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Opinion |
5 May 10 |
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Food tyrants
As various branches of government exercise their power by bossing us lesser beings around, another bit of nannyism has surfaced in Santa Clara County California. Last week, the county’s Board of Supervisors, the equivalent of our Commissioner’s Court has, of all things, banned toys being sold with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. While this isn’t on the same level as more important examples of incompetent goofiness that we are seeing at higher levels of the federal government, it’s nonetheless an example of the creeping encroachment by government into things that are clearly none of their business. Official county busybodies say that a quarter of children in the area are overweight or obese and say they are tackling an "obesity epidemic". According to the Supervisor behind this edict, Ken Yeager, "This prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys to peddle high calorie, high fat, high sodium kids' meals. It breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes." The new proclamation says, “Food outlets will be stopped from offering toys with meals that do not meet a set of basic nutrition standards. There will be a limit of 485 calories per meal.” It doesn’t state whose standards are being used. All this really accomplishes is to assert that Santa Clara County Supervisors know better than parents, what’s good for their children. New York City Mayor Bloomberg has given sticking his beak into what people eat, perhaps the highest priority of his administration. First he banned smoking in bars, and then went after trans-fat, now he’s declared war on salt and those that put it in food. A most bland fellow he must be. He established the Office of Food Policy in 2007 and appointed Benjamin Thomases as Coordinator. One wonders if he approaches the patching of potholes with the same zeal he does sticking his nose into people’s refrigerators.
School kids are perhaps the ones most affected by lunchbox and
lunchroom meddling from officialdom. Here’s a quote by Stephanie
Johns in a piece titled “The Feud Over Food (The truth about the
school lunch wars),” ‘There are a lot of reasons our kids are
getting fat,’ said Texas state Rep. Jim Dunnam when he championed a
2005 law called the Safe Cupcake Amendment to let Texas children
bring sweets to school on their birthdays. ‘Cupcakes aren’t one of
them.’ I’m glad I got out of school while I was able to go to the Frosty Cream for lunch and have a chili dog and a nickel cherry coke. The point of all this has been to point out what has already happened and ask the question, who gave these people the authority to order us around? The function of a mayor is to run the town or city to which he/she was elected. What the residents eat or how fat they grow is none of the mayor’s business. The matter of toys in McDonalds Happy Meals is likewise, no business of a Board of Supervisors. All of these officials have real jobs to do dealing with running a town or county. All of these positions were created for the benefit of taxpaying citizens. There was never any intention to empower these officials with the authority to control peoples’ diets or ban legal products from tax-paying businesses. Most of the power trippers pulling this stuff live on the east and west coasts where a certain amount of nuttiness is expected. But could you image the reaction if one or more of our local officials decided to assert his authority and limit, for example, the number of jalapenos one could put in pot of beans or on a nacho—something that has absolutely nothing to do with his job? I don’t think the people around here would just sit back and take it. I’d like to think people like us would have that official sent to Wichita Falls for observation.
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