Front page news this Tuesday: half of our elderly population suffers from high blood pressure. But not to worry, because our Health Parliamentary Secretary is a man with a plan. The problem, he ‘notes’, is that “Maltese love to eat bread and Maltese bread contains a substantial amount of salt.”
So what do we do? We start producing a salt-free, blood pressure-friendly ħobża. Should we take this statement with a pinch of salt? Was it an merely an early April fool? Not really, no.
Remember, last year the same Health Parliamentary Secretary told us that the reason for Maltese obesity stems from the fact that most mothers do not breastfeed and that formula milk at birth is making us over-chubby for the rest of our lives. So, it seems to me that every year Chris Fearne likes to come up with an off-the-beaten track idea.
He told Times of Malta that since the fact that 45 per cent of the elderly population suffers from high blood pressure “cannot be ignored, the government will be engaging in discussions with the industry to examine ways through which the quantity of salt in Maltese bread could be reduced”.
Let us state a fact here. The ħobża Maltija has precisely one teaspoon of salt, which amounts to four grams.
Perhaps rather than convincing bakers to start manufacturing a quasi-salt-free bread, the government ought to engage in discussions with the elderly so that they don’t eat a whole loaf at one go: if 72-year-old Johnny Borg eats just two slices out of that loaf, then he’d be consuming all of 0.6g of salt.
But my main concern is: what next?
Is Mr Fearne going to check the levels of salt in pastizzi? Because Maltese eat quite a lot of pastizzi. Is he going to check the level of salt in Woody sausages because many Maltese people I know eat them on a regular basis.
And what about restaurants? Maltese people, as we know, eat out all the time. Will the government be sending an incognito army of tasters checking the levels of salt?
No, there is no need because there is a report about that too. In a study, Charmaine Gauci and Petra Mallia examined the use of salt in restaurants.
“The study found that the majority of chefs and caterers added salt to the dishes they served to enhance flavour and improve taste.” As we say in Maltese: heq.
Our bread has enough battles as it is. It does not need a nanny State to strip it off its traditional ingredients
Are we to expect any time soon, more discussions, so that there’s strict regulations on how much salt chefs can use in our à la carte dishes? “No cod today Ma’am. That would shoot up the salt content beyond government regulations,” the waiters will be telling us as we lust at the menu.
We’ll be going to restaurants to eat hospital food. Everything will taste rather bland, and another pleasure of life will be slowly struck off the list, but at least we’ll all stop suffering from high blood pressure.
But any gourmand worth their salt would have another pressing question. Is it only salt? How about sugars? Won’t that be tackled? How about the government checks the level of sugar in the pasti bil-krema which the Maltese love to eat? Will there be, then, discussions for sugarless pasti?
Or wait. What about buffets? They can easily cause cardiovascular problems. Maltese people love buffets more than their ħobża. We love the art of balancing copious amounts of food on a tiny plate. We love layering a piece of steak on top of a bed of penne with crab sticks, on top of three tablespoons of ġardiniera, on top of a dozen cozze d’Italia, with a sprinkling of chips.
We love wolfing all that down and then going for a second helping and a third and a fourth. Obviously, that’s blocking our heart veins. So how about engaging in discussions with hotel owners so they reduce the amount of food available at buffets?
Alas, the Health Parliamentary Secretary may just have opened a Pandora’s box. Where do you draw the line? I humbly suggest that instead of reading reports and coming up with, erm, unusual solutions, he should go back to the salt mines, as it were.
The time spent talking to bakers would be better spent monitoring the hospital corridors-turned-wards. A sick friend of mine was bedded there last week: the patients next to her were men. She had to strip off for her ECG in front of them with no minimum of privacy. Talking about salt in bread when there’s more painful salt in the wound seems a touch insensitive to me.
As I am typing this, I am eating a freshly baked ħobża Maltija, so warm that the butter has completely melted. I live opposite a baker, who still bakes it the traditional way.
Because, beware, there’s lots of fakes around – chain bakeries have commercialised Maltese bread into something spongy and chewy, which means that our bread has enough battles as it is – it does not need a nanny State to strip it off its traditional ingredients.
Let it be.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti