PrintJuly 8, 2010
What Is Your Breaking Point?
Most of us are reaching the breaking point with Obama and the Democrats' agenda for more big government bankrupting the nation, higher taxes, job killing legislation, and infringements on our personal liberties.
Yet none of these assaults on our cherished American way of life can match the war on our taste buds. The Democrats' crusade against food that tastes good is just beginning, and it's already out of hand.
I suppose it all started with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where the progeny of Benjamin Franklin launched the modern busybody state in the 1930s under the Pennsylvania Bakery Act. This legislation required every seller of edible cereals, grains, refined flour, and heated and sealed foodstuffs such as cakes and pastries to be registered with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Thus all breads, cookies, crackers, pasta, and chips have long had the ubiquitous Reg Dept Penna Ag stamp somewhere on the package.
...Without which we'd be eating an assortment of weevils, grasshopper wings, mites, fungi, and who knows what bacteria along with our Frosted Flakes, Wonder Bread, and Frito Lay corn chips. Beyond commonsense food prep hygiene, there are nanny-state legislators all across this nation who would ban all three of these products for too much sugar, excessive salt, and lard or shortening having zero nutritional content.
Coming soon is a revival of the Methodists' Temperance League, having trouble peddling any serious influence since Prohibition ended in 1933. Perhaps now the Temperance League can find its second wind -- demonizing trans fat, sugar, and salt. In fact, they could start outlawing everything that makes eating food enjoyable.
There's now a website devoted to banning trans fat, which means a war on cookies, cakes, muffins, coffee cakes, candy bars, triple-deckers, french fries, and cheese balls. These people actually sued Nabisco to stop using hydrogenated oils in Oreo cookies. They proudly take credit for buffaloing Gov. Schwarzenegger into signing the trans fat ban law in California. The trans fat ban zealots happily point to all of the fast food villains -- McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, Burger King -- the headliners on the trans fat enemies list, easily coerced into downsizing from the likes of the Whopper to the Whimper.
A Democratic Party NY State Assemblyman, Felix Ortiz from Brooklyn, who has introduced a bill to ban the use of salt in preparing restaurant foods, as reported in the Albany Times-Union,
admits that prior to introducing the bill he did not research salt's role in food chemistry, its effect on flavor or his bill's ramifications for the restaurant industry. In response to Assemblyman Ortiz's bill, the Center for Consumer Freedom in Washington put out a statement that said, in part:"Assemblyman Ortiz must not cook for himself because his bill shows his ignorance of how food is made. Forcing a restaurant to stop using salt is the equivalent of telling a carpenter to stop using nails or a barber to not use scissors."
This sort of idiocy is by no means an outlier in the war against food that tastes good.
And now, the Mayor of San Francisco has banned soft drinks containing sugar from vending machines on city property. The FDA has already mandated its nutrition facts label in 2006, which reads like a Tokyo train station timetable. More labeling rules are most likely coming out from the FTC before they start marching the fast food heretics to the gallows. This is all getting downright frightening.
When and where will this madness end? You can't eat peanuts on airplanes -- how long until peanuts are banned at Major League Baseball parks? Want a red sauce brat at Wrigley Field or a Nathan's Famous hot dog at Yankee Stadium? Fugetaboutit! Have a celery stick with tofu instead. Will Ben & Jerry's ice cream, the dessert staple of all of the liberal darlings who worship Vermont, the Greens' version of paradisio, survive the onslaught? Not likely.
Or will the next convenient target be Hostess Twinkies? Imagine Twinkies, along with Little Debbie cupcakes, joining the ranks of contraband in the crosshairs of federal agents from ATF&F (food)!
If so, that will be the sign to call out the militia and man the barricades.
The breaking point for me will be when Dunkin Donuts lemon-filled donuts are banned. As soon as HR bill XXX, The Lemon-Filled Donut Prohibition Act, appears in the Federal Register, you can count me in for the million-pound march on Washington.
Would Voltaire defend to the death my right to a lemon-filled donut? As inspired by Winston Churchill, who would have defended to the death his right to a cigar and brandy:
"We shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender" our lemon filled donuts.
Of course, such dramatic measures may not be necessary. Legislation still needs to be enforced. At least in my neighborhood, the police patrolmen parked in the drive-thru lane at Dunkin Donuts, casually ignoring the illegal immigrants working the takeout window, are busy enough ordering another half-dozen assorted raspberry-filled cinnamon sticks and glazed crullers. Mmm, mmm, mmm.
