Farmer's Fate

Putting the government in our kitchen
Lately there’s been a lot of hype about healthy diets: what to eat, what not to eat. What to cook with, what not to cook with. What to do about trans fats.
Trans fats occur naturally, in small quantities, in meat and dairy products. Most trans fats consumed today, however, are industrially created as a side effect of the partial hydrogenation of plant oils. Partially hydrogenated oils are attractive to food manufactures for several reasons: it reduces rancidity and consequently increases product shelf life and decreases refrigeration requirements—the downfall is that it increases the risk of heart disease.
New York City’s Board of Health voted to ban trans fat in restaurant food in December. Restaurants will be barred from using most frying and spreading fats containing trans fats above 0.5 g per serving by July 1, 2007, and will have to meet the same target in all of their foods by July 1, 2008.
Supporters are praising the new measures and probably wishing other states would adopt them as well. But research also directly links chewing tobacco to mouth cancer—the government isn’t stepping in to “fix” that problem.
So why are we asking the government to do our cooking? When questioned, American’s typically say the government is already in too much of their lives…yet here we are asking them to supervise our diets. While cleaning up our diets isn’t a bad idea for most of us—is it really the government’s job to oversee it? What’s next? Micromanaging our tooth brushing habits—after all, poor dental hygiene can cause gum disease.