I have multiple blogs; the main blog is a currently daily-published libertarian-conservative (political) blog. In practical terms involving diet and exercise, I am generally skeptical about government involvement beyond general food safety issues and ensuring proper disclosure in transactions (e.g., valid representations of food source, quality, ingredients, processing, etc.)
This post includes edited versions of two previously published commentaries in the main blog dealing with recent nutrition issues.
It's Time To Fire Big Little Nanny
[This is an edited version of a commentary I originally published on February 16.]
The First Lady, a trained lawyer (not nutritionist), decided that a key education priority that can't be trusted to local school administrations but requires federal intervention is school lunches. (She must wonder just how kids, given their parents' obviously deficient dietary decisions, ever made it to her nutritionally sound school lunch programs.) We've also chuckled at Mayor Bloomberg's nutritionally dubious concerns with salt content of foods ("no salt for you!") or intake of alcoholic beverages.
But this story out of North Carolina (hats off to the Carpe Diem blog) astounds me:
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed [turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice] was not nutritious [i.e., did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home]. [The missing portions (i.e., chicken nuggets) resulted in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.]Where do you start with this? Even if you ignore the state's questionable authority over family dietary decisions, the child's lunch, in fact, fully complied with specified guidelines. Moreover, the fix? Three chicken nuggets in place of a sandwich consisting of white whole wheat bread, cheese, and turkey? If you assume the nuggets weren't deep-fried (with possible trans fat issues), chicken and turkey are both excellent sources of protein (and cheese is an excellent dairy choice), but the breading on nuggets compared to whole grain bread? Kudos to the mom who prepared a more nutritious lunch for her child than the school!
By any objective standard, the bureaucrat inspecting the children's homemade lunches was incompetent. Guidelines are just that: guidelines, not inflexible standards which have been proven in a scientific context. A school official (or state/local bureaucrat) doesn't know and shouldn't care how a family distributes its nutritional targets during family and school meals. Short of parental negligence (e.g., the parents sent the child to school for an extended period without a calorie-sufficient child's meal or money for lunch), I think the school or bureaucrat needs to respect a parent's authority. If the school has concerns, it should address those concerns in a nonjudgmental, respectful way directly with the parents. (For example, a school bully may have stolen a child's lunch.)
There is no reasonable justification for government bureaucrats analyzing the content of student lunches. It is not the function of government to look over our shoulders and stand in judgment. Government must stick to its core competencies. Will we always make the right or best decisions for ourselves and our families? Perhaps not. But liberty means being able to make those decisions: for the government to serve us, not our serving the government.
Big Little Nannies
[This is an edited version of a commentary I originally published on March 17. I realize that I have discussed raw milk sales previously in this blog, but there are nuanced differences in content and presentation.]
Some Big Nannies never forget their roots as Little Nannies; they will tell restaurants how much salt they can put in their foods or size of their portions.
The First Nanny is determined that on her watch what your child eats at school will be by Big Nanny guidelines. If you dare ask 'Why?', she'll tell you: "Because I said so."
I want to specifically point out the topic of milk in particular. My Dad is the youngest in his family. I never knew my paternal grandfather whom died just before my Dad hit his teens. As I recall, my Dad worked during the summers on a small Massachusetts farm owned by relatives. Dad recalls that one day the ladies of the farm baked fresh blueberry pies and set them out to cool. He and the other guys swiped a pie and grabbed a cold bottle of farm-fresh milk, with that natural layer of cream at the top; my Dad's eyes light up as he recalls eating that glorious warm blueberry pie washed down with raw milk. (Of course, he and the guys thought that they had gotten away with it as the ladies of the farm went around looking for their missing pie. Until she made them stick out their tongues for inspection...)
Where do I stand on this? As a scientist, I would have to carefully look at the empirical evidence and any relevant research methodology. Note that any food source can be contaminated--including the handling of food at home. Clearly the farmer needs to ensure that his cattle are healthy, pastures or other feed and water are safe, fecal matter is properly controlled, milk-related equipment and containers are well-maintained, the milk is properly sealed and cooled as soon as possible after milking, etc., but these things are true for any dairy operation.
