Progressives Turn Food Into A Political Movement

June 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Since the beginning of the progressive movement socialists have been obsessed with what people eat. It largely begins in the United States with Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle” which prompted Congress to pass all sorts of food regulations. Never mind that by the time Congress acted the free market had already forced reform within the meat packing industry. The National Socialists in Germany were obsessed about creating super Ayrans through food, Hitler is a famous vegetarian. It continues today with the progressive lefts obsession with organic food and opposition to non-organic food and GMO’s. It’s one thing to enjoy tasty food, it’s another thing to make a political movement out of food.

EU Bureaucrat and American food writer Michael Pollan has declared that “it’s not food if it comes though the window of your car.” Don’t you just love how these self appointed experts get to declare what is or isn’t food, largely based on their own personal preferences. This is the language of the progressive food movement though, their goal is to put anyone who opposes them on the defensive by declaring their position to be in favor of “not food.” You may or may not enjoy eating at McDonald’s but it is absurd to suggest that the food made there isn’t in fact food. It has nutritional value, whether the progressives like hearing it or not.

Another go to issue for the progressive left is their unwavering opposition to GMO’s. A few weeks ago the left held protests in a couple hundred cities against GMO’s and Monsanto. Monsanto is the new boogyman on the left. It’s become like Haliburton, they just say the name and we’re all supposed to know what they’re talking about. In any event, the left insists GMO’s are dangerous and going to kill us all. They of course don’t have a shred of evidence to support that claim. That won’t stop them from trying to scare people into opposing GMO’s. After all, they’ll just declare it’s “not food” thus isolating the opposition and putting them on the defensive.

The fact is, GMO’s are a great blessing for the world. By changing a gene or two in corn or some other vegetable, Monsanto is breeding a vegetable that isn’t as susceptible to certain bugs. They’re making stronger vegetables, able to grow in more varied climates. There are arguably billions of people without daily access to food across the globe, GMO’s can feed these people by making sure crops aren’t destroyed by pests and by making sure the crops planted are as strong and as likely to survive as possible. We should be rejoicing over God’s blessing, instead the progressive left wants all of this stuff declared poison and banned. Anyone who thinks the left really cares about poor people is fooling themselves. If they cared about poor people, they would support GMO’s.

Yours truly is a bit of a foodie, so I understand wanting to eat good food. A line has to be drawn though when food becomes a political movement. Whether you like hearing it or not, no one can tell the difference between an egg bought at Kroger’s and a “free range” egg from some farm. You’re dreaming if you think there’s a difference between so-called factory beef and beef from some farm that declares their beef “natural.” (assuming we’re talking about the same breed of cow and same quality (choice or prime)) None of these things are any healthier for you either. If you want to spend the extra money on it, eat your heart out. However, don’t become a snob and look down on those of us who either don’t share your interest or can’t afford it. Food is an interest, it isn’t a political movement. Or at least it shouldn’t be a political movement.

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Soda Ban Exposes Progressive’s Totalitarian Desires

March 13, 2013 2 Comments

By now everyone has heard that a judge issued an injunction against Nanny Bloomberg’s soda pop ban. I haven’t had the opportunity to read the opinion (I don’t even know if a written opinion was even issued) so I don’t know what law the judge applied in issuing his injunction. Since I’m not a lawyer in New York and am generally unfamiliar with their laws I wouldn’t want to guess. In this issue we’ve seen the far left show their true colors. They want to control our every move. It’s hilarious that they’ve exposed themselves on an issue as ridiculous as this. Make no mistake, they’ve exposed themselves.

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski threw a hissy fit over this ruling. She declared that movie theater owners were killing people with salty popcorn and pop. She declared sugar is poison, then told us we should be mad at ourselves for buying pop and other products that contain “poison.” She then exposed what the left is really up to in all of this. Brzenzinski declared that the sugar industry is going to be brought down via litigation, just like the tobacco industry. That isn’t really a surprise but Brzezinski is probably about five years ahead of the curve here. Make no mistake though, litigation is being eyed by liberal groups on this matter.

