The Year In Government Bans

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No Fast Food for You!

Slate has an excellent article up about the insanity of banning new fast food restaurants from poor areas:

The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We're not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We're talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn't think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

The authoritarian nature of this ordinance is breathtaking to me. The government ought not to even have this kind of power--regulation, yes, flat-out bans such as this, absolutely not.

Seriously, who do the Los Angeles city councilors think they are? And what do the think they're doing? Protecting poor people from making bad decisions? Why don't we just assign them jobs, housing, and ration cards already? Is there any part of their lives the nanny state shouldn't control?

On a side note, I'm no longer a metro reporter. Thus, I'm free to go off on as many anti-nanny state tirades as I see fit. Brace yourselves!

(Via Radley Balko.)

Re: Help Curb Obesity-It's the Law!

Welcome to the blog, Amanda.

Reason magazine has been covering these mandatory labeling laws for some time. Unsurprisingly, given that publication's ideological leanings, its not exactly friendly to these new regulations. But regardless of one's general political disposition, Reason's writers make some excellent points.

Steve Chapman wrote:

The belief that more facts will generate wiser decisions is appealing but, at least in the realm of food, yet to be proved. No one seems to have noticed that as nutritional labeling has expanded, so have American waistlines. The federal government first required packaged foods to carry such information in the mid-1970s, and today, we are collectively fatter than we were then.

What does that suggest? Either people don't notice what's in the food they buy, or they don't let the knowledge affect what goes in their mouths.

Jacob Sullum added:

Notably, "there was no significant difference in mean calories purchased by patrons reporting seeing but not using calorie information and patrons who reported not seeing calorie information." In other words, simply making people aware of calorie content is not enough to affect their food choices. It may be that the information's influence is limited to people who are predisposed to count calories, in which case the impact of regulations like New York's will depend on the extent to which those people are not already taking advantage of nutritional information available on fast food chains' websites and on posters, counter mats, tray liners, and brochures in restaurants.

And Radley Balko piled on, too:

Menu labeling laws mean every restaurant in a given chain needs to make every dish exactly the same way, every time. Most menu labeling laws allow for a 20 percent margin of error. This is the same variance allowed for the nutritional information on manufactured food products, where assembly-line machines cut exact portions and abide by standardized recipes using the same ingredients, every time. That's quite a bit different than having real live people making dishes from what's available in the kitchen. Yet both are held to the same standard.

Of course, the labeling of manufactured foods is another argument in favor of the futility of these menu labeling laws. We've been labeling packaged foods for decades now—the foods that make up the vast majority of our meals and snacks and where we get most of our energy. And we're still getting fatter.

Anyone advocating labeling laws needs to come up with some good responses to the above arguments. Simply asserting that maybe, possibly, hopefully such policies will help make Americans healthier isn't good enough.

Ultimately, we must keep in mind that most people's obesity is a choice. People choose to take in more calories than they expend, which inevitably leads them to get fat. And no one needs calorie counts on their menus to know if he's eating too much. If a person is getting fat, he should eat less. It's just common sense.

Lest I be accused of being ignorant of the issues involved or unable to identify with those who struggle with their weight, I'll let everyone in on something I'm not particularly proud of: I used to weigh about 75 more pounds than I do now. However, I recognized that I was living an unhealthy lifestyle, cut back on my calories, and started exercising on a regular basis.

I'm highly skeptical that mandatory menu labels will influence too many people to follow in my footsteps. Only a personal desire to live a better life can do that.