If you listen to the food scolds at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), adding some salt to your food is essentially mainlining cocaine. Michael Jacobson, the group’s president, has called salt the “deadly white powder you already snort” and has long campaigned against it (as has NYC Mayor Bloomberg). Food scolds demanded that the national health authorities reduce the sodium allowance (salt is, of course, sodium chloride) by one-third, and a committee of the never-unhappy-to-scold Institute of Medicine (the authors of...

> Read More

One of the less-remarked upon provisions of the national healthcare law passed in 2010 was a standardized calorie reporting requirement for restaurant menus in chains with more than 20 stores. We noted at the time that while it might fill a consumer desire to disclose calories, the mandate wouldn’t meaningfully reduce obesity rates. Supporters, however, pushed the fat-fighting narrative even as they admitted that evidence indicated that we were right. We asked at the time: So we have to ask: What if it doesn’t work? To...

> Read More

When the New York City soda ban was announced, among its most fervent partisans was MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski. She notably threw a fit when Judge Milton Tingling struck it down. This week, we found out why. Chasing this year’s well of food-related publishing cash, namely screaming from some New York park bench that food is being made “addictive,” she’s written a book titled Obsessed blaming the food industry for life’s problems. Echoing a political attack ad, she insinuates that food companies are waging war on...

> Read More

In today’s POLITICO (the daily newspaper for the professional political set) Marion Nestle and two fellow “preventive medicine” — the P.R.-approved name for food police — researchers expressed outrage that a Congressman would dare to suggest restricting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) propaganda slush fund. They claim that forbidding the CDC from “educating” the public about the horrors supposedly caused by foods and beverages would be horrible. They neglect to acknowledge the Congressman’s more important points: Not all the grants went for true...

> Read More

As California considers a punitive soft drink tax and a ban-anything-food-scolds-don’t-like law, would-be dinner dictators feel high on the hog. So as they promised in a journal article from last year, regulators are now proposing even more methods to shove Americans into changing their eating and drinking choices. British researchers now demand that the government put “cigarette-style” warning labels on soft drinks. But as Canada’s largest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, noted when a similar hysterical proposal—which also applied to pizza, snacks, and fruit juices—saw...

> Read More

German newsmagazine Der Speigel reports that Denmark plans to repeal its tax on sodas starting this year. The small European nation enacted and subsequently repealed a separate saturated fat tax. Demonstrating conclusively that people will get the beverages they want come what a government may do, the soda tax drove Danes to increase cross-border shopping and hurt local businesses. And a recently conducted Harris Poll shows that Americans are also livid with the suggestion that Yalies and billionaire mayors should dictate beverage choices. Respondents objected to...

> Read More

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) periodically raises alarm bells about pathogens in America’s generally very safe food supply. Now CSPI has released what it is calling a “risky meat” report, based on what meats have been tied to illness outbreaks over the past 12 years. The presentation is the usual CSPI hyperbole (think pasta alfredo as a “heart attack on a plate”), complete with a “food pyramid” of meats that will supposedly give you a bad case of the runs or...

> Read More

Michael Pollan, arch-foodie and author of the food-Luddite tome The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a new book out, entitled Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Like his previous efforts, the book calls hard-working Americans to more hard work in the kitchen, because Pollan believes that slaving over a cutting board is better for our souls or our health than allowing industry to help ease the load. To promote the new book, Pollan sat down with his comrade at The New York Times, Mark Bittman. Needless to say,...

> Read More

The food activist book industry has been hyperactive the past few months. Robert Lustig’s holy war against sugar was extended into book form. Melanie Warner proclaimed a crusade against so-called “hyperprocessed” food—of course, never turning to criticize the processed foods her prospective readers enjoy.  And Michael Moss of the New York Times insinuated a supposedly vast conspiracy, extending to every kitchen and kebab shop from Times Square to Tikrit, that people change food to make it taste too good. With the activists looking to whip up...

> Read More

The latest tactic by the nation’s food police is to classify foods as “foods of abuse” that are “addictive” and that should be regulated like tobacco cigarettes, alcohol, or even marijuana. Fortunately for gourmands gobbling gouda and commoners chomping on cheeseburgers alike, there is considerable evidence that this slipshod approach to neuroscience is fatally flawed. The European Food Information Council recently released a synopsis of two Cambridge University efforts to scrutinize the existing data ostensibly supporting the theory, which we have noted before. The researchers’ overwhelming...

> Read More