Posted by
Steve on Friday, September 23, 2011 2:34:52 PM
The food police are coming for your dinner. If you doubt that, look at New York City and their Mayor Bloomberg. He has taken the salt shaker from the tables in an effort to reduce salt usage in the City. Michelle Obama got Darden Restaurants to remove French Fries from their kid’s menus. There are more examples, but I think you get the point.
Restaurant owners are obviously worried about bland food in the future. So, they had the head of the Department of Agriculture come and talk. He said they are working on ways to make food taste better and be healthy. But, the kicker is that he also said that people will have to get used to the new taste of healthier foods. That means we will have to change our eating habits to suit the government, not because we want to.
Somewhere the food police seem to have forgotten about freedom. This country was founded on the idea of liberty and freedom. One of the first motto’s the country had was, “Don’t tread on me.” The entire idea of the American Revolution was to give more freedom to the people of the United States. That has been the goal of the people and government for over 250 years. Now, with the Obama administration we have the idea that freedom is somehow an outmoded idea. The government can do anything it wants and people have to comply because the government knows best.
Everyone I know can tell numerous stories of how the government has messed up this or that. In fact, the government rarely gets things right. It may luck out and get it right in Maine, but that same idea flunks in Arizona. When I was with USDA, we had regulations that said we had to develop erosion plans for each farmer we worked with. That regulation made perfect sense in the Midwest. In Arizona, the regulation was majorly stupid. In the Midwest, every acre of ground is susceptible to erosion. An erosion plan is essential to insure that the ground stays there. In Arizona, to stop erosion, you have to irrigate. But, to grow a crop you have to irrigate. So, if you have cropland you control erosion. Governments don’t care that their ideas don’t work everywhere. They just make the rule and everyone has to jump through the hoop.
The idea that we need to reduce salt intake comes from a Nobel Prize winning scientist by the name of Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, one in Chemistry and one in Physics. He was not a biologist. He knew about as much biology as your average high school student. But, because he was a Nobel Prize winning scientist, he had credibility with government officials. There have been numerous studies trying to prove that his arbitrary amount of 2400 mg is the proper amount. So far, there has not been a single study that proves the idea true. John Stossel did a special on Junk Science about 10 years ago when he was with ABC. He does a better job of detailing this controversy than I do. But the bottom line is that someone took an idea completely out of thin air and the government has been running with it for the past 50 years. Now the food police have come into complete power under Obama. They are going to put this arbitrary rule into law. We are going to comply or go to jail if the food police have any say in the matter. For now, they have a lot to say. On November 6, 2012, they may lose their authority, but that is up to us.
Salt is just one of the things that the food police are coming for. It just happens to be the headliner. We have to stop them from enforcing this arbitrary amount or we will all be much less free. This is supposed to be the land of the free. It is not the land of the free if the Obama administration has any hand in it.