Bloomberg to NYC: "Stop Eating All My Salt"
Michael Bloomberg is an imperious, irritable oligarch who has purchased the mayoralty of New York City for life. And the New York Times has something to say about him: He puts salt on his pizza.
Bloomberg famously wants to regulate what you eat and how you eat it—he banned the use of transfats in the city, forced restaurants to post nutritional information, and has nagged New Yorkers about all the salt they eat. So it's a worthy enterprise to point out, as the Times does, that he eats like shit and puts salt on everything and is a cosmic, nagging hypocrite:
But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others' lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel "that it's like a pretzel," said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg's Upper East Side town house.
Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino's Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.
Also, he doesn't really ride the subway as frequently as he seems to claim to! This is all well and good, and we really do enjoy reading about Bloomberg's unhealthy relationship to food. He's basically Cathy: "[T]he sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides." But maybe the Times should spend more time looking into why Bloomberg hired Brad Tusk, who spent four years as deputy governor of Illinois under Rod Blagojevich—four years during which Tusk's boss was the target of a federal corruption probe? Or maybe how he seems to still be running his business and using it to reward political allies? We know salt is an important issue, but sometimes people are interested in money and corruption, too.