Meanwhile our old pal Piers Morgan wondered on Twitter what the point of being Mayor is if the Mayor can’t make his city healthier? For those who pay attention to the news in New York, Brooklyn broke out in fights the other day. The job of the Mayor isn’t to regulate what people eat, it’s to make the streets safe. Morgan went further in declaring that sometimes we need the nanny state to tell us what to do. Adults ought to be able to decide for themselves whether they want 17oz of pop or not. In the world of Piers Morgan, that’s a decision best left to the government.

Nanny Bloomberg is addicted to cheez-it’s. You know, those disgusting bright orange, salty crackers. It’s funny how he isn’t trying to place restrictions on the purchase of food he likes. It’s only soda and other sugar drinks that he wants to place restrictions on. Part of the problem here is that we’ve allowed government to get involved in our healthcare. If we were responsible for our own healthcare, then we would bear the cost of being overweight. Instead, government is paying the bill and we can hardly be surprised when government pays the bill that they want more control over the personal decisions we make.

The future of healthcare and freedom in this country is pretty clear. If you want single payer, socialist healthcare then you have no problem with the government restricting what we put into our bodies. If the government foots the bill for every medical procedure we have, they’re going to want a say in you eat. The left will tackle this in three ways. They’ll tax foods they don’t approve of, they’ll sue the manufacturers of foods they don’t approve of and they’ll ban foods they don’t approve of. Personal choice, personal responsibility and personal freedom won’t exist anymore.

What the left is offering is nothing short of a totalitarian state. What we eat may seem like a minor issue but it isn’t at all. There is nothing more personal than what we choose to eat. It affects all of us daily, usually several times daily. It’s bad enough that government has banned unpasteurized cheese from Europe, we don’t need them limiting how much Coke or how many french fries we consume. These matters are simply none of the government’s business and yet they are because of the socialist health system we’ve allowed to slowly creep into existence since the 60′s. Nanny Bloomberg is just the beginning. It’s easy to dismiss him as an extremist. In a decade though governments across the country will be enforcing the same ban he’s tried to place in New York City. Courts across the country will hear cases against food manufacturers for selling “poison” to people. Give it time, the far left playbook is abundantly clear. They want totalitarian government and they’ll stop at nothing to get it.

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NYC Schools Don’t Produce Readers, Mayor Focused On Food

March 8, 2013 2 Comments

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (aka Nanny Bloomberg) has made a name for himself for tackling the “tough” issues of transfat, smoking, drink size, salt and calorie counts. Meanwhile crime is up in New York and 80% of city high school graduates can’t read sufficiently. But they aren’t fat and unhealthy anymore! Except that they are because Nanny Bloomberg can’t stop people from buying two pop’s and eating whatever they please. Bloomberg is derelict in his actual duties as mayor: Governing the city. His error is buying into the progressive notion that we can create a perfect society through government regulation.

Nanny Bloomberg’s food and smoking laws are straight out of the progressive playbook of a century ago. It’s a playbook that brought the United States the 18th amendment (prohibition). Society would be so much better if only alcohol was banned. It’s a playbook that Adolph Hitler bought into. He was a vegetarian not because he liked vegetables but because he believed it created superior men and a superior race. He was essentially a vegetarian for political purposes. Bloomberg obviously isn’t a German National Socialist but the playbook he’s playing from is the same, it’s been around for over a century.

The playbook is simple, deny people choice via government action. The progressive sees a problem, real or imagined, and then seeks a government solution to the problem. The solution is then sold to voters as something the “experts” think will save us all. The proposal will create a better society, a stronger society and in the case of food a healthier society. We’ll be a stronger nation, a stronger city, a stronger race if only we give up our freedom and allow government action in our lives. Bloomberg in this respect is no different than the Christian Women’s Temperance Movement or any number of other groups that have wanted government to ban this or that food or drink over the last century.

The problem is that society cannot be made great through government micromanagement. We cannot create a super race by banning meat. We cannot create a healthy society by government banning large drinks or outlawing certain kinds of fats. Absent requiring people to go to the government each day to stand in line for an approved meal, there’s nothing government can do to prevent people from eating too much if they so desire. Even in this example, there’s always a black market for subversives who want a treat.

Bloomberg’s city is crumbling back to what it was before Guilianni. Crime is up, the schools are getting worse. Hurricane Sandy exposed the negative side of the culture of welfare dependence. Bloomberg has no solution to those folks problems other than to point fingers. Bloomberg isn’t doing the job that matters to average New Yorkers or the sort of job that would matter to any of us if he were Mayor in our town. Nanny Bloomberg is obsessed with what people are eating, it’s frankly none of his business. He will not create a healthy New York via government regulation. Just like prohibition, Bloomberg’s food regulations will be another in a long line of failed progressive programs. Meanwhile there’s a hold up in the Bronx and Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.

