The Food Police have been hard at work for several years on creating laws and regulations to tell you and me what we can and can’t eat. Several years ago a Los Angeles councilwoman even wanted to ban fast food restaurants. The latest push is to force us to cut down on salt intake.

In a very interesting story, Carolina Journal’s Sara Burrows digs into the headaches and costs a proposed FDA effort would impose on North Carolina industry and consumers.

Johnny Hayes, plant manager at Smithfield-based Carolina Packers, said their signature Bright Leaf hot dogs now have a salt content of 2.5 percent. A 25 percent cut would take that down to 1.9 percent.

“They can’t get much lower than 2 percent or they’re going to deal with a lot more problems than salt,” he said.

Those problems include E. Coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, and Listeria.

“I’ve been in this business 22 years,” Hayes said. “I’ve been through the reduced sodium thing with another company. There’s really no preservative like salt when it comes to curing or preserving meat. It’s been used for thousands of years.”

Carolina Packers General Manager Kent Denning said cutting back on salt would reduce the already brief shelf life of the hot dogs, forcing the company to switch to vacuum packaging or make grocery store deliveries more often.

What sets the Bright Leaf brand apart from the competition, Denning says, is that they’re sold in a bag, letting customers know the hot dogs are fresh. Vacuum-packaged hot dogs have an 85- to 90-day shelf life, while Bright Leaf hot dogs are supposed to be consumed within 18 days of the date they are packaged.

Denning has tried to switch to vacuum packs in the past and his customers were furious. He said his company serves a niche market, and that he would lose customers by adopting vacuum packaging.

The alternative would be making deliveries to markets four or five days a week, instead of the one or two deliveries Carolina Packers now makes.

“That’s a cost you’ll have to pass on to the consumer,” Denning said.