you know, how did the government exactly begin controlling recipes?

...