It would appear Jonah Goldberg has caught up to us in looking for that good liberal who fought the righteous fight back in the day and now has faded into a hazy memory and cannot be found anywhere.
I’m something of a product of my times. In the 1980s and 1990s I heard a lot of putatively honest liberals insist that the one zone of life that was absolutely sacrosanct was our own bodies. The state simply had no business getting involved in “our bodies.” Admittedly, this was mostly the rhetoric of abortion. I still remember Anna Quindlen on one of those Fred Friendly seminars waxing terribly righteous about the absolute sovereignty of a woman’s body. There was some spill-over into such topics as euthanasia and assisted suicide (remember “Whoes Life Is It Anyway?”), but the passion and heat was over abortion.
Flash forward to today and pretty much the entire edifice of liberalism insists that our bodies — what we put into them, how we maintain them — are fair game not just for Congress but for bureaucrats.
So, is it rank hypocrisy, intellectual disingenuousness (back in the day) or all just a way of making, as Goldberg put it, "the pro-abortion stance sound more highfalutin?"
Because menu board calorie counts at Taco Bell are a "must-have" for those healthy choice decisions.
Photo (and sentiment) courtesy W.C. Varones - the Taco Bell photo not the tea party babe, that is.
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11 comments:
Knowing what is in your food is bad? This is a real stretch. As far as I know, no one has been forcing people to eat Taco Bell food. That would be a crime.
Steve
Do you really need to know the calorie content of the slop at Taco Bell? Why should this not be the call of that private establishment?
If you go to a restaurant wanting to know this info and they are not providing it, then you are free to take your business elsewhere. Why is this such a difficult concept to grasp?
http://beerswithdemo.blogspot.com/search?q=calories
And, yes, forcing people to participate in a commercial activity, whatever that commercial activity is, is a crime.
Transparency. Market economies work better with informed consumers. The consumer remains free to make whatever choices they want to make. They can read the information or not. They can buy or not. At least they have the ability to be informed.
Steve
I am not against labeling food items so you know how many calories you're getting, but preventing McDonald's from giving out toys in the Happy Meal I am against. One gives the choice to the consumer, the other doesn't.
Great photo of Tako Smell's menu!
Agree with ya Harrison. I would also oppose limiting amounts of sugar and salt in food, but I think they should be labeled so we can make knowledgable decisions.
Steve
Someone has to pay for that information.
If we want it so bad, we should vote with our cash-- not get the government to force someone else to get their stuff tested.
How on earth are the mom'n'pop diners going to know how much of what is in their food? Especially if it's home made with fresh ingredients and what's been harvested, as a large number of places I go to do?
IIRC, it only applies to the larger chains. Local food in general should need few rules or regs, just labels about where it came from for store food. For stuff bought straight from the farm, none would be fine. That is what we do.
Steve
So suddenly you don't need to make knowledgable decisions if the place selling it to you has fewer than X outlets?
Or is it X amount of income?
X number of workers?
(Ooh, that last one would be handy-- it's easy to design a fast food place to work with two or three people, but Bruno's in Gerlach needs four just to man the counter, do the cooking and keep up with the baking.)
Why stop at calories when that is only part of the equation. I should know how much that food is going to effect my cholestoral also. And how about trans-fats? That would be more transparency, right?
Who is going to audit all this by the way? Will the FDA have to hire thousands more inspectors/auditors as the IRS is hiring tax agents to handle all those additional 1099s?
And what will be the fine for getting the cal-count wrong?
@Fox- Local markets dont generally need much regulation. if a farmer sells locally and has a bad product, he will suffer the consequences immediately. Since it will affect his neighbors, he is more likely to feel responsible for his actions. This does not always hold true for larger corporations. For restaurants, the same holds generally true. They dont usually hide lots of calories in foods where you dont expect it. They also have a more direct relationship with their consumers. I would trust that more than state rules.
"Why stop at calories when that is only part of the equation. I should know how much that food is going to effect my cholestoral also. And how about trans-fats? That would be more transparency, right?"
I would be happy with just calories. If you want to know more you should find restaurants that publish that data.
"And what will be the fine for getting the cal-count wrong?"
If done deliberately, I would suggest a year of a diet of nothing but Taco Bell, if it can pass the unusual and cruel clause.
Steve
Steve-
Why are you jumping from being forced to test and publish the calories in the food to farmers having a bad product?
If McD's has a bad product, their local outlet will close-- same way O'Smallguy's fast food place would.
A deep fried fast food place doesn't magically have healthy food just because there's only X or fewer outlets.
if a farmer sells locally and has a bad product, he will suffer the consequences immediately. Since it will affect his neighbors, he is more likely to feel responsible for his actions.
Organic male beef originated fertilizer.
He's more likely to be directly held responsible for his actions, assuming that the local area is small enough and they're not utterly brain-dead-- which is not as common as you'd think, from the number of folks our local "organic" dairy has sent to the hospital with their raw milk.
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