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Nanny Bloomberg Seeks Baby Formula Restrictions

July 30, 2012 23 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to see progressives get outraged discuss child rearing with them. Yours truly had no idea progressives were so thin skinned about children until my wife and I had our first kid. That’s when we got bombarded by various progressives both inside and outside of the church. From radical evolutionist parenting called attachment parenting to natural child birth and breast feeding, if my wife and I were ever looking for a fight or to be insulted and ridiculed we needed to do nothing more than oppose progressive child rearing, announce our intention to formula feed or have my wife declare an intention to have her babies in a hospital, with drugs or, gasp, even have a c-section. The wrath of progressive parents was sure to be felt for merely voicing an opposing view and sadly we unwittingly lost friends in the church over it. 

With that history in mind, it surprised me not to see that Nanny Bloomberg wants to regulate baby formula. Apparently New York’s most powerful nanny wants hospitals to hide baby formula and brow beat women into breast feeding. So much for women choosing things for themselves. The anti-formula crusaders are to be found all over the place in the crunchy world of progressive parenting. These people love to whip out their breasts in public in order to shock and appall normal people going about their daily business. There’s something about progressives that’s off, they always seem in desperate need to shock people.

Like with most things in life, what you choose to do with your kids is none of my business. If you want to breast feed or formula feed your baby, what’s it to me? If you want to have a natural child birth or if you want drugs or a c-section, again what’s it to me? That’s not how these progressives view things though. They view it as their duty to “educate” people who disagree with them and gain new converts, these people border on being a pushy religious sect. If I had a nickel for every time my wife was told about the evils of formula feeding (never prompted of course) or the evils of doctors and their c-sections we would be millionaires. They view disagreement as not only a personal attack but also an attack on the progressive agenda whereas non-progressives view disagreement as just disagreement.

At the end of the day though, how you parent your kids is your business. If you want to do crazy things with them like sleep with them, breast feed them until they’re 8 years old or allow a baby to dictate your every waking moment, that’s your business. If I choose to put my kids on a schedule, formula feed them or if my wife chooses to have a c-section, what business is that of yours? If only it were that simple. The progressives believe they know how to run my life better than I do and as such they view it their duty to confront me on everything they consider “bad” about my parenting choices. If I won’t listen, then they’re more than willing to lobby government to write a law.

The laws begin with Nanny Bloomberg outlawing baby formula. Next thing you know Obamacare won’t pay for C-sections. Next thing you know Child Protective Services will knock on the door of families who don’t sleep together in the same bed. We conservatives will scratch our head the entire time and wonder what’s going on. Our mistake is that we have no idea what the progressives are up, we have no idea how far their tentacles reach not just in government but in philosophy. We’ve written off progressives as being anti-child because they’re pro-abortion. In reality, they have a very clear agenda that extends to parenting. So far reaching is their agenda that it has infected what would otherwise be conservative churches.

Next time Nanny Bloomberg comes out with another absurd regulation or demand, keep in mind he’s following the progressive agenda to the letter. Nothing he does should surprise us, even when he wants to severely regulate baby formula. Anyone who is surprised by Bloomberg’s attacks on need only check out the agenda at Mothering Magazine and Gentle Christian Mothers. If these people want to do weird parenting things with their kids, that’s their business. But the problem is they want to not only confront the rest of us and attack our methods but they’re willing to demand government pass laws to further their agenda. Thus, Nanny Bloomberg is in lock step with the progressive mothers. We conservatives need to do a better job of understanding these people.

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Food Nazi Alert II: Now They’re After Popcorn and Milk!

June 13, 2012 5 Comments

Just a couple weeks ago New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a ban on the sale of pop if it is larger than 16oz. We here at Steven Birn Speaks roundly criticized Nanny Bloomberg’s proposal. The health board that will ultimately decide, in favor, of the over 16oz pop ban isn’t limiting its intrusion onto New Yorkers lives to sugary drinks. They’ve already fallen for the slippery slope argument, they’re proposing limits on the size of movie theater popcorn, milkshakes and milk heavy coffee drinks. Once they’ve banned large popcorn and limited your milkshake intake, one wonders what they’ll be after next.

