I’ll tell you. Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits. I’m suspicious of orthodoxy, the kind of orthodoxy when it comes to what you put in your mouth. I’m a little reluctant to admit that maybe Americans are too stupid to figure out that the food we’re eating is killing us. But I don’t know if it’s time to send out special squads to close all the McDonald’s. My libertarian side is at odds with my revulsion at what we as a country have done to ourselves physically with what we’ve chosen to eat and our fast food culture. I’m really divided on that issue. It’d be great if he [Obama] served better food at the White House than what I suspect the Bushies were serving. It’s gotta be better than Nixon. He liked starting up a roaring fire, turning up the air conditioning, and eating a bowl of cottage cheese with ketchup. Anything above that is a good thing. He’s from Chicago, so he knows what good food is. [source]
This is pretty much how I feel about our recent trends of legislating what we are allowed to put in our bodies. In NYC especially, Bloomberg has made it harder and harder to choose exactly what you want to ingest. He has raised taxes on “unhealthy” items, and outright banned some things (like trans fats). This sort of well-intentioned nannyhood may go over well with certain interest groups, but in general people are more than a little incensed that our elected leaders are disallowing our personal choices. I know I am.
I’m not saying that trans fats are good for me, or that I miss eating foods fried in them, I’m just saying that I should be allowed to make that decision for myself.
Comments are closed.