Food Fight! by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #278 | @MDWorld

June 11, 2012 Mike Gold 16 Comments

Last Saturday I had the great pleasure of joining my fellow columnist Martha Thomases and two wonderful Detroit friends for brunch at a Manhattan restaurant. Nothing can be finer than good banter in a diner… in the morning.

This particular place was as unique as most other surviving Lower East Side institutions: a two-sided color photocopied menu with all sorts of concoctions ranging from the seemingly healthy to the obscenely dangerous. Despite the fact that three of the four of us are skinny as hell (ahem) and obviously work hard to stay that way, we had a meal with a combined calorie count that could feed Haiti for a month. Mine was possibly, and preposterously, the healthiest and I had homemade barbecue brisket (of course) with sweet pickles, some sort of strange purply-green vegetable, and a homemade raspberry foamy beverage.

Therefore it could come as no surprise that the prevailing conversation among this witty, intelligent, fast and very political group was about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent proclamation that New York will banish all sales of soda in containers larger than 16 ounces. Not a single thing on our table would be banned except, arguably, my raspberry beverage. We had enough congealing grease on those plates to oil the entire Manhattan subway fleet, but Mayor Mike wasn’t going after that. It was the 17+ounce soda that had to be stopped.

Hello? Compared to what? The mystery meat sold from carts on nearly every New York corner? The Nathan’s hot dog? Everything else on each and every fast-food menu in town… as well as most of the restaurants, both hoity and toity?

The Born Again Koch-Sucking Tea Baggers have been employing a very useful phrase, “nanny state,” and whose meaning they have since twisted into a pustular perversion, just as they did to the word “family.” This action is representative of the nanny state. We as adults have the right to make our own decisions regarding stuff that doesn’t affect others – most certainly, which evils we choose to consume. Are some of these decisions stupid and self-destructive? Certainly. I’ve jumped out of airplanes, gone bungee-jumping, taken ill-defined recreational drugs, and had sex with at least a few women who were obviously from other planets. And I eat barbecue as though it’s next on Bloomberg’s list.

Now if you’re going to respond with an argument about the health costs of ill-advised eating, you are going to lose. You do not want to go there. If you do, to be fair you’d have to ban alcohol, aspirin, many of not most pharmaceuticals, automobiles, jet engines, air conditioners, headphones, electricity production plants, factories, cows, insects, corn, lettuce, plastics, arms manufacturers, college fraternities and sororities, military organizations, and religion. It’s a really, really stupid and self-righteous argument.

To their credit, it appears most food fascists refuse to support the Bloomberg ban, including the most eloquent of their lot, Mets co-owner Bill (“but I kid food fascists”) Maher. The government should be advising us about such issues – the present First Lady’s health campaign, the previous First Lady’s literacy campaign – and I’m certainly in favor of ingredient listings and calorie counts: information that will allow us to make our own decisions. Food inspections and labor safety regulations are good things, as while I’m willing to chow down a Vienna hot dog, I’m not interested in an imbedded thumb.

Unfortunately, Michael Bloomberg doesn’t need anybody’s consent to push his initiative through. But the citizens of the city of New York are going to spend a fortune enforcing it and defending it in court.

Talk about out-of-control health costs…

—-
Mike Gold, whose blues name really is Barbecue Bones Jones, performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place, so listen to it already! He also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com, where he pontificates on matters of four-color.