The food nazi’s, really food socialists (nazi’s are socialists afterall), aren’t simply trying to combat the made up epidemic of obesity. They’re exactly the same as the global warming alarmists. They’re manufacturing a crisis and demanding massive control over our lives to combat a non-problem. The idea that people are suddenly fat today is ridiculous. People have been fat throughout human history, including people in our parents and grandparents generation. The average young American today for example is one inch and ten pounds heavier than the average world war two soldier. Heavier yes, but also taller which explains the added weight.

We do not have a crisis of fat people. It’s completely made up and trumpeted by a media that will repeat anything that will gain power for the government. They focus on morbidly obese people who weigh 500 pounds or more and because the media focuses so much on these people others think it’s become normal when it has not. They’ve done the same thing with homosexuals. Nearly a third of young women think 25% or more of the population is homosexual when in reality around 2% are. It’s all because the media hypes homosexuals. The media is doing the same thing with the morbidly obese, they focus so much attention on them that people think that 500 pound fat cat ladies are everywhere when they aren’t.

The other thing to question is what we’re calling obese today. They’ve created the statistical levels so that nearly half of us fall into the obese category, even those who most of us would look at and assume are only a couple pounds overweight. If you’re 10 pounds over the health nazi’s “ideal” weight they’ll call you obese. These people then run to the media with their statistics and suddenly we’re all nervous and want someone (government) to “do something” about it.

Nanny Bloomberg and his board of health nuts has plans to “do something.” This includes limiting your access to the foods of your choice including pop, popcorn, milkshakes and creamy coffee drinks. These folks are just getting started to, in a couple weeks they’ll be banning double cheeseburgers, footlong hot dogs and large new york pizza slices. After that they’ll ban everything larger than a small french fry and bags of chips over a couple ounces. Then they’ll be after ice cream sundaes, no doubt Burger King’s bacon sundae will be first on the ban list, onion rings, pie, cake, new york cheesecake and fried chicken. Give these people time and they’ll ban everything fried, everything sweet and everything that tastes good.

The worst part about this is that if the Democrats dream of single payer healthcare ever passes, people will go right along with these infringements on food liberty because of an imagined healthcare cost savings. It matters not that the experts are lying about how fat people are, it matters not that they create artificially low weights in order to make us all obese. We’ll buy into freedom infringement because we imagine it will save us money. When it doesn’t, well we’ll have forgotten all about our freedom lost by then. It starts with Nanny Bloomberg’s pop ban. When will the infringement on liberty end?

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Food Nazi Alert: Nanny Bloomberg Bans Large Drinks

June 1, 2012 12 Comments

New York City Mayor Michael “Nanny” Bloomberg wants to ban large drinks. Apparently Bloomberg is convinced that large coffee’s and large pop’s are making Americans obese. This “problem” is something Bloomberg thinks government must take on. A century ago progressives like this were trying to ban alcohol, now they’re trying to ban drinks with sugar in them. He isn’t concerned about milkshakes with all their fat and sugar. He isn’t concerned about large 32oz beer’s with all their calories served at Yankee Stadium and bars throughout the city. Nor is he concerned with doughnuts and all their fat and sugar. In fact, the Mayor endorsed National Doughnut Day with a video!

It’s only sugar drinks over 16oz that Bloomberg wants a piece of. He believes it’s his duty to “force you to understand.” He isn’t banning us from doing things, he’s simply forcing us to understand. How Orwellian. Adults can and should be free to make their own drink size choices. It really shouldn’t be any of the government’s business one way or the other. Bloomberg’s plan fails in that there’s nothing stopping me from buying two or more 16oz drinks. It also fails to combat obesity by failing to ban milkshakes, doughnuts and doritos. The problem though is that it’s a step in that direction. The progressives learned from prohibition. Going at it all at once is a bad idea, taking it step by step works. Food totalitarianism here we come!

One of the problems with government control of healthcare is that it leads to a reasonable argument for government micromanaging our lives. If it saves the state money to micromanage us by banning drinks, it becomes a taxpayer savings argument that may even draw in conservatives. A quarter of Americans are on Medicaid these days, almost as many are on Medicare. In New York it may be even higher. Suddenly obesity, which should be little more than a private issue, becomes a “public health” issue.

