The Food Police Gain Ground Over the American Sheeple

Chain restaurants in the United States will be required to list calorie information on their menus starting in December 2016.

Chick-fil-A said that it did not reduce calories in its menu items because it decided to start posting them. “We have always been focused on providing a wide variety of menu options our customers can feel good about ordering and eating. … We added calorie counts to our menu boards because it was the right thing to do. Chick-fil-A believes in making it easier for our guests to make informed choices,” said Carrie Kurlander, vice president of public relations and public affairs at Chick-fil-A.

Panera “rarely” reduces calories in reaction to its voluntarily menu labeling, and instead its menu is driven by what chefs and bakers think are the highest-quality ingredients, said Sara Burnett, director of wellness and food policy at the company.

In an emailed statement, a Starbucks representative said the company allows customers to customize beverages and provides nutritional information on its mobile app and website, but it did not address whether it has reduced calories in menu items since it began posting the calorie counts.

Jamba Juice and McDonald’s did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. [Source: cnn.com 11/3/15]

Who should decide what goes into people’s mouths and bodies? The FDA? Or the businesses who make the food?

Probably half the population will say the businesses – the fast food chains, the restaurants and the others making the food.

Probably the other half of the population will say the FDA and the government should ultimately decide. Maybe a slight plurality on that side, is my guess, since faith in expansive government seems to be at an all-time high.

However, it’s a question with a faulty premise.

The question should not be: Who decides – the government or the restaurant?

There should be three choices offered: The government, the restaurant owners … or the customers eating the food?

Because, in the end, it’s the customers who decide what to put into their mouths and stomachs. It’s not the government, and it’s not the restaurants.

Nor should it be.

Restaurants do not force customers to do anything. So long as nobody holds a gun to their heads, they’re eating the food of their own free will.

Some will reply, “But fast food can be an addiction. You no longer have control once you’re addicted.”

No, that’s not true. The “101” of addiction management is that YOU – the addict – take control of your life and STOP blaming other parties for your own choices, however self-defeating those choices might have become.

Regardless of how you view or conceptualize addiction (or whether you even call it addiction), the fact remains: No restaurant or business forces or compels its customers to do anything.

How deeply insulting of our federal government to state or imply otherwise. Aren’t you disgusted and angry? I know most are not. Which is what troubles me most about the state of our culture.

A people this sheepish, selfless and submissive cannot go on this way for long. We’re sitting targets for terrorists or anyone else who wishes to bring us down. We won’t even stand up to our own food police. How on earth can we expect to give ISIS any pause?

Forcing restaurants to list calorie information next to the items on their menu is not something the government has any moral or political right to do. I cannot believe I even have to say this, or that anybody has to do so. I cannot believe that this is probably now a minority view, in the USA of all places.

What happened to you, America?

Calorie counts are readily available to anyone who seeks to keep track of them. In fact, the greatest success I ever observe with sustained weight loss are the people who create a “calorie economy” of the sort fostered by Weight Watchers and other such programs.

Politicians and others connected with the federal government know all this. But it’s not helping people lose weight that’s their goal here. It cannot possibly be that. Their actual goal here is to initiate coercion and intimidation against businesses.

It’s their way of saying, “We hold businesses, especially big businesses like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, responsible for the fact that so many people are getting fat.”

Somebody has to get the blame. It certainly cannot be the people putting the extra calories into their mouths and bodies, can it? So it’s the evildoers who make money at it who must be punished.

Is there fraud or coercion involved on the part of these big businesses? Of course not. Such laws are wrong, totally against the Constitution, and totally in violation of individual rights, including basic property rights. Few seem to know or care about these things any longer, but it’s true all the same.

These regulations do not merely “make for a more informed customer.” They deliberately heap red tape on businesses in hopes of (1) making those businesses less profitable for the hated profit-makers who run them; and (2) making their products more expensive in hopes that fewer people will eat them, and America will become a land filled with thinner people as a result.

Ridiculous. And wrong, in every conceivable way.

You cannot kid yourself that such laws make any difference to people who are already in the habit of eating too much. These regulations presume that the great majority of people who eat too much would stop doing so if the number of calories were placed in front of them. “How many calories in this Big Mac? Oh. I won’t eat it then. Throw it away.” That’s absurd. For one thing, those concerned with their calories are already counting those calories, and taking other corrective measures such as exercise, etc. They either avoid or minimize their contact with restaurants who serve the highest calorie food.

As for those who are medically self-negligent, indifferent or otherwise unconcerned with calories – how is this law imposed by Washington DC supposed to change anything? So long as the government does not pass a law forbidding these restaurants to serve fattening food, and so long as the government does not pass a law mandating what people’s diets will be (using police and cameras installed in homes and in cars to enforce it), those who are indifferent to calories will continue to eat just as much.

So you food police advocates out there…how far are you willing to take this? If making America thinner is your real goal, is this just a beginning? If it’s the right and responsibility of the federal government to force restaurants to tell people the number of calories they’re eating, how long before we take the policing to another level?

None of this is about the health of Americans. It’s about control and punishment of success. Whenever the government goes outside the bounds of its constitutional limits (about 90-95 percent of what it currently does), it’s always about control and punishment of success.

The people who run our government and pass the laws are mostly career politicians. They are in the field they chose because they lust for power. They rationalize their lust for power as helping others. Control freaks always do.

This is truly mental disorder. It’s sickness. It’s psychopathology to impose these insulting mandates on restaurants. Why? Because it’s really a way for the government to tell the people, “We don’t approve of what you’re eating. These big, powerful restaurants have to submit to us and do what we say. Watch what you eat, or you could be next.”

The federal government might as well install bureaucratic schoolmarms in fast food restaurants throughout the nation, saying things like, “Tsk, tsk,” and “Shame, shame” as people wait in line for their Big Macs, Baconators, Whoppers and ice cream sundaes.

As sad and even disgusting as obesity or dietary self-negligence can be, there’s something far worse: The spectacle of a supposedly free nation permitting its government to take on this role, with barely a whimper in response.

This is one of the reasons why I sadly continue to think that it’s twilight in America. A reasonable, self-assertive people would not merely laugh at such a law; they would oppose it on principle.

Instead, we’re a nation of guilt-ridden, atonement-laden and morally-psychologically sheepish souls who refuse to stand up to the federal government installing itself not as a protector of rights where we need it, but as the food police.

If there’s one thing worse than a government that would do this kind of thing, it’s a nation of people who will tolerate it.