New York City to Ban Eating
Well, not really, but the city really may as well just cut to the chase and do it. After all, who'd stop them? The same people who put up with a statewide ban on smoking in private establishments? The same folks who allowed New York to ban cell phone use while driving? From Ephedra to recycled airbags to multiple listings for kidney transplants, I think the only reasonable ban New York has enacted in the past 200 years or so was its prohibition of the slave trade.
NEW YORK — Three years after the city banned smoking in restaurants, health officials are talking about prohibiting something they say is almost as bad: artificial trans fatty acids.
The city health department unveiled a proposal Tuesday that would bar cooks at any of the city's 24,600 food service establishments from using ingredients that contain the artery-clogging substance, commonly listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated oil.
Artificial trans fats are found in some shortenings, margarine and frying oils and turn up in foods from pie crusts to french fries to doughnuts.
Doctors agree that trans fats are unhealthy in nearly any amount, but a spokesman for the restaurant industry said he was stunned the city would seek to ban a legal ingredient found in millions of American kitchens.
"Labeling is one thing, but when they totally ban a product, it goes well beyond what we think is prudent and acceptable," said Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the city's chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association.
Given New York's track record on nanny-statism, I'll bet dollars to your trans fat-soaked donuts that this ban will take effect. Why wouldn't it? From the federal government to the states, freedom-hating Americans are supporting and even encouraging government busybodies to control virtually every facet of our lives. Just this week a federal judge allowed a class action tobacco suit that could potentially shake down manufacturers of light cigarettes for $200 billion, and the city of Philadelphia banned smoking in private bars and restaurants.
It practically defies common sense to have to explain why a government ban on private behavior that harms no one else is immoral and tyrannical. The prevailing sentiment among anti-smoking advocates is that secondhand smoke is harmful to non-smokers, though non-smokers are not forced to work in or patronize private businesses that allow smoking. And though it's almost not possible, this attack on cooking oils is even more absurd. Anti-fat activists can point to neither force nor fraud when it comes to the food we buy. All individuals have an innate right to choose what to put into their bodies, and it can't even be argued that consumers are being misled by food manufacturers because nutrition information labeling has been a requirement for years.
And check out this little tidbit:
Under the New York proposal, restaurants would need to get artificial trans fats out of cooking oils, margarine and shortening by July 1, 2007, and all other foodstuffs by July 1, 2008. It would not affect grocery stores. It also would not apply to naturally occurring trans fats, which are found in some meats and dairy.
Grocery stores can still sell cooking oils that contain trans fats but restaurants can't sell food that does. So New Yorkers can choose to buy all the fat they want at the market and go home and make fatty foods, but they apparently don't have the right to do the exact same thing at a restaurant. That makes so much sense I can't believe it was dreamt up by politicians and bureaucrats!
Anyone who believes the government has the right -- or, worse, the responsibility -- to ban trans fats may want to consider whether it would be appropriate for government to do the opposite -- to mandate their consumption, or to mandate smoking in a private restaurant whose owner wished to disallow it.
Life is not risk-free, and it cannot be made so by a cabal of self-congratulatory politicians and their bleeding-heart supporters, no matter how hard they try. It would make just as much sense to ban cinder driveways that skin knees, ice rink surfaces that break tailbones, bananas that lodge in windpipes, houses that catch fire while we sleep, cars that crash, pools that drown, and an infinite number of other consumer products that have the potential to cause us harm through private use.
New York City -- or the feds or any state that seeks to impose bans on consumer goods that provide us happiness at no expense to others -- may as well ban eating, period. Such legislative overreaches are de facto bans on freedom that will do nothing but kill us slowly anyway.
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