Nanny Bloomberg’s War on Sugar
5th June 2012
Lileks nails it.
A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.
But self-righteous finger-wagging is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the cruts.
Unless you’re on TV and want everyone to like you because you’re concerned about the right things. Being concerned about fat people like being concerned about Tibet; it requries nothing but expression of the proper sentiment, usually containing sadness for The Children, but also some righteous anger for Big Food, which has tricked everyone into eating more. The idea that some kids are fat because they have lousy parents doesn’t apply, because whoa whoa whoa now we’re blaming the victims, the people who for some mysterious reason can’t arrange a family meal and influence their progeny’s ingestion. For those people, obesity just happens, somehow. But in general, it’s because of soda, because everyone saw that YouTube clip with the stack of sugar cubes, right?
Yes, every time the TV talkers are in the store behind someone poor with a big arse packed in sweatpants buying Doritos and Little Debbie Cakes, the trim concerned commentaror thinks “it’s a big problem that the cost of her health issues will be distributed among 300 million people.” That’s the issue, all right.
And he takes a poke at David Frum, which is all to the good; why any respectable publication would give any space to David Frum always astonishes me.
As I said, it’s not about health. If it was, no one would mention the cost of obesity. It’s an issue only because the rest of us have to pay for it? If that’s the case, then there’s no end to the restrictions we can conjure up and impose with equal parts of sadness and resolution. Smoking was easy because it stinks. Trans-fats was easy because no one knew what they were; it’s not like you go down the store to pick up some trans-fats. The soda laws appeal to the overclass because fat people are disgusting.