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Noah Pollak Responds

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6/15/00 12:20 p.m.
Noah Pollak Responds
The author of "American Diet" strikes back at Jacobson's dissent.

By Noah Pollak, an editor of Restoration

he details of my article's controversial quote are as follows:

I called CSPI the morning of June 2nd and asked to speak to someone about the advertisement they ran that week. I was put on hold, and I finally hung up after several minutes. A few minutes later, I called back, explaining again that I wished to speak to someone about the advertisement, as I would possibly be writing an article about it. The phone attendant explained that few people were in the office that day, and after a few more minutes on hold, someone came on the line. I introduced myself and asked three questions; the conversation was brief and uninformative. I did not, upon getting this person on the phone, undertake a discussion on whether or not he was the absolutely correct person at CSPI to comment on their advertisement — I assumed that the phone attendant had selected the right person, or had asked someone knowledgeable at CSPI to find the right person, and that the person I talked to, knowing that he was charged with commenting on the advertisement, would have declined the task had he not been an appropriate spokesman.

I asked this person why CSPI advocates a junk-food sales tax but says that junk food manufacturers “can afford it,” and his reply is transcribed verbatim, honestly, and unembellished in my article. Tthe reason he sounds so inarticulate is because my question took him totally by surprise; it was evident that the thought had never crossed his mind. The reason I cannot furnish the name of the CSPI representative is entirely my fault, and entirely an accident: Over the last weekend, I was in my office performing a miscellany of tasks, one of them cleaning. My piece had been off NRO for several days, I had heard nothing more from CSPI or NRO about it, and in my weekend cleaning endeavors, I threw the piece of notepad paper — on which the quote and name were written — in the trash. This was careless and foolish, and I take full blame for the stupidity of the action — but it was nothing more than a mistake, for which I have apologized to CSPI and NRO.

On the substantive matters, a few observations:

Any American with the capacity to see knows that Americans are fat. If CSPI's real concern is that fat people cost taxpayers money through Medicare/Medicaid expenses, then why doesn't CSPI argue that only recipients of those welfare benefits should suffer taxation, and that those revenues be used to cover obesity-related health-care costs, rather than “lifestyle” advertising? CSPI essentially is not dedicated to the idea of the free society: There will always be very good reasons to demand that people change how they comport themselves, and articulate people will always be able to write intelligent justifications for the intrusion. But we must admit that it is an intrusion nonetheless, and that intrusions ineluctably destroy freedom. The controversy is not between who says he loves freedom and who says he does not, but rather, it is between who actually supports freedom and who does not. There is rarely one sudden, climactic moment when liberty is destroyed — it is chipped away and undermined constantly by people who, for an array of very convincing reasons, would prefer one more little policy — taxes on junk food, for example — in exchange for an equally little piece of their liberty. I offer the alternative of leaving people alone who, in their daily intake of the wrong foods, neither harm nor bother anybody.

“Whenever A annoys or harms B under the pretenses of improving B, A is a scoundrel.” — Henry Mencken

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