Speciality products, such as cured bacons and hams, should be excluded from Food Standards Agency (FSA) targets on maximum salt levels in meat, processors have argued.
The industry can reach or beat targets on most products, said the British Meat Processors' Association deputy director Maurice McCartney, but it was extremely hard to regulate salt content in some traditional processes, such as immersion and dry curing, he claimed.
Technical issues also meant it was unlikely that the industry would be able to meet the FSA target for pork pies a maximum of 500mg of sodium per 100g of product by 2010 and it therefore wanted less stringent standards for that and similar products.
McCartney said: "It is possible to reduce sodium content to a lower level in pork pies and you can change people's tastes through gradual reduction and attuning, in the same way that people who used to drink full-fat milk now drink it semi-skimmed. But we are unable to achieve targets lower than our current two-year plan [600mg per 100g] without further technological innovation.
"We are going to conduct a review of all the technology that's out there in terms of salt replacements. What we don't want to do is replace salt with expensive artificial ingredients that the consumer doesn't want anyway," he added.
Fat, which was next on the FSA's hit list, was "an even more complex issue", said McCartney.
"There is lots of evidence that consumers trim off fat, which means it may not be worth spending a fortune on breeding leaner animals. Cooking methods also vary. We will be having more meetings with the FSA to look at what is feasible."