This is where Obamacare becomes so problematic because it will lead to socialist single payer healthcare. Rather than having fat people pay higher rates for their health insurance, taxpayers are going to be stuck paying for fat people’s healthcare. That gives incentive to people like Bloomberg, who want to micromanage our lives, to propose laws that actually do so. Step by step of course. One morning we’ll wake up to discover that we aren’t allowed to drink pop, we aren’t allowed to have an egg cream and National Doughnut Day will have long since been banned.

Bloomberg is trying to force us all to understand. What he doesn’t understand though is that we adults already know that sugary drinks can make us fat. We simply don’t care. We make choices, we’re adults who understand that the momentary pleasure of drinking a pop could lead to the undesirable consequence of obesity. We’ve made a rational choice not to care about the latter. We of course won’t even get into the absurd statistics which have been manipulated to show that nearly all of us are obese when in fact most of us are simply a few pounds overweight.

Bloomberg needs to understand what freedom is. It is not his job as Mayor to micromanage the lives of the people of New York just like it’s not the job of the President t micromanage the lives of Americans. Bloomberg is proposing food totalitarianism. If successful you can bet it will be coming to a city near you soon. Mayor’s across the country have power envy, once one mayor achieves an amount of power over the people in his city every other mayor wants the same power. New York first, San Francisco next, then Chicago then your small city. Meanwhile freedom falls by the wayside.

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Food Tyranny in Chicago: Brown Bag Lunches Banned

April 11, 2011 2 Comments

Michelle Obama’s dreams of tyrannical food control are coming true at some Chicago government schools. It seems homemade lunches are banned at more than a few Chicago government schools. Unless a child has an allergy he is stuck eating the slop that the government school hands out at lunch. His parents have no choice. The government school lunch costs $2.25 if the Federal government isn’t subsidizing it. Not surprisingly the politically connected school lunch company Chartwells-Thompson stands to make a fortune if more schools ban parents from sending their kids to school with a homemade lunch.

The arrogance of the government schools is sort of incredible. They apparently believe it is their responsibility to make sure children eat what they consider to be healthy food. According to one principle:

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

Since when was it the job of the government schools to protect children from themselves? Since when was it their job to step in and prevent parents from determining what their kids eat for lunch? It’s this sort of power that government should not have over students or anyone and yet most turn a blind eye when the government schools declare that they alone will determine what kids eat for lunch.

What’s going on in Chicago does little more that set children up for a lifetime of servile dependency on the state, which is exactly what the socialists at the government school want. They want children to grow up depending on the government to determine what is best for them. They want them to grow up with only the choices that the government decides to bestow on them. What these socialists don’t want is for children to have free and unfettered access to choices that the school or government doesn’t approve of.

One of the goals of the government schools has always been to train the next generation to rely on the state. The schools have always been viewed as the way for socialists to change the next generation. This dates back to Dewey and Mann, the founding fathers of modern government schools. Parents have long been seen as an impediment to radical socialist change dating back to the very beginning of modern government schools. So it should come as no surprise that the next government school movement, the control of food, views parents as the problem and thus seeks to isolate parents from their kids. Ironically the government schools will try to deflect blame for poor test scores by blaming parents when all along they have tried to keep parents away from any serious decision making at the schools.

It is none of the government’s business what our children eat. It is therefore none of the government schools business what parents choose to serve their kids for lunch. Even if we agree that a lot of parents give their kids unhealthy food to eat, that is not cause for government to step in. Parents have an inalienable right to raise their children and thus feed their children as they see fit. Haughty government bureaucrats do not know better than parents and should not be allowed to substitute their judgment with the force of law.

Michelle Obama’s food campaign is dangerous because it seeks to turn know it all government bureaucrats into absolute authorities on healthy eating. Those bureaucrats in turn will substitute their judgment for that of parents. Every time the left gets up in arms about something like food it leads to less freedom for parents and more government control in the lives of children and families. That is exactly what is going on in Chicago today. Mrs. Obama may be jumping for joy in one of her frumpy designer outfits but what she wants costs the American people in freedom. Parents alone should be free to determine what their children eat for lunch. Government needs to steer clear of usurping parental authority.

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