The reader is encouraged to do his or her own due diligence. For example, you can look at CDC public information on raw milk (e.g., here). For an alternative point of view, you can review reports at the Real Milk website.
But my quick takeaway: the fact of the matter is that raw milk has been SAFELY consumed by humans for literally thousands of years before the birth of Christ; pasteurization is a very recent phenomenon. By the most reasonable estimate over 9 million people regularly consume raw milk in the US in those states where it is legal. Yet roughly around 42 cases of raw milk issues per year have been reported. Whereas any contamination case must be taken seriously, one should realize that many LEGAL foods (including pasteurized milk) have as many, if not significantly more, reported safety issues.
In my opinion, it looks as though CDC is acting on an agenda and is engaged in policy fear-mongering. It seems that the federal government is abusing its interstate commerce authority in an intentionally discriminatory manner
Let me quote from a timely post today; keep in mind the sale of raw milk in Pennsylvania (less than an hour's drive away from me) is legal. (For the record, I've never purchased raw milk, but I would try it if I didn't live in a Nanny state like Maryland)
Last month, a federal district judge banned an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania from selling raw milk to Marylanders who were members of a local food club. 'The ruling followed a two-year undercover investigation of the online club, Grassfed on the Hill, by the Food and Drug Administration.
An FDA agent used an alias to become a member of the club, and ordered large quantities of unpasteurized milk to test. After lab tests proved the milk was raw, a fact the farmer Dan Allgyer openly admitted, Judge Lawrence Stengel issued an order blocking milk sales to the club.Is this the kind of thing we've come to expect from the federal government? Treating Amish farmers like criminals for selling healthy, wholesome foods to fellow Americans? Wasn't the whole purpose of interstate commerce regulation to eliminate state barriers to entry in commerce (including disparate taxes)? The unalienable right of liberty has gotten lost in the weeds.
Going back to the politicization of milk in general, here's an additional (edited) note on milk sales from Wikipedia:
According to an article in The New York Times, milk must be offered at every meal if a United States school district wishes to get reimbursement from the federal government. Some school districts have proposed or enacted bans on flavored milk because of added sugars.I don't like the federal government manipulating local school meal policies. And from my perspective, milk is a healthy food, flavored or unflavored. If the point is getting kids to drink milk and they prefer chocolate or strawberry-flavored milk to plain milk and are more likely to finish drinking it, what's the big deal? If a choice is to be made, empower the child's parents to make that decision.
A final note: Big Dairy clearly is unnerved by the encroachment of increasingly popular raw milk sales (up by double-digit percentages in California, for instance). We have, of course, concerns about large-scale farm operations and their intrinsic vulnerability to the rapid propagation of health risks. Big Dairy isn't going to admit that it wants to shut down small independent dairy operations (that Goliath picking on David image: not good for business). Big Dairy works arm-in-arm with government food propagandists to posture itself as the "Safe Milk" choice. I have seen a couple of blogs out there that are thinly-veiled fronts for Big Dairy; I will not promote them in this blog. (One of them has a misleading name that seems to suggest that it's a raw milk advocacy. It zealously exposes every new allegation of contaminated raw milk it can find.)
Natural foods activist Mike Adams (involved in the below embedded interview with a California grocer) has an interesting anti-protectionist style argument, which should be familiar to my fellow free market readers. Adams argues that the pasteurization process (much like the effects of a subsidy or tariff on imported competitive goods) can mask the effects of poor dairy management, unduly relying on pasteurization to offset the risks associated with a lower-quality, less healthful natural product.
Video Liner Notes: "From the August 3, 2011 raid of Rawesome Foods by government [personnel] who conducted a SWAT-style armed raid on this store selling raw milk and cheese." Rawesome Foods is cited in the above Stossel video.
I would tone down the rhetoric in the following interview (e.g., use of the term "torture"), but keep in mind that we're discussing a grocer--not a member of organized crime, a murder suspect, etc. Why is he being held at all? Why the handcuffs? Were the law enforcement officers worried that the 65-year-old grocer would overpower them and shove raw milk cheese down their throats?
