Get A Life!

[elfs]

So, the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio runs a picture of some local guy who's a marine in Iraq, and the picture shows his grimed and weary face with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. And the idiots in the public start going apeshit about how this picture "glorifies smoking" and "teaches young people that it's okay to smoke."

Excuse me? This guy is in Iraq! Bullets are flying overhead! He has more important things to worry about than lung fucking cancer! Give "young people" the facts and let them make informed and rational decisions about whether or not to have a cigarette, okay? Since when have we been such a nation of ninnies?

As if that weren't enough, the British Health System is considering banning buy-one, get-one-free offers for fatty junk foods. Apparently, the average citizen is too stupid to realize that overeating fatty foods is bad for you, and so the government must send agents, some of them armed, to wrestle those potato chips and snack cakes out of your irresponsible hands. As Gastroblog puts it:

Food ought to be banned, or at least rationed by trained medical staff in public service centres, since people are not rational enough to use it properly. At the very least food should be labelled "Food can be bad for you". Those who make billions of pounds growing and distributing food should not be allowed to give people what they want. It turns my stomach to think of all those multinationals making money out of producing delicious food. There ought to be a march against it. Think of the children! In a modern society politicians have a democratic mandate that decide what we should have for tea each day. I vote for the party that raises taxes in order to pay for more regulators.

Yeah, I'd rather spend a lifetime eating Tofu and die at 79 rather than have the ocassional Dorito and die at 78. Just think: if Julia Child hadn't used all that butter and cream in her French cooking, she might have lived to be 92!

Comments

Re: Gastroblog

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Manufacturers are not obliged by law to provide nutrition information, unless they make a nutrition claim. For those that do provide nutrition information, certain rules must be followed.

I don't understand what the problem here is. As a lot of people point out and Darymple makes explicit in the example cited, there are groups of people who know how to eat and how not to eat. The argument that "the buy one get one free" deals unfairly targets the poor is a bogus argument, as even at BOGOF prices preprocessed foods are, calorie for calorie, still exorbitantly more expensive than a bag of rice, a bag of beans, a bag of flour, or an apple. And they certainly don't have the same vitamin, mineral, and other micronutrient value. The citation is exactly right: "And the willingness of Indians to take trouble over what they eat and to treat meals as important social occasions that impose obligations and at times require the subordination of personal desire is indicative of an entire attitude to life that often permits them, despite their current low incomes, to advance up the social scale." [Emphasis mine.]

This is really quite a frightening little scenario you've created: an entire generation, raised in schools run and regulated by the state, has somehow misplaced its capacity to discern what is and is not good to eat. A generation of regulatory oversight has failed, and the solution is more regulation. It is not that people need to make better and more moral decisions-- and make no mistake, every choice that is not frivolous is a moral choice and food choices are clearly not frivolous-- but that the government, "public opinion forcing it to act," needs to use its unique capacity for violence to ensure that people cannot make the immoral decisions.