Oh, groan..........

Cross Chicago off the list of Places Where I Want To Live. Seems a city councilman is urging the city council there to pass an ordinance banning restaurants from the use of oils containing trans-fats (or trans fats.....) In April, this council voted to ban foie gras in the city's restaurants!

Good god. Am I still living in the United States????? For god's sake. Have we lost all sense of personal responsibility? Have we decided to become a Big Brother society? Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's a simplistic view. But for fuck's sake (yes, this is MY blog and I can use whatever words I want because last time I checked I still live in a nation that places a premium on free speech), let's get a GRIP. We do NOT need city councils deciding what businesses can and cannot do. Or, for that matter, what kind of food private citizens should or should not eat. Or restaurateurs should serve.

My own town -- Ames, Iowa -- is just as bad. Several years ago, the city council voted to ban smoking in restaurants. Never even TRIED to negotiate with owners to install proper ventilation. This turned out to be a true slippery slope: not long after that, the same council voted to ban upholstered furniture on front porches. Yes, I live in Little Nazi-ville.

If the Chicago city council (or this jackass city councilman in particular) wants to do something about good health, then they should ask Oprah to sponsor a marathon. Have Oprah sponsor a "town meeting" on healthy eating. Spend some dough on having good-food types talk at public schools. Whatever.

But for fuck's sake, let go of the "let's monitor every goddamn aspect of people's lives, including what sorts of cooking oil restaurants use." Because otherwise it's the same thing as saying "HEY! I know what's best for all of you, and by god, I'm going to pass laws deciding what you can and can't eat.

Because frankly, I think you're too fucking stupid to make your own decisions. And besides that, I hate democracy and love tyranny." And I'm here to tell you that that kind of thinking scares the fucking shit out of me. If I wanted to live in tyranny, I'dve long since emigrated to Iraq.

Organically yours

Okay, so Anheuser-Busch is apparently going to launch (or perhaps has already done so) an "organic" beer. And there's been the usual hand-wringing from some circles: "Oh, no! When Big Business gets into organics, there goes our warm fuzzy safe food!" Eg, all the fuss last month when Wal-Mart announced it planned to start stocking its grocery shelves with organics, etc.

To which I say: get a grip! What did the hand-wringers THINK Big Business was going to do with this resurgence of interest in organic food? Ignore it?? (For the younger set, the first wave of organic mania was back in the 1970s. This second one is prompted in part, I believe, by the growing size and number of Whole Food outlets.)

Of course Wal-Mart, Anheuser-Busch, whoever isn't going to ignore it! It's the nature of capitalism to give the customer what he or she wants. And if middle class America wants enough organic stuff to allow what was once a small hippie outlet -- Whole Foods -- to become a national chain, well, OF COURSE other food purveyors are going to jump on board.

According to some hand-wringers, this is bad news because, well, farmers can only produce so much organic food. Once they've been stretched to their limit, then regulations will ease up and farmers will be allowed to produce slightly less "pure" crops but still call them organic. (I'm simplifying a more complex argument, but you get the drift.)

Translation: if Wal-Mart does it, it MUST be bad. I'm not sure I agree. I think the only reason Whole Foods hasn't fallen prey to the same sort of criticism lobbed at W-M (and soon, I'm sure, at A-B) is because Whole Foods has this "image" of being a birkenstocky, pure sorta place. When in fact it's just a big corporation whose main intent is to make money for its owners.

But in the minds of a certain segment of the population, WF is "pure" because that's its image. And image, friends, is everything. Well, okay, maybe not eeeeeeverything, but it counts for a lot. (Think of actors: the more famous and well-paid they are, the harder their handlers work to persuade us that they're just plain ol' folks like the rest of us.........)

So what's the point? Well, I don't really have one, except this: Big Business is gonna go where the middle class goes. And if that means organic foods are more accessible and affordable, well, that can't be all bad!

GIVE ME SOME BACON!

This morning's Wall Street Journal contained an article about Starbucks and kids. Seems that some critics are howling that Starbucks is "marketing" to kids by serving up overly sweet confections and by selling DVDs and tapes of kids' books.

Okay, I'll bite: What the hell is wrong with that? The people at Starbucks are in business to make money. They want people -- all people, even, gasp, parents -- to frequent their stores. If a parent comes in with kids, well, he or she won't come back often or again if there's nothing there for the kids to consume. The crux of the matter is, of course, fat and calories. Yes, the do-gooders who think government should monitor our diets are upset that some Starbucks products contain lotso calories and lotso fat.

Among them -- surprise! surprise! -- are the zealots at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of my all-time my least favorite organizations. (The outfit's name cracks me up. At the very least, head watchdog Michael Jacobson ought to change it to something more accurate, like, say, Center for Pseudo-Science in the Name of Our Own Personal Pet Peeves.) The folks at CSPI are shocked, shocked!, by the amount of fat and calories in a Starbucks Frappuccino, as is Barbara Rolls, the Penn State prof who came up with "volumetrics."

A few years ago, I dismissed this kind of crap with eye-rolling and groans, but not anymore. Now I see complaints like this as another face of the cult of victimization and as yet another example of the mania for government-as-parent.

Let's just say that these attack dogs succeed in banning Frappuccinos (and french fries and shakes and doughnuts). Seems to me that what lies at the bottom of this slippery slope of excess government is parenting-by-mandate: Some government agency (The Bureau for Parental Authorization? The Agency for Permission to Parent?) will decide who is fit to parent and who is not. You're overweight (at least according to government standards)? Sorry, no kids for you. You enjoy a drink or two before dinner? Too bad, Jane, no permission to parent for you! You eat the occasional Big Mac? We'll schedule you for a hysterectomy.

Obviously this sounds insane, but so does the notion that government ought to dictate what foods can and can not be purchased in a supposedly free marketplace. Now excuse me while I go eat some bacon and eggs.