Cook Like Mad

For a long time organizations such as the Center for Consumer Freedom have been educating and warning the public about hysterical food police attempting to restrict and dictate our consumption decisions in America. From this proposed Mississippi bill, you can now understand, in just one example, why they have been so insistent on their admonitions to the public that we must stand up for ourselves in the face of these self righteous food regulators. Here is the main clause, taken from HB 282 itself, if you aren’t already familiar with the news:

from: http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/2008/pdf/history/HB/HB0282.xml

…you get the point. The bill goes on to say that it will be within state rights to revoke the permit of any restaurant caught violating this bill, and that the bill is set to go into effect on July 1, 2008. Oh, and the restaurants that qualify? Any that contain five or more seats for customers.

While it’s not easy to write with my stomach turning from this news, let me say a few words about this bill and it’s demented focus. It is easy to find out on the web that Mississippi is the U.S.’s fattest state. With 31.4% of their population obese, and 66.7% obese or overweight, they top the chart, but not too far above even the leanest state, Colorado, whose population is 18.2% obese and 54.9% obese or overweight. It should also be noted that every single state in the U.S. (excluding Hawaii, for lack of available data), has seen the percent of their obese population increase in the last year, so let’s not act like Mississippi is the only state struggling with the health problems an obese population faces. If I lived in Colorado, I wouldn’t be throwing a parade over my state’s statistics.

However, there are ways to help overweight and obese individuals become healthier, and denying them food, is not a moral solution, in fact, it is bigotry. While this bill does not directly state that it “hates” obese people, as my use of bigotry would infer, it does mandate a policy of intolerance on these individuals, which is key to the definition of this term.

I have touched before on topics like schools disallowing students from bringing in birthday cakes, but this trumps puny school rules. This is going to take more than a PTA meeting to override; it is going to require cultivating a fresh perspective on our American obesity epidemic. While this bill tries to slim down the obese Mississippi population by denying them food at the restaurants they have the right to dine in, what stops these same individuals from buying food that maintains or increases their weight? Are supermarkets going to follow suit and place scales and BMI calculators at their entrances? Are cameras going to be placed in homes and on the streets to monitor each morsel of food an obese person puts in his/her mouth? Furthermore, is this movement going to stay in the reactive realm or move to the preventative one? As states become more and more overweight, are individuals with BMIs in the “healthy” range going to face restrictions, too? Surely some individuals counted among the obese population were once within a healthy BMI range- can the state legislators prevent this transition from normal to obese by slowly increasing the margins of what we consider obese, thereby preventing these individuals the pleasure to dine in their desired restaurants, too?

There are many other factors here that many have not yet addressed in regards to the topics of weight and responsibility (both of the restaurants and the individuals). Trans fat was recently banned in New York City, but portion sizes are larger than ever in NYC and around the country. Can’t we have both value and reasonable portions? Can we not tell when we’re full anymore? Do we even care? Has the sense of fullness shifted from a biological signal to a perturbance we slowly train ourselves to ignore?

I think the solution to our growing obesity problem is greater responsibility for both individuals and restaurants. While customers may be dismayed initially to see portion sizes decrease, prices would also, and that’s always welcome. In the short term, restaurants may have difficulty reestimating the amount of food they need to serve their customers, and they may also have to deal with angry customers, but if the quality remains, and prices decrease, I believe the upset would be short lived.

In terms of individual responsibility, it all comes down to education. There are very successful children’s programs known around the country for their effectiveness in teaching the next generation how to eat to live, and respect their body’s internal signals of fullness and hunger. For adults, the path may be trickier, but public outreach, community nutrition counseling, more transparent food labeling are all steps in the right direction. I am not an expert on this topic, and these are just my opinions, but education is often an effective tool for positive long-term change.

If you had not heard the news of the Mississippi bill before reading this, I am glad I was able to alert you to this important piece of consumer news, and if you had, I hope this post brought something new to the discussion. Please feel free to comment on this post and let me know your sentiments.

-M

Posted February 4th, 2008 under Food. Tags: food legislation, food police, hb 282, mississippi bans obese, mississippi fattest state, mississippi hb 282, mississippi obese, mississippi obese law, mississippi overweight
RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.