Food is Bad

Something is truly demented with the priorities of our society.

Here is an AP News Story that indicates our real problems are that food is too plentiful, too inexpensive, and too tasty.

Food Industry a Target in Obesity Fight

It's tempting to blame big food companies for America's big obesity problem.
...
Sure, companies set the stage with cheap, calorie-dense foods.

But government also has propped up agribusiness, the medical community was slow to take on obesity and good nutrition, and consumers seem determined to move less and eat more, says Tillotson, a former food industry executive.

But don't let that stand in the way of lawsuits to, what, destroy the evil food industry?

So that food becomes more expensive, calorie-poor, blander, and scarce?

Why are we obese?

Yale obesity expert Dr. David Katz says that's because companies aggressively peddle food to people who don't need it.

That's such an odd statement, isn't it?

Am I wrong, or don't people tend to be designed to eat a few times per day?

So who's to say the audience "doesn't need" food?

Without it, you die!

And "aggressively peddle"?

What business doesn't?

Teh article of course points out the "food industry" position of personal responsibility, but the critics respond:

Personal responsibility has limits in the face of a multibillion-dollar marketing whirlwind pushing countless high-calorie treats.

Just like "freedom of speech" has its limits when it "offends" a designated victim group, I suppose?

Furthermore, we:

can't explain the growing ubiquity of food or the ballooning portions of it, from bigger buckets of movie popcorn to McDonald's much vilified — and now defunct — Supersized burgers.

It's a menace! The growing ubiquity of food!

We must have scarcity!

Now it gets really weird:

But what if those companies engineered their foods to make you eat more of them? Though he acknowledges that evidence is scarce, Katz believes companies do just that, much the way tobacco companies were accused of tinkering with nicotine.

Research shows that people eat more when faced with a variety of foods, or even a variety of flavors within a single food. For example, you are less likely to overeat plain baked potatoes than those drenched in butter, salt, sour cream and chives.

Sugary cereals, Katz notes, have more salt in them than many potato and corn chips. Katz believes that's one way to make a cereal's flavor more complex and appealing to get people to eat more of it.

You see? The evil food industry makes food that is too tasty and too appealing!!!

We must have blander foods!

So the solution to tasty food, of course, is to sue the food industry into oblivion for its crimes:

"You can't get to a solution until you get a diagnosis. If you don't see the role of the junk food industry in causing the problem and in continuing to maintain the problem, you've missed a big part of the diagnosis," says Daynard, who is leading a soda industry lawsuit.

"Things that dramatically assign blame, like a lawsuit, help people make a diagnosis."

See, the real problem is that

consumers can't be counted on to want what's good for them.

There we go! That's how your typical left-wing fascist works. Deciding what's good for you then forcing it on you via big government, preferrably by judicial means because it's non-democratic and they wouldn't get their way otherwise.

Whatever the food industry's share of the blame, Tillotson, the Tufts professor, thinks obesity lawsuits are inappropriate and Congress is considering a measure to bar them. Food companies were asked to feed a hungry nation; suing now penalizes them for doing so, he believes.

Duh.

Tort reform is desperately needed to rein in these social-control-freaks.