6.05.00
The American Diet

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Loss for Elian, No Victory for Clinton

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W. Blows Off Texas

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Bob Casey, R.I.P.

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"Art & Ideas" at The New York Times

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Tune Out, Light Up

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Patsy Get Your Gun: Rosie Needs It

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6/05/00 1:40 p.m.
The American Diet
The Center for Science in the Public Interest Should Move to France.

By Noah Pollak, an editor of Restoration

he advertisement is simultaneously ominous and cartoonish: “WE KILL AS MANY AMERICANS AS TOBACCO,” it says in large block letters, except that several have been replaced with similarly-shaped ice cream cones, hot dogs, slices of pepperoni pizza, and doughnuts — all of which may have the unintended effect of making people hungry rather than scared. Underneath The Center for Science in the Public Interest’s ad that appeared in Tuesday’s Washington Post is a longer lamentation on the insalubrity of American eating habits and the pressing need for some federal taxation to coerce proper nutrition.

CSPI’s analysis runs as follows: “The tobacco industry is on the defensive now. But makers of high-fat, high-calorie junk foods are on a marketing offensive. McDonald’s spends more than half a billion dollars a year on advertising-four times more than the Marlboro Man. Soft-drink makers, another $500 million. Portions are ‘supersize.’ Gas stations have become 24-hour candy stores. No wonder obesity is up 50 percent since 1991!” Having identified the problem (McDonald’s advertises? The audacity! The effrontery!), CSPI instructs that “it’s time for the federal government to step up to the plate on nutrition issues. For starters, Congress and the Clinton Administration should provide a minimum of $30 million to Centers for Disease Control for effective campaigns promoting healthy eating and physical activity. …If more money is needed, let’s charge a penny or two tax on soft drinks or other junk foods…to fund public-health campaigns. The junk-food makers can afford it. They’re living off the fat of the land.”

And there you have it-a philosophical and political disaster area, perhaps even worthy of federal assistance. The claim about living off the fat of the land makes absolutely no sense (aren’t the junk-food makers producing the fat?), and on purely economic grounds, the geniuses at CSPI seem totally bewildered as to how sales taxes work. I telephoned CSPI asking why their ad advocates a tax on soda but then says the junk-food manufacturers “can afford it.” Isn’t it true that consumers, not manufacturers, pay sales taxes? Indeed, wouldn’t that be the point of taxing junk food? Reply: “That’s a good question…uhhh…I’m not sure…hmm…yeah.”

Indeed, CSPI’s advertisers have cobbled together a remarkably clumsy argument. Americans are so fat, they say, because of external causes such as compelling advertising, scheming corporations, and seductively large portions; but on the other hand, CSPI’s preferred remedy is sumptuary taxes on the purchase of junk food and a federally-funded campaign that one assumes would be directed at reforming individual eating behavior — and CSPI still cannot bring itself to admit to the world that the sales taxes they recommend will penalize consumers instead of corporations; are designed to do so; or that Fat America can be explained by one ancient idea: gluttony.

Elite received wisdom holds that modern liberals are uncomfortable making moral judgments in the political arena of a personal nature, especially concerning the “lifestyle choices” about which they trumpet their enlightened agnosticism. But the truth is that liberals simply prefer to pick and choose when and where they will declare that the personal is political. The (Democratic) president’s pants: never! Gays in the military: sometimes. Smoking, gun owning, and, now, Twinkie-eating is morally and therefore politically suspect. If I don’t like Snickers bars, goes the thinking, then I must be able to deny everyone access to them.

Given the past few years’ activity against cigarettes, guns, and now food, the question arises, Why do some “things” (i.e. guns, cigarettes, potato chips) anger liberals so much? Elite leftists (and some elite Rightists) are appalled at how middle Americans choose to use their freedom: they smoke, play with guns, eat corporate fast food, and worst of all, are recalcitrant to social-engineering projects. The strategy appears to be to discourage and prevent access to these objects, which have no inherent moral substance, as a roundabout way of reengineering the people the left thinks, but will not call, immoral. If you can’t attack the choice, you simply eliminate it.

There are many other arguments against CSPI’s proposal: Taxes on junk food would be regressive, given that junk food eaters are overrepresented in the lower classes (a fact that would normally bring the more outraged liberals out of the woodwork). The ad says junk food kills “as many Americans as tobacco.” That means that no Americans are killed, because tobacco doesn't kill people-smoking does, and that is a choice, not a state of victimhood. And finally, CSPI is one of those groups that flippantly identifies everything it wants to regulate as a political problem requiring a government solution by simply affixing the “public” label, as in “public health” — with no explanation for how someone’s affection for Burger King is anything other than a private vice.

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