Kirin’s New ‘Electric Salt Spoon’ Helps Reduce Salt Intake

Among the world’s great national cuisines, Japan’s is one of the most formidable, at once sea-based, strongly nourishing and strongly flavored, low in fat, and yet bearing a surpassing delicacy and interplay of ingredients.   

So, here’s a terrifying food-consumption stat: According to the Japanese Ministry of Public Health’s 2019 survey, citizens of Japan above 20 years old consume some 10.1 grams of salt per day — over double the World Health Organization’s recommendation of about 5 grams per day. This rate of consumption is in surprising contrast to Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health stats for the average American, who consumes 3400 miligrams of sodium, or 8.5 grams of salt daily, itself considered dangerously over the WHO line.  

In other words, despite the largely lean, nourishing, protein-rich Japanese diet, and more curiously, despite the staggering tonnage of fatty, ultra-prepared snack foods consumed by Americans, the Japanese are still handily besting Americans in the top tier of the salt-overconsumption game by nearly two grams of salt per day. Day in, day out.  

And official Japan knows it. Let’s draw a bead on this point: For a hyper-industrialized, hyper-digital, culturally sophisticated, health-conscious socio-economic world power such as Japan, a sodium overdose of double the magnitude of the WHO’s metric in literally every citizen in the country is a stunning public health vulnerability.   

The irony is that the problem is rooted in the otherwise remarkably healthy Japanese cuisine, ultra-salty sauces and staple condiments such as soy sauce notably among the sodium-delivery culprits. Not least, driving the problem, there is the bulwark of the Japanese palate, honed over dozens of generations to appreciate its treasured cuisine. That means the Japanese taste for salt is tough to change.       

Enter the Kirin company.  We know them as the Japanese beverage giant and the brewers of that crisp, tangy, deliciously malty Kirin Ichiban beer, and in that brewer’s guise it may seem that they are unlikely runners in the race to solve one of Japan’s most pressing public health problems. But the company has a far-flung portfolio of divisions that evidence a broad interest in public health, and the people in those divisions exhibit a proven ability to think outside the box.  

To wit: By 2022 Kirin had developed a prototype set of chopsticks that would introduce a small (imperceptible) electric charge into the mouth, and that charge would, in turn, concentrate the number of sodium molecules passed into the mouth by food so that the diner would perceive the food as properly (for the Japanese palate) salted. When in fact it was not. It was simply that the electric charge aligned and concentrated the sodium molecules to amplify their taste.

The laudably out-of-the-box thinking at Kirin ran along these lines: Forget the food. We’re not going to try to change the way Japan eats. What we’re going to try to change is what Japan thinks it’s eating by creating a little sodium sleight-of-hand on the Japanese palate. Then we can lower the salt in everything, and still have it taste in that very same cozy-sharp way so pleasing to all lovers of Japanese food.   

Over the last three years, Kirin metamorphosed the chopsticks prototype into a spoon which, with great fanfare, made its market debut this week. With admirable simplicity, Kirin calls it the “Electric Salt Spoon.” Get it? As if the spoon, itself, contains salt, when in fact it contains only the electricity that convinces the palate of the presence of salt.  

But! It’s a soft release of the heart-saving implement: In this run, Kirin only made 200 of the things. A larger manufacturing run, and a larger release is planned. Derided as a “mouth-zapper” or a “Taser for your mouth,” those critiques of its method miss the point. The spoon is a potential life-saver and at the very least will impart flavor to those who, for health reasons, must be relegated to a low-sodium diet.   

No gastronomic pun implied or intended, but there are two takeaways: First, it’s fun to think of such a lowly kitchen implement as a spoon being elevated to a heart-saving tool. Second, and not least: Just perhaps, with a couple of more years of aggressive R&D, Kirin can figure out how to electrify Americans’ thumbs and index fingers so that we could have desalinated nachos-on-the-couch that taste as salty as they always have.