Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Food Fascists

Good humour from Tom Naughton



Now I am a Brit who thinks the NHS is generally good and can't understand the American horror at the idea of a national health service, but I sympathise with some of the ideas here - usually the fascists want to ban good food and leave the bad. Remember they want to ban butter, but subsidise grain.

5 comments:

ネイット said...

Man, kill the corn subsidies and the price of sugar goes up, so the price of most of the worst stuff goes up. No tax needed.
The price of meat and dairy would probably increase too, which is a bummer for me, but would also placate those with the "mainstream" conception of healthy. The global obesity epidemic is a pretty hefty cost just to line the coffers of ADM and the like.
As always, thanks for the blogging.

Methuselah said...

I am a liberal fascist. I want to simply ban foods that are bad. Yet I recognise people's right to eat what they want. Where do we draw the line? Most people don't advocate the sale of cocaine in supermarkets. It makes people feel great, but is very bad for them. Chocolate makes people feel quite nice, but in the long term, can be quite bad for you. Like cocaine, it rather depends how sensible you are. Does society suffer in either case? Arguably yes - but does it suffer more when our freedom to make our own choises is removed? Ideally our old friend the mass amnesia machine would come into play. The main problem with banning things to make the world a better place is all the people who can remember its availability...

SportsGuy said...

Well, Methuselah. Why not take your liberal fascism a bit more seriously and contemplate eliminating those people who remember and pine for those bad foods?

Chris said...

Methuselah

I know what you mean. My problem - like I said - is that my definition of what s good / bad doesn't match the rest of society most of the time. I think butter, red meat, cream, eggs etc are healthy et they are the things that the world wants to ban

Methuselah said...

Chris - I guess that's where we'd ideally like to turn to the 'experts' to be objective adjudicators... not much hope of that happening any time soon!

SportsGuy - because that would be fascist fascism ;-)