It’s for your own good, Fattie.
This is the most accurate summary of recent moves by New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Cambridge, Massachusetts Mayor
Henrietta Davis to limit the maximum size of sodas or other sugary
drinks sold within their fiefdoms.
It’s enough to remind you of the book Heather Has Two
Mommies except that in Manhattan, your second mother — most
unwelcome in your already happy home — is named Michael.
Whether it’s curbing cigarette
smoking, salty
foods,
trans-fats, food
donations to the homeless, and now my cherished Mountain Dew
Big Gulp, Mayor Bloomberg behaves, if not as your misery-making
step-mother then at least as a scolding, self-satisfied Nanny.
Bloomberg’s recent push, specifically, is to ban the sale of
sugary soft drinks — but not sugary milk-based drinks with just as
many calories — in sizes larger than 16 ounces. Whether he will
then try to make it illegal for someone to buy two drinks, or for
restaurants to offer two-for-one drink specials, or even try to end
the free refills that Americans currently know and love, is as yet
unknown.
Cambridge’s Nanny-in-Chief knows an inspirational intrusion on
personal decision-making when she sees one, so Ms. Davis has asked
her city health department to make a recommendation on just what
sweet drinks, and above what size, they should ban.
The smugness of liberal moralizing, of these petty tyrants’
certainty that we need the assistance of their joy-sapping
risk-avoidance to get safely through our days, is enough to make me
lose my appetite — until I imagine the gastronomic glee of a visit
to Five Guys (Bacon Cheeseburger calories: 920, plus another few
hundred in deliciously greasy fries…but I’ll have a Diet Coke with
that, thank you very much).
One may well ask where these mayors believe they have acquired
the authority to limit the size or the amount or the very
consumption of otherwise-legal food and drink. The mayors are
sometimes signing bills passed by their city councils at Big
Nanny’s suggestion, sometimes seeming to assume executive powers,
and sometimes relying on their visions of a little
Splenda-sweetened angel alighting on a shoulder, whispering sweet
but low-cal nothings into their ears.
But when it comes to their claimed authority over my diet,
frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
If there were ever a time for food-based civil disobedience, it
is now. It is time to stand up for our right to eat what we want,
to be left alone in our private lives. It is time to point out the
naked hypocrisy of those who scream that people’s choices regarding
what chemicals they ingest to prevent childbirth are private (yet
still somehow to be paid for by others) but that what we eat for —
or drink with — lunch (which we pay for with our own money) is a
matter of public concern.
One standard bit of rhetorical cover for nannyism is that it’s
“for the children,” something which the Cambridge mayor has
explicitly claimed regarding banning large sugary drinks. But there
are two problems with this fig leaf: First, young people are
unlikely to comprise more than a small minority of all
very-large-size drink sales. Second, and more importantly, several
studies point to sugary drinks and junk food being either a
minor factor or
not a statistically significant factor in childhood obesity —
not that different study outcome would justify government
involvement in the contents of my gastrointestinal tract.
These study results cannot have gone unnoticed by the Nanny
State-ists; it’s just that they are so sure they know better. The
data must be wrong since it conflicts with what they believe, what
they need, to be true. After all, if they can’t protect us
from ourselves, how will they earn the same fulfillment in life
that they hope to jam down our throats — as long as that
fulfillment comes in a low-calorie, low-salt, trans-fat-free
form?
Another usual argument for Nannyism is that the so-called
problem is a matter of “public health.” But unlike someone who has
a communicable disease, an overweight person cannot transmit weight
gain to someone he breathes on, works with, or shares a home
with.
And unlike the true public health risks that involve large
numbers of people potentially becoming ill or dead due to the
actions or inactions of others, the decision regarding what and how
much to eat is completely under each individual’s (or, in the case
of a child, his parents’) control.
Thus, even though many Americans are overweight, the issue is a
series of private health concerns, not a matter of public health
calling for government intervention — a term I use with specific
intent. And if it is not a matter of public health, Americans —
even those leftists in Manhattan and Cambridge who are so fully
getting the government they deserve — must throw off the shackles
of the gastronomic Grinches who are hell-bent on telling us what we
can or can’t eat, drink, or smoke.
The degree to which Mayor Bloomberg envisions himself and his
city government as a surrogate parent or nanny is made depressingly
clear in the language they use: The bans on smoking, trans-fats,
salts, and the proposed ban on large sugary drinks are called
“interventions,” as if we, the hapless, helpless, mindless
citizenry will eat or drink ourselves into an early grave without
the oh-so-caring ruining of our daily dining delights by the
bureaucrats of bland and boring.
Lest you think I overstate the nannyist mentality of Bloomberg’s
NYC Health Department, I refer you to the department’s “diabetes
surveillance program”, implemented in 2005.
Wendy Mariner, Professor of Health Law at Boston University
School of Law, framed the issue and question well:
The new health code regulations require medical laboratories to
submit to the Health Department the results of every patient’s
blood sugar tests, together with the patient’s name, date of birth,
address, physician, and other information. The report does not
require the patient’s consent. The Health Department will review
the reports to see which patients are not controlling their blood
sugar levels and will contact the physician, or sometimes the
patient, to encourage the patient to change his or her behavior by
losing weight, eating better, taking medication, and seeing a
physician more often. Is this an innovative way to improve the
health of several hundred thousand New Yorkers, a presumptuous
invasion of privacy, or usurpation of the physician’s
role?
If the answer isn’t obvious to you, you should probably move to
Manhattan or Cambridge.
Meanwhile, as New Yorkers and Cantabrigians
decide whether to allow government to turn them into obedient sheep
eating their obedient boring meals and drinking their obedient
sugar-free drinks, I echo the sentiments of one Susan
Crowell: Give Me a Big Gulp or Give Me Death.
