I was asked to do an interview on a recent passing of legislation to ban the sale kids meals that do not meet nutritional standards. I was asked to debate this issue of regulating the food industry with Bob Barr, former senator for Georgia who echoed the familiar rant that this is another way that the government is turning the US into a “nanny state.”
You can see my responses on this video:
Regulating the food industry
But on another note, it is interesting to consider whether regulating the food industry would allegedly prohibit freedom of choice, especially since this freedom never existed (or could exist) in the first place. In thinking about this issue and preparing for it I found this piece by an attorney stating that the issue of free choice in the context of food in any culture is an illusion and doesn’t really exist. Buchanan basically argues that our tastes and preferences for foods are shaped by the cultural norms and those norms are influenced by the interactions between government and the food industry. In fact, it will always be that government will have some say in food choices we have as they do this very day. Buchanan states:
Therefore, when the government tries to change what people eat, it is not operating on a blank slate. Instead, people already face a busy marketplace of food messages. Thus, a person who objects to the government telling him what to do in this area of his life is, in essence, saying: “Don’t let Big Brother tell me what to eat. I do what the Pillsbury Dough Boy tells me.”
So it is not a question of government becoming more involved in food choices, it is a question of how they are involved. Regulating the food industry is already happening just in a different way. The current way that government is involved is not working. This is evident due to our current obesity and disease rates. Some of these grim statistics:
- One in three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes at some point in his or her life
- Overweight children today have the arteries of 45-year-olds
- One in five teens has an abnormal cholesterol level increasing their risk for the number 1 cause of death in the US, a totally preventable death
So if the current interactions between the government and the food industry have set the stage for all this suffering, disease and death, then the ways our government is regulating the food industry need to change.
