Food Cops: Coming Soon to a Restaurant Near You?

The food cops are back.

With liberal Democrats running the two political branches of government, enthusiasts for the Nanny State are coming out of the woodwork. Chicago-and-Harvard law prof Cass Sunstein has been named the Obama administration's regulatory czar. (He replaces Susan Dudley, who came out of George Mason University's Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank.) Sunstein is the co-author of Nudge --the premise of which is that, because some people make stupid decisions, "choice architects" practicing "libertarian paternalism" should shape other people's options so that the booboisie will make the type of choices smarter people, like Sunstein, think they should make.

This might be accomplished by, say, taxing soft drinks -- a policy recently suggested by Michael F. Jacobson on the Huffington Post. Jacobson heads up the Center for Science in the Public Interest. You might remember the CSPI from its warnings over the years about movie popcorn, Chinese food, Italian food, fast food, and so on, all of which can be summed up as follows: Eat This and You Will Die.

Jacobson doesn't suggest you will die from drinking soda, but he does say you could get fat, and fat costs money: "Americans spend about $90 billion a year in direct medical costs related to obesity, of which half is paid with Medicare and Medicaid taxpayer dollars." (Note the subordinate clause; we'll come back to it shortly.)

Soda also is bad, Jacobson asserts, because "we all need food, but no one needs soda" -- a product he calls "liquid candy" and therefore "uniquely worthless." But not just soda: "The same is true for 'fruit drinks' with little juice, so-called 'energy drinks' like Red Bull, 'sports drinks' like Gatorade, or gimmicky products like VitaminWater." Solution? Tax them. A soda tax "would promote health and reduce health care costs."

The health-care angle rescues the soda tax from what otherwise might seem remarkable arrogance; without the cost argument, food cops like Jacobson sound as though they are setting themselves up in judgment over other people's personal choices. The cost argument transforms those personal decisions into public-policy questions: If you make poor dietary choices, then you are effectively raising taxes on other citizens by raising medical costs through Medicare, Medicaid, or similar programs such as FAMIS. Therefore, you should not be entirely free to make your own dietary choices.

YET AS IT turns out food, too, is problematic. It is problematic because (say the food cops) you are not really free to make dietary choices to begin with. So suggests David Kessler, who ran the Food and Drug Administration for a while back during the 1990s, in his new book on The End of Overeating. Through personal experimentation, Dumpster-diving behind chain restaurants, and other research, Kessler has discovered a diabolical plot by the food industry. Just as the tobacco industry manipulated nicotine to hook smokers, the food industry has carefully calibrated the salt, fat, and sugar content of foods to maximize the sensual pleasure we get from eating them. This gives a jolt to the reward centers of our brains, making us crave more than we need for sustenance.

"Hyper-palatable food," as Kessler calls it, is carefully engineered toward the "bliss point," the point at which we get the greatest pleasure from the various ingredients. The food industry is "design[ing] food for irresistability," Kessler says. "It's been part of their business plans."

In short: Food companies and restaurant chains work hard to make sure their offerings taste as good as possible.

Shocking, isn't it?

Kessler doesn't come right out and say food ought to be regulated as cigarettes are, but according to a Washington Post article, "Whether government ought to exercise tougher controls over the food industry is going to be the next great debate, especially since much of the advertising is aimed at children, Kessler said. 'The food the industry is selling is much more powerful than we realized.'"

THE ANALOGY between Big Food and Big Tobacco is a reach, but it does set up the dynamic that has worked so well in the past: Big Government stepping in to protect the little guy from an evil industry that takes advantage of his ignorance and weakness. The difference, of course, is that while Big Food can lure, entice, cajole, and seduce, it cannot coerce as government can. Nabisco can't have you arrested for walking away from a box of Oreos.

Now imagine Washington passes the type of health-care reform congressional Democrats seem to want -- the kind with yet another publicly subsidized program, which inevitably will siphon business from private insurers who can't compete with deficit financing. That expansion of government will, in turn, become a rationale for yet more expansion of government, of the type sought so assiduously by the food police. Because government is taking care of your health, it has the right (they will say) to tell you how to eat. And you have a duty to obey.

Other foods may cloy the appetite they feed -- but the desire for more government, it seems, is never